This study explores how esports spectators' motivations lead to psychological benefits in two settings: official onsite events and unofficial online streams. The benefits examined are flow experience and subjective wellbeing. A professional research company conducted a cross-sectional survey of 400 South Korean esports consumers with 200 per viewing context. We used partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypothesised relationships. The results showed that all three motivations predicted flow for onsite spectators, while only skill-based and relationship-based motivations influenced flow for online viewers. Entertainment-based motivations directly enhanced wellbeing in both contexts, while relationship-based motivations predicted wellbeing only for online viewers. Flow experience contributed significantly to wellbeing in both groups and fully mediated the skill-based motivation-wellbeing relationship. Despite these variations, multigroup analysis showed no significant differences between viewing contexts. These findings demonstrate that fundamental psychological mechanisms remain consistent across viewing contexts. • Flow experience fully mediates the relationship between skill-based motivations and wellbeing for both official onsite spectatorship and unofficial online viewership. • Entertainment-based motivations of esports consumption directly enhance wellbeing for both viewing contexts. • Permutation multigroup analysis confirms that the psychological pathway from motivation to wellbeing is consistent, showing no significant structural differences between onsite and online viewing contexts. • The study validates and extends Barney and Pennington's (2023) second order motivational framework in two different viewing contexts.
Kim et al. (2026) studied this question.