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Imagine this: The year is 2026, and your younger coworkers can’t stop talking about this weekend’s games. Which team will win? Will it be an underdog or a top seed? Which player will rise up and become the next

superstar?

It’s not just your coworkers, either. More than 50 million people in the U.S. and millions more around the world are wondering those same things, counting down feverishly to the big day. Bars and clubs around the city are hosting viewing parties.

Personally, you don’t get the enthusiasm — in fact, you don’t get any of it at all — but you know it’s real because your kids have been hooked for years.

So which set of games am I referring to... March Madness? The start of the NFL, NHL, or NBA playoffs? The World Cup? A real-life version of The Hunger Games? None of the above.

It’s the League of Legends World Championship.

Huh?

Check out the action in this arena...

Photo courtesy of ESPN

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League of Legends, as I’m sure you’re wondering, is a video game, and a fairly simple one at that. Players control a set of champions, each with unique abilities, and work cooperatively with other players to defeat opponents or accomplish certain objectives. The graphics and sounds are simple and unimpressive. The characters and “battle arenas” stay mostly the same. The game can be played on a 10-year-old Dell laptop and won in minutes.

But for millions of video gamers and viewers around the world, League of Legends is thoroughly addicting. Sales of the game reached $1.2 billion in 2015, up from $85 million just five years ago. And 36 million fans watched the game’s World Championship tournament in Berlin, Germany, last December. Yes, I’m talking about just this past December.

What’s more, that mind-boggling number — 36 million fans — eclipsed the almost 29 million who tuned in for last year’s NBA Finals Game 6, which, as you may remember, featured a battle between basketball’s two biggest stars, LeBron James and Steph Curry. That mind-boggling number is also more than double the 17 million who watched last October’s World Series final game between the Kansas City Royals and New York Mets. Only the Super Bowl was more popular among “sports” events over the past 12 months than the League of Legends finale.

Suddenly, that weird, seemingly impossible future I described above doesn’t seem too far-fetched, does it?

Photo courtesy of League of Legends

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No longer are video games just a passing distrac-tion for socially awkward teenage boys — instead, video games are big business.

Welcome to the world of eSports, or competitive video gaming...

Need proof? Just check out these latest statistics from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), a trade group that tracks and supports the industry:

Source: Electronic Software Association

Here’s something else to bear in mind: The numbers you see in the graphic are just as big, if not bigger, in China, Korea, and Germany. And increasingly, the massive global population of video gamers isn’t just playing the games, but finding tremendous enjoyment watching others play as well…

In fact, the trend toward video gaming as a spectator sport has led to the creation of dozens of major tournaments and leagues around the world over the past decade, capitalizing on a growing legion of fans who consume video games in the same way football, basketball, and hockey fans enjoy the NFL, NBA, and NHL, respectively. According to Newzoo, a market intelligence firm that tracks trends in digital gaming, the global eSports audience is already comparable to the size of the global ice hockey fan base and could grow to challenge American football as early as next year.

Source: Newzoo, Repucom

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And like any major sport with a growing global audience, there is plenty of money to be made. Between ticket sales, merchandise, sponsorship fees, advertising, and other revenues, Newzoo estimates that eSports could be bringing in almost half a billion per year by the end of 2017.

Source: Newzoo

The really big news? While those figures are impressive, I think they grossly underestimate the potential of eSports!

For starters, the dollar figures don’t include video game sales directly tied to eSports. The growing popularity of games like League of Legends, Dota 2, and Call of Duty as eSports platforms has spurred millions of additional unit sales of those games.

That dollar figure also doesn’t include betting, which is already a popular feature among fantasy sports leagues like DraftKings and FanDuel, and almost certain to become a major derivative of eSports in the future.

Moreover, consider for a moment the average NHL enthusiast. He or she likely spends at least several hundred dollars each year attending games and buying related merchandise, and dedicates dozens of hours to watching live NHL games on TV or reading (advertising-sponsored) content about the league and his or her favorite team. Those activities are probably worth at least $1,000 per year on average to the National Hockey League. If we’re able to apply that same average dollar figure to the 100-plus million “eSports enthusiasts” out there in a few years, well, just imagine the kinds of numbers eSports could be pulling in long before we reach my hypothetical eSports-crazed world of 2026.

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The 3 Supernova picks we think are set to prosper from this enormous, game-changing trend…

Activision Blizzard (Nasdaq: ATVI)Market cap: $25,774 millionRecent price: $34.92Dividend yield: 0.7%

It was almost seven years ago. David Gardner and I were attending E3, the massive annual video game expo in Los Angeles. While there, we interviewed

Thomas Tippl, the chief operating officer of Activision Blizzard, the world’s biggest video game publisher. Tippl mentioned something about “eSports,” marking the first time I’d heard the term. Sure, I was passingly familiar with competitive video gaming, though I took it to be mostly an Asian phenomenon. Yet according to Tippl, Activision was watching the development of eSports very closely — even though eSports was only a nascent market, at best, in Europe and North America.

Fast forward to today, with Activision Blizzard fran-chises such as Call of Duty, Diablo, Hearthstone, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft taking center stage at big tournaments around the world…

Which is why it came as no surprise when, this past January, Activision purchased Major League Gaming (MLG), one of the top eSports platforms. According to Mike Sepso, head of Activision’s eSports segment, this was a pivotal part of his division’s mandate to build “the ESPN of eSports.”

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Similarly, when commenting on Activision’s most recent earnings conference call, CEO Kotick couldn’t resist drawing a rather compelling comparison to illustrate the massive opportunity of eSports:

“Last year, our Activision Blizzard games were played for over 14 billion hours, and spectators watched over 1.5 billion hours of video content based on our games. In the 2014/2015 seasons, fans of the NFL watched about 7 billion hours of nationally televised games, which is less than half the time spent engaged with our franchises. Those televised games generated approximately $7 billion of broadcast rights fees for the NFL and another $4 billion in other revenues, including sponsorships, merchandise, and ticket sales .. Our franchise today generates revenues principally from the sale of interactive content, but not meaningful revenues from tournament play, advertising, broadcasting and pay-per-view, licensing, or merchandising, all of which are great future financial opportunities we are pursuing... We think competitive gaming and the spectator opportunities connected to organized gaming competitions could provide sizable opportunities for shareholders and great rewards and recognition for our hundreds of millions of players. We continue to believe that eSports is another long-term growth pillar for the company, and our recent acquisition of Major League Gaming has accelerated our strategic plans.”

Sure, it’s probably a bit premature to compare eSports to the NFL. But the audience is certainly getting there fast, while Activision has positioned itself as a major eSports player in both games and tournaments, thanks to its acquisition of MLG.

In other words, if Activision can capture just a fraction of the kind of revenue that the NFL generates from its fans, it will be a game-changer for Activision’s business. It’s just one reason why we’ve built a 6.4% position for Activision in Supernova’s Odyssey 2 portfolio.

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Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN)Market cap: $295,310 millionRecent price: $626.20Dividend yield: NA

As a global leader in e-commerce, Amazon is the retailer of choice for millions of gamers around the world looking to buy new and

used video games or, increasingly, download them directly to their PC or console and start playing almost instantly. That alone makes them at least an indirect beneficiary of the growing trend of eSports… But Amazon jumped directly into the eSports market in a big and unexpected way back in the summer of 2014 when it paid almost $1 billion to acquire Twitch Interactive.

Twitch Interactive is the world’s leading online streaming video platform dedicated to video games. Which, translated for those over the age of 25, means that viewers can watch other people play video games, the way they would watch a Seinfeld rerun or a YouTube video… On Twitch.tv, users watch live and on-demand “playthroughs” of

games, broadcasts of eSports competitions, and all kinds of user-generated content related to video games.

In early 2015, Twitch announced that its platform was hosting more than 1.5 million broadcasters AND that 100 million unique viewers were watching 16 billion minutes of content per month — more than double the audience size from the time Amazon purchased the platform. That’s a lot of people watching a lot of other people play video games. Now just imagine where those figures are today.

To acquire Twitch, Amazon had to outcompete Google’s YouTube division, which was in hot pursuit and which was considered the more natural fit for the company. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has always been a forward thinker. He had this to say on the press release announcing the deal for Twitch back in 2014:

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“Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon, and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month — from The International, to breaking the world record for Mario, to gaming confer-ences like E3. And, amazingly, Twitch is only three years old. Like Twitch, we obsess over customers and like to think differently, and we look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community.”

With Twitch, Amazon essentially owns what could be described as the YouTube of video games. As the popularity of eSports grows by leaps and bounds, so will the demand for live and on-demand content related to tournaments, players, and leagues. Amazon, already the world’s largest online retailer of video games, now owns the industry’s largest media company as well. It’s a recipe for big wins — which is why it’s a 7.7% position in Supernova’s real-money Odyssey 2 portfolio!

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Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS)Market cap: $$170,613 millionRecent price: $104.57Dividend yield: 1.3%

Of course, Disney would probably have something to say about Amazon’s media ambitions, and a whole lot to say about Activision’s dreams of becoming the “ESPN of eSports.” After all, the House of Mouse owns the ESPN family of networks

and knows a thing or two about sports broadcasting.

ESPN has certainly been no slouch when it comes to getting in on the eSports craze. It’s been covering tournaments and leagues, including delivering live coverage, for several years now. And just this past January, it launched a new eSports vertical on its flagship ESPN.com site. Here is what Chad Millman, editor in chief of ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine had to say about the launch:

“This new vertical is the natural evolution of our commitment to esports, from SportsCenter highlights to a first-ever ‘Esports Issue’ of ESPN The Magazine last May. Most recently, ESPN3 carried live coverage of BlizzCon and The International Dota 2 Championships as well as the 2014 League of Legends tournament, some of the biggest and most notable competitions in the esports industry. The network also delivered exclusive live coverage of Heroes of the Dorm, with the final airing on ESPN2 — the first live, televised coverage of a collegiate esports event for ESPN.”

Given the sheer size of Disney’s other media and entertainment properties, including its film division, eSports might not move the needle for Disney anytime soon. But no company among the three companies discussed in this report has quite the distribution, talent, and entertainment know-how that Disney has. More importantly, advertisers looking to cash in on an eSports massive audience may prefer to go with a trusted partner like Disney rather than less-pedigreed players such as Activision’s MLG or Amazon’s Twitch.

When it comes to the brave new world of eSports, don’t count out the world’s largest entertainment company and the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports.” Thus far, we’ve carved out a 6.5% spot for Disney in Supernova’s Odyssey 2 — and we won’t be afraid to go back for more.

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Why Activision, Amazon, and Disney are Supernova all-stars – plus, everything you can look forward to in the days ahead…

By now, you’re beginning to get a sense of how the Supernova team and I look to earn our members out-of-this-world profits. All by investing in the stocks and companies that we think will win the future…

And if there’s anyone with the track record of high-performance growth-stock investing… someone with an almost uncanny sense of what the future will look like AND which companies will come out on top, it’s Motley Fool Co-founder and Supernova Chairman David Gardner!

That’s why, in the days and weeks to come, I hope you’ll keep one eye on your inbox. You’re set to receive the next two reports in our Supernova 2026 series…

Giving you the chance to rack up a full $300 in Supernova credits and get ac-cess to six more Supernova stocks. Meanwhile this service is completely free, simply your reward for being a loyal (and forward-looking) Fool!

Remember: If you have questions for me, or David Gardner, or any member of the Supernova team, we’d like to hear from you! Reach us anytime at AskSupernova@fool.com. And be sure to bookmark this site to see all the exclusive investing content we’ve made available for you.

Till then, Fool on!

Matt Argersinger Supernova Mission Lead

Motley Fool performance data as of March 31, 2016. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. David Gardner owns shares of Activision Blizzard, Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Amazon.com, and Walt Disney. Matthew Argersinger owns shares of Activision Blizzard and Amazon.com. Tom Gardner owns shares of Alphabet (A shares) and Alphabet (C shares). The Motley Fool owns shares of Activision Blizzard, Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Amazon.com, and Walt Disney.