One effect that many did not foresee was the impact on the world of electronic sports or e-sports.

Electronic sport is a form of competition using video games. E-sports involves players competing as individuals or in teams in organised multiplayer video game competitions.

Many players compete on a professional basis under different e-sports organisations or 'orgs' as they are commonly referred to.

'Orgs' contract players to compete under their brand name. Many e-sports organisations have teams in multiple different games, such as Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), and Fortnite.

These four games make up for 57 per cent of the $877 million USD of all prize money earned in competitions, with Dota 2 making up for the lion's share of it distributing $227 million USD across all tournaments.

Even though Australia has a low population compared to other regions, we have bred several top e-sports talents. One of those talents is 21-year-old Anathan 'ana' Pham who earned over $6 million USD by the age of 20. He holds the third-highest player earnings across all games in the world through playing for 'Team OG'.

This team placed first in several international competitions, most notably, The Dota 2 International 2018 and 2019.

Ana personally earned $5 million dollars from those two events.

To play at such a high level he has had to leave Australia and compete on an international team consisting of Finnish, Danish and French players.

Nearly all Australian players who wish to go far in their respective games are forced to leave their homes and live overseas to stay competitive. They do this to be able to practice with a larger variety of toptier teams.

This option hasn't been possible for players this year because of the border closures due to COVID-19.

Back home in Australia, small, grassroots leagues and tournaments are breeding new talent.

The main Australian tournament organiser LetsPlay.Live (LPL), formally CyberGamer, has been hosting tournaments for several years now. They are most well known for the CS:GO, league, which they run with five divisions, Pro, Challenger, Evolution, Amateur, and Open.

With free entry for their open division this is the place where most up-and-comers prove themselves. Open and Amateur have the highest player count, due to the way they are structured.

They don't have a fixed amount of teams like the higher divisions.

The overall amount of teams participating in this season for Open and Amateur has increased.

With the added prospect of increased prize money this time around, it seems it would entice more people to commit time to play.

But this is generally not the case, most competitions have lower prize pools because of everything being online.

'LAN' or Local Access Network tournaments are considered more competitive. LAN allows for no latency between what someone does to travel through the internet to their server they are on.

LAN tournaments are where all the big competition happen. Some teams don't perform online, but do very well on LAN.

With the lack of these tournaments, some teams have had consistently poorer results because of online play. With international travel not being on the cards for the foreseeable future Australian e-Sports could be in dire straits.

The only time Australians get to compete against other foreign teams is at LAN events overseas, this will effect Australia's ability to compete at an international level.