Esports Journal - Edition 14 by Esports Insider

In this Edition

Türkiye’s

Bang Boom

Dear reader,

It is difficult to get a sense of the scale of change that has happened to esports in the first half of this year.

We’ve said goodbye to familiar faces — Insomnia, Houston Outlaws, Sprout, Beyond Gaming, Vexed, and many more. And publishers from Epic Games to 2K Games have made cuts to their esports programmes.

We’ve also ushered in lots of change, for better or worse. Esports leagues far and wide, including some of the biggest and most prestigious across the industry, have gone back to the drawing board to figure out sustainable models that work.

Valve has taken a rare step to enforce an opening of its ecosystem, while Activision Blizzard scrapped franchise fees for Call of Duty League and scrapped franchising entirely for Overwatch. Riot Games continues to lean further into in-game esports item sales as a means of sustaining teams in its ecosystem, seemingly to great success.

Publishers are increasingly contracting out their esports

circuits to third party tournament operators, who are benefitting handsomely — BLAST claims to have turned a profit after picking up operations of Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League and Fortnite, while ESL FACEIT Group is benefitting from the enormous Esports World Cup.

Elsewhere, the education and youth esports space is moving from strength to strength as stakeholders get the message across that competitive gaming can be a powerful tool for benefitting young people’s lives. AI and data are presenting new opportunities for esports companies to innovate, both within esports and beyond it. And the Olympics has taken a decisive step closer to esports, which may open up the doors to lucrative sports funding.

The divergent fortunes of esports in various regions is leading to a reshaping of interest and investment. Western organisations are eying markets far from home as mobile titles like Mobile Legends: Bang Bang continue to explode in Southeast Asia. Saudi Arabia’s flagship endeavour the Esports World Cup will have come to an end

by the time this edition is in print, bringing with it a decisive injection of cash, attention, brands, and controversy. Investor sentiment may have softened in Europe and North America, but there’s no esports winter in the hot desert climate of the Middle East.

2024 has been a momentous year for the wider world, with major elections, conflicts and growing geopolitical tensions that threaten to upend the status quo — with implications for esports. Read on with a drink in hand and journey through an exploration of all of the above topics and more, hearing from the key names that are charting the future course of the industry.

Happy reading,

Jake Nordland

Meet the Team

Sam Cooke Managing Director & Co-Founder ESI & ESJ

Dafydd Gwynn Freelance Editor

Jake Nordland Editor ESJ, Media Manager ESI

Riccardo Lichene Freelance Journalist

Lea Maas Freelance Journalist

Guest Authors

Kevin Hitt Journalist

Sascha Heinisch Freelance Journalist

Izabela Tomakic Freelance Journalist

Sean Smith EMEA Gaming Sales Lead Samsung Ads

Jack Williams Head of Gaming Technology GIANTX

Alex Kozachenko Chief Product Officer DATA.BET

Cecilia Ciocchetti Freelance Journalist

Jeff Simpkins Chief Operating Officer Resolve Esports

Agnes Wasikowska Director of Product Bayes Esports

Tom Daniels Editor ESI & ESJ

Ivan Šimić Journalist ESI & ESJ

Changing Seasons

Is the Esports Spring here?

AUTHOR Cecilia Ciocchetti @AithusaHere

here is an Italian legend that the last three days of January, the so-called days of the blackbird, can predict whether the spring season is just around the corner or if winter will clasp its grip on the landscape for a bit longer.

The esport industry is in its days of the blackbird. The worst of winter seems to have passed, but spring is still not in full bloom. How close is esports to seasonal change?

A catch-all term used for all the industry’s ills over the past few years, the Esports Winter refers to a period marked by significant financial challenges for esports businesses and a contraction in growth compared to previous years. This harsh season signifies a departure from the unbounded

expansion and investment fervour that has characterised the industry from late 2010’s, resulting in a reevaluation of business models across various sectors.

Yet, despite the challenges, some claim the downturn does not warrant talk of ‘winter’, and that this moment is just a natural trough after a very big peak. “I can assure you Berlin is very cold, and we never approached that. We’re always in the soft, Californian spring,” claimed G2 Esports CEO Alban Dechelotte

Alexander Müller CEO of SK Gaming, is not of the same opinion.

“The assumption that we are in a kind of esports winter, it’s correct,” said Müller. “You could see [companies] struggle at some point or adjust their business models,

adjust spending, adjust left and right; and that’s a consequence of what’s happening around us.”

Referring not only to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the pervasive economic uncertainty prevailing across all markets, the product of wars, inflation, and social unrest, Müller and other industry executives explained how this uncertainty affects everyone’s business model — including the organisations.

Others, like Jonathan Jang, VP of Esports at 100 Thieves, believe esports winter is a matter of perspective. “A lot of people use the term esports winter because our revenue models from before aren’t working,” he said, emphasising that those models were never sustainable to begin with. He

sees this period as organisations figuring out how to create sustainable businesses around their esports teams, describing it as a reality check for many.

These “cycles of ups and downs,” which occur in other markets as well, are what alter the investors’ perspective, according to Team Vitality’s CEO and Co-founder Nicolas Maurer.

Investors now more closely scrutinise the fundamentals of esports organisations, wary of profitability and sustainability concerns, further compounded by wider economic downturns and illusory promises of crypto money. Nonetheless, certain partners remain steadfast, renewing multiyear deals with organisations and leagues and signing new ones, signifying belief in esports’ enduring potential and suggesting pathways for stability.

This is the climate under which every player of the industry entered 2024.

According to Steve Arhancet, Co-CEO of Team Liquid, at

present there are two groups of esports companies. The first one includes the well-funded, capitalrich companies which failed to create real business models and revenue, which weren’t able to raise incremental capital and “simply ceased to exist.”

The second group are companies that are running healthy businesses, looking to consolidate and merge, or which are valued “substantially lower” than their real value. Essentially, Arhancet explains, these companies’ operations might be strong and profitable, but their market valuation doesn’t reflect their true potential or current success.

A silver lining of the painful fallout of the last few years is that the industry has “less mouths to feed” now compared to before, as Arhnacet pointed out. In a recent blog, Riot Games also affirmed that a more sustainable ecosystem necessitates fewer teams. By reducing the number of competing teams in T1 leagues, Riot aims to concentrate support from its new business model — the Global

Revenue Pool (GRP) — ensuring there’s more revenue per team.

Vitality’s Maurer agrees, but also emphasised that to reach financial stability over the years one needs the right investor and a suitable time frame to create value. “You have many ways to succeed and everyone has to find what works for them and for their own, but for [Team Vitality] at least the conscious choice is to say the ‘esports performance’ model is at the centre of everything.”

This model operates on a dual focus of revenue growth and cost management, according to Maurer: participate in leagues, thereby increasing their revenue potential, while controlling the costs, which was “very difficult in an environment with easy access to capital,” like in the pre-pandemic era.

Maurer explained that back in 2018 Team Vitality made a “conscious choice not to raise money through venture capital,” as it did in 2017, which was then instrumental to achieve financial stability through the years. Citing again the up and

Image credit: Colin Young-Wolff / Riot Games

down cycle of esports, he suspected it would have taken time to build a “robust ecosystem” and that the pressure of a shorter time frame to achieve success combined with venture capital was “not a good idea.”

For 100 Thieves though, esport is “just another carrier” where people can have conversations around the brand. That is because, rather than a more traditional esports organisation, 100 Thieves sees itself as an entertainment company, its new VP of Esports explained. He said esports is one among many platforms to attract and maintain audience attention to then redirect it towards various ‘verticals’ under its brand umbrella.

“We’ve been around for 27 years,” SK Gaming’s Müller told me, “and we’ve always been ‘the conservative’ ones.” The success of SK’s business model relies heavily on cultivating strong relationships with partners which in return trust the team to achieve long-term success. Müller argued other brands in the ecosystem would rather focus on the “meme game,” wanting to be number one in social media, something that SK

Gaming’s CEO described as a very “resource-hungry” approach.

G2 might disagree.

“We don’t need anyone to make jokes about us because we’ll make the jokes ourself,” said Dechelotte whilst trying not to spill what G2’s social media ‘secret sauce’ is. “The minute we lose we have a video already produced making jokes about us losing, and that’s a very G2 thing.”

Riot Games, with its new business model, is now actively acknowledging, tracking, and rewarding efforts to cultivate a dedicated fanbase. 15% of their GRP is reserved for teams that have significantly contributed to fostering fandom around the sport and regional leagues.

John Needham, President of Publishing and Esports at Riot Games, disclosed to The Esports Journal’s sister publication Esports Insider in July that the metric used to determine the allocation of fandom rewards is currently the Average Minute Audience (AMA) for each team’s

match. That metric might change in the future, but at the moment it’s the “best objective measure we can get [of] a fandom right now,” Needham said, taking Karmine Corp as one example of who would benefit from that 15% of the GRP.

Dechelotte highlighted that G2, for example, prides itself on probably having one of the biggest social media and production teams in the industry, which complements its “unlimited ambition” approach to competition. This infrastructure not only bolsters the company’s presence in the industry but also affords the teams the security to make bold decisions, such as changing players even after successful outcomes like winning a silver medal.

“That’s pure G2. If anybody else was second in the world they would not change anything. For us ‘second’ is the first loser,” he concluded. This confidence in G2’s fanbase and established voice in the industry empowers it to be resolute in its choices, thus playing a pivotal role in shaping its business model.

Image credit: Liu Yi Cun / Riot Games

But there are instances where the need for capital and revenue outweighs the need to appeal to the fanbase, and thus organisations make decisions that could potentially alienate fans. Such is the case for the Esports World Cup, where the record-breaking prize pool and other financial incentives drew in many established organisations to participate, despite pushback from fans on the ethical implications of participating in events owned by Saudi Arabia, a country with a concerning human rights record.

Esports is not one-size-fits all — organisations need to scrutinise each esport ecosystem built around a title, as applying the same rules to all games simply “doesn’t function in today’s world,” says Jack Etienne, CEO at Cloud9

By ensuring that each team operates as its own independent business unit, Cloud9 says it generates revenue from competitions in a sustainable manner, where “each game must at least break even” financially.

“I had several games where I didn’t see a way to actually make this

profitable,” continued Etienne. “It was just pouring cash into something that just never had a return. And so we stepped away from several games because of it.”

However, revenues from tournaments are not enough to sustain an esport organisation in 2024, a sentiment echoed also by Team Liquid CEO Steve Arhancet. The percentage of revenue that would come from third party tournament organisers is “too inconsequential” to shape the strategy of the organisation.

The “highly predictable” and recurring types of revenues, sponsorships and partnerships — which Arhancet describes as “healthy revenues” — made up 45% of Team Liquid’s revenue in 2023 and allowed the organisation to plan its business strategy. Thanks partly to that, the organisation told Esports Insider it closed 2023 “not in the red,” achieving $60 million in top line revenue, breaking even.

Heading into 2024, Team Liquid decided to build its strategy leaning into this conservative model so as to “de-risk” the forecast for this year — although Ahrnacet

acknowledges the uncertainty of what will unfold in 2024.

Similarly, Etienne shared he has spent the last couple of years getting Cloud9 in the direction of profitability through resizing its outflow to the reality of the marketing dollars inflow in the company. “We were profitable last year, and that was the first time in a few years that we are profitable again,” shared Etienne, expressing the satisfaction of starting this year on a positive note.

However, other companies have made a conscious decision not to be profitable in 2024 to invest in a better 2025; such is the case for SK Gaming. Müller said 2023 was a very successful year for SK Gaming; the organisation generated growth which it decided to “fuel” instead of consolidating.

Likewise, G2 Esports was “nearly” profitable in 2023, instead choosing to “accelerate” by investing into Dota 2 and VALORANT, Dechelotte said. “We felt that the market was slowing down so poorly that it was a great opportunity for us to accelerate,” said Dechelotte before confidently

Image credit: Colin Young-Wolff / Riot Games

stating G2 would be profitable “again” this year.

100 Thieves is of the same opinion as it too is investing heavily in expansion and growth, which entails high upfront costs. “I think we’ll be profitable in the future,” said Jang, “it just depends on which sectors of the business.” He explained that while some parts of the company are already profitable — without disclosing which — 100Thieves as a whole is not there yet, but “super close”

On the other hand, there are organisations which approached this year exercising prudence in their financial decisions to sustain revenue growth. Among them, Team Vitality’s strategy to achieve profitability in 2025 involves balancing ambitions with financial discipline. Yet this presents a challenge, said Maurer, as solely cutting spending may yield short-term profitability but risks “destroying a lot of value around your brand” in the mid to long term. “Everyone in the space is tightening their belts,” said Cloud9’s CEO, “everyone in the space is trying to do more with less than everyone

Image credit: Colin Young-Wolff / Riot Games

else.” However, he also confidently stated that the viewer base for esports is growing each year, and while now teams are not getting proper value for the fanbase they have, with time the “folks with the marketing budgets” will realise the tremendous spending power that esports fans have.

Müller also agrees that esports has a very unique and sizable audience, and it’s the organisations’ job to make it available to the “huge” brands who want to invest in the industry. “They can’t deal with esports as it is,” continued Müller, praising those few esports organisations who succeeded in unlocking their fanbases’ potential while going through industry downturns. “The G2s, the Team Liquids, all these great teams that established themselves and went through two, three, four, five crises. They’re actually the brands that we all respect. The others? Gone.”

And while there’s a bit of tension due to the global inflation rate and a lack of attraction for the esports industry in general, Dechelotte is confident in his “high performer” organisation’s ability to create value for partners.

It seems a shared, cautious positive feeling accompanied several major esports organisations into 2024, though the many smaller teams who have folded over the last two years may disagree — and the thousands people being laid off since the beginning of 2024 too.

Riot Games, for its part, was wary. “I think it might be a little optimistic to say Spring is blooming. I still think we have a few years left,” said Needham. He argued Riot’s new business model needs to be put to the test — to “successfully get [teams] to sustainability” — before he can say we’ve made it.

Amidst the gloom, there are causes for optimism, team executives said, like a persistence in sponsorship interest this year and promising revenue growth from in-game item sales. Is it enough to constitute a change in season?

“I don’t know if we’re fully out of Esports Winter,” Arhancet concluded. ”It does feel like spring is in the air, I guess, but I just can’t say for sure.”

Sponsoring Scholastic Esports PlayVS’ approach to growing scholastic esports

AUTHOR Ivan Šimić @Space_njoka

There are currently more than 3,000 scholastic esports programmes in the United States, educating thousands of students on the benefits of esports and providing grounds for competing against peers. With esports, schools can get put on an after school programme that is interesting and appealing to students, boosting attendance and engagement. At the same time, schools can get tangible benefits from partnering with companies and organisations, such

as finances, equipment and help with scholarships.

PlayVS, one of the most popular platforms for scholastic esports in the country, is leading the charge in educating students, teachers, staff, and parents about the benefits of esports. In its pursuit of that goal, PlayVS’ CEO Jon Chapman, who joined the company in 2023, has already made some notable decisions. One major change in the company’s approach was removing its scholastic platform fees, in turn

changing the company’s business model to broaden access to more schools. Instead, the company’s scholastic esports endeavours are funded through partnerships and sponsorships with brands that want to support and reach a young, engaged demographic.

Chapman spoke to The Esports Journal about the often challenging field of partnerships in scholastic esports and the moves PlayVS is making to help bridge the gap between esports companies and schools.

“I think the scholastic esports scene in the US today is rapidly growing”, said Chapman, adding that PlayVS has, together with other organisations and companies, helped create a way for students to have a formalised, official outlet to compete in esports. Currently, nearly thirty of the states in the US have partnerships with PlayVS, and students there can compete and win championships. In some states, such as New Mexico, esports is almost as popular (if not even more popular) than some traditional sports, said Chapman.

Sponsored by PlayVS

The flashy championships, in turn, get other students interested, further boosting the appeal and reach of esports. But in a sign of its growing ambitions and priorities PlayVS is also considering ways to cater to other youth groups, such as students that don’t make the school team.

“We’ve gotten a lot of demand from the community to create other ways for those individuals to compete. We’re going to be announcing other ways in which students can compete without necessarily having to be on their official school team. They could play in a weekend Rocket League, Madden, NBA2K tournament, or other events. We want to create opportunities that also go outside that official team competition to further grow our amateur and scholastic ecosystem in the US.”

PARTNERSHIPS

An important part of sustainably operating in esports, however, are the partnerships — now the main funding model for PlayVS. Working together with brand sponsors allows the company to scale at a much faster pace by opening up access to more schools. Chapman said that, from his experience, schools are very open to these socalled public-private partnerships — a lesson he learnt from EverFi, a successful ed-tech company Chapman co-founded.

Schools generally approve of organisations that want to work with them in esports and gaming because these partnerships can open fascinating opportunities for students. Esports particularly appeals to students that might not be interested in joining a traditional sports programme or other conventional after-school activities.

“The partners are essentially providing the resources for those students to represent their schools and communities, and that has a real benefit on the students because they can better understand the good effects that we usually get from traditional sports, like how to be a good teammate, how to effectively communicate, how to demonstrate resilience and other important characteristics. It also helps them to feel included. So, increasing the level of inclusion in a school is very positive for the overall school community, and in the end, the mental wellness of its students.”

For organisations with ESG goals, delivering positive social impact for students — particularly ones that might otherwise be excluded — as well as supporting their school programmes is an attractive proposition. It also generates goodwill and the attention of a very influential demographic of techsavvy youth.

Chapman noted that there is already interest from an array of sources — including commercial brands, foundations, nonprofit organisations and government agencies.

STUDENTS AT THE CENTRE

PlayVS’ funding model pivot is one of the ways that the company wants to ease the process of integrating esports into schools. By, as Chapman puts it, “eliminating all the possible barriers for schools to compete,” more schools can access esports, which is still new to many of them, even in the United States.

“Oftentimes what happens is that, if you don’t establish a relationship with schools where you’re providing them with something they really need, they may not elect to or be capable of adopting new activities like competitive gaming. In this case, we are providing a competition platform for esports, which they’ve seen the benefits of, so they know it’s something they need. And so they’re receptive to organisations saying, ‘we’re going to cover the cost of your esports season. We’re going to help provide additional grants that might provide scholarships or allow you to purchase more equipment’. When they hear these things, knowing that they themselves may not have the budgets for that, they’re very receptive.”

However, despite receptiveness from schools and interest from clients, there remain questions

surrounding safeguarding and integrity given the age of the participants. PlayVS said it has strict policies in place so that everyone involved in competitions is cared for. Chapman noted that there are both state and federal mandates to adhere to, though PlayVS itself wants to go the extra mile due to the somewhat unique nature of esports. Toxic behaviour and internet abuse can be prevalent in some gaming environments, issues which the company works to tackle in every event it runs.

“For us, we want to see esports and the competition be positive to the students’ mental health, and not a detriment to that, and not a detriment to that. We also want to teach the students that they don’t always have to play the games alone at home, they can do it in the structure of a school lab with their friends and teammates and a responsible coach. So all organisations and partners we work with know that they’re providing resources to enable a safe and positive environment. And at PlayVS, we won’t bend to any kind of modification of that and I feel like that’s what’s attractive to partners

that want to support us — it provides them with an authentic and safe relationship with students.”

KEY TAKEAWAYS

PlayVS’ CEO singled out three important pieces of advice for brands seeking to work with scholastic esports organisations and schools. The number one goal for any partner that seeks to work with a school, for Chapman, is to make sure the company’s values align with a youth audience. This, of course, means that some companies might not be a good fit for schools, like alcohol brands, though he said a large number of brands are very interested in supporting initiatives that benefit youth.

The second piece of advice for companies and organisations is that they should consider their motivations for entering scholastic esports. According to Chapman, many organisations in the US are looking for a unique way to impact the communities they operate in and also create opportunities to drive commercial value. Esports, he said, is a good place to do that, and at the same time can impact lives for the better.

“We want to see esports and the competition be positive to the students’ mental health, and not a detriment to that.”

The third and final piece of advice, one Chapman has touched on repeatedly in the past, is that any brand seeking to enter scholastic esports should be in it for the long run. Chapman said that long-term partnerships with schools build trust and authenticity in a much more substantial way than many other partnerships do, which offers a unique opportunity — if it’s nurtured right.

With scholastic and collegiate esports growing fast in the United States, more opportunities are opening up for brands that want to support it. But the main beneficiary, of course, is the students — who are enjoying growing opportunities to engage in a healthy esports ecosystem.

Learning From Sports Should collegiate esports be a path to pro?

AUTHOR Kevin Hitt @kevin_hitt

The continued growth of collegiate esports in North America and the world stands in stark contrast to the financial difficulties plaguing professional esports organisations and leagues, many of which are being forced to explore new financial solutions. As colleges and universities across the globe start to embrace esports, consumer brands and investors are taking a long look into the collegiate esports landscape asking themselves

if there are potential business opportunities. If you talk to those involved in the space, they will say of course there is — but others still need convincing.

According to the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE), there are over 300 collegiate esports programmes that have started operations since 2016. And while at this point these programmes are considered ‘club’ level sports, they are treated with

every bit of the respect that varsity sports receive with most schools in the US giving out scholarships to field teams in various esports titles such as League of Legends, Rocket League, VALORANT, and others. In fact, in 2023 the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) played its esports championship event in conjunction with its championship basketball tournament.

And while collegiate athletic conferences are endorsing

Image credit: Riot Scholastic Association of America

esports, organisations such as the Collegiate Sports Management Group (CSMG) are continuing to fuel the growth of esports by running large events of their own. This past May at Esports Stadium Arlington, CSMG brought back for the fourth year its Collegiate Esports Commissioner’s Cup (CECC), which featured 84 teams competing across four gaming titles dubbing the competition ‘May Madness.’ The event brought in over 3,000 fans to the venue.

“CSMG has built the Collegiate Esports Commissioner’s Cup with the vision and mission of providing conferences and schools across every single level of collegiate athletes an opportunity to participate in a world class event,” said Michael Schreck, Chief Executive Officer for CSMG. “That event has become international over the years, with schools participating from not only the United States but also Canada and Mexico. And we’re even looking to expand.”

The growth of collegiate esports can be attributed to several factors. First, the age demographic of college students aligns perfectly with the primary audience for esports and gaming. Second, the potential for scholarships in order to give students a chance to further their education and gain professional development opportunities makes esports an attractive option for talented gamers — even if they aren’t on scholarship.

Enrollment numbers have blossomed. Finally, the increasing recognition of esports as a legitimate form of competition has led to greater institutional support and investment.

“For most higher education institutions that are supporting esports programmes, esports is a source of revenue tuition dollars,” explained Adam Antor, Assistant Professor of esports production at Ferris State University “This is because most esports competitors are not receiving full tuition

scholarships, the vast majority are receiving scholarships between $500-$5,000 per year. When the average tuition cost per year at a four-year private institution is north of $40,000, that’s a lot of tuition revenue from students who would not have otherwise attended that specific institution.”

However, even with its positive growth, in order to understand the potential of collegiate esports as an investment vehicle for brands and others, it’s essential to have a handle on the broader esports ecosystem. This ecosystem is composed of game developers, tournament organisers, teams, players, streaming platforms, sponsors, and more who are all contributing to this multi-billiondollar industry.

Game developers, such as Riot Games, Valve, Epic Games, and Blizzard Entertainment, play a crucial role by creating and maintaining popular esports titles. These companies often

Image credit: Collegiate Esports Commissioners Cup

organise major tournaments and leagues of their own, providing a platform for collegiate teams to showcase their skills. Third-party tournament organisers, like ESL and BLAST, further contribute by hosting events that attract massive audiences both online and in-person.

And at the top, professional esports organisations represent the pinnacle of the ecosystem. Their teams have scouted talent from the collegiate ranks such as Eain ‘APA’ Stearns (Maryville College) from Team Liquid which just won League Championship Series 2024 Spring and Rupal ‘Rupal’ Zaman from Winthrop University that plays for the Toronto Ultra in Overwatch, offering contracts to promising players.

Streaming platforms, such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming, provide a means for fans to watch live competitions and interact with their favorite players.

All of these combined have grabbed the attention of sponsors and advertisers, who are starting to recognise the improving reach and engagement of collegiate esports. We are seeing more major brands getting into the collegiate esports scene by sponsoring or partnering with various schools or events.

“We sat down with McDonald’s corporate and local franchisees with their agency out of Dallas and we said ‘OK, what would get McDonald’s excited to reach and engage with this audience?” Why is this event magnetic and powerful enough for McDonald’s to get involved,’” said CSMG’s Schreck. He had a persuasive answer: “The fact that you can be in a room with 1000 gamers for three days…we drove over $50,000 in sales to the local McDonald’s that weekend because we were ordering app delivery to the venue.”

However, investing in collegiate esports is not without its risks. The regulatory environment for

collegiate esports is also still in flux, with issues such as player eligibility, scholarships, and amateur status requiring careful navigation, especially with the US’ National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) having said ‘no’ to esports as a varsity sport as recently as 2019. And perhaps more importantly, the sustainability of collegiate esports programmes depends on continued institutional support and student interest. While the current trend is positive, there is no guarantee that this momentum will continue indefinitely. Universities may face budget constraints and students may lose interest which could impact both of their commitments to esports programmes.

One of the arguments in favour of collegiate esports is its potential as a pipeline to professional play, akin to traditional college sports. Many professional esports players, most notably from titles such as League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Overwatch, have emerged from collegiate programmes,

Image credit: Collegiate Sports Management Group

leveraging their college experience to secure contracts with top-tier teams. This path in theory mirrors the journey of traditional athletes in sports like football, baseball, and basketball, where college performance is often the main route into professional play.

However, the comparison between collegiate esports and traditional sports is not without its challenges. As of now, there is no feeder system into collegiate esports as there is with sports, where children in North America often play on ‘club’ or high school teams from which collegiate coaches can scout and recruit players. Rather, in esports collegiate players are being recruited from the professional ranks, which is backwards compared to its stick-and-ball sports cousins.

“There is a stark difference between esports and traditional sports in developing talent,” said Antor. “It’s my opinion that very

few esports programmes at higher education institutions are actually developing talent. They are only recruiting talent in and then that talent improves slightly and then plateaus. Because of this, the collegiate scene is not developing players efficiently and effectively enough to gain the interest of the professional scene.”

However, while sports such as football, basketball, baseball, and others have thrived collegiately in North America due in part to their connection with professional sports, other sports have still thrived without such a connection such as softball, track and field, lacrosse, and swimming — meaning it’s not a prerequisite.

In assessing whether or not collegiate esports is a sound investment vehicle worthy of investment or marketing dollars, one should note that the scene is relatively young, as the esports industry along with

its infrastructure and support systems are still evolving. While traditional sports have wellestablished scouting networks, coaching programmes, and development leagues, esports is still in the process of building these frameworks. This evolving landscape presents both opportunities and risks for businesses looking to invest in collegiate esports.

Looking at all sides of this puzzle, the future of collegiate esports appears promising. The continued growth of the collegiate esports landscape, coupled with increasing recognition of esports as a competitive sports entertainment medium bodes well for the expansion of collegiate programmes and the overall scene itself. As universities invest in esports, they are not only providing opportunities for students but also positioning themselves at the forefront of rapidly evolving tech and entertainment industries.

On the Syllabus

What exactly is in an esports degree?

AUTHOR

Jake Nordland @callmeprivate

You may be forgiven for not knowing what is in a university esports degree. After all, they’re fairly new, and have little in the way of comparison — sports degrees for example are almost always split up into specific focuses, like Sports Science, Sports Management or Sports Media.

There’s plenty of debate around the role and the place of dedicated esports degrees, but comparatively little knowledge of what exactly students learn and do on such a course in 2024.

Staffordshire University, which offers an undergraduate course in

esports, says its degree has evolved substantially since it became the first university to offer the course in 2018. We took a look at the university’s BA (Hons) Esports degree course to find out what it actually involves.

COURSE BEGINNINGS

The first cohort of esports students joined Staffordshire University in September 2018 for the course’s inaugural year. Since then, after feedback and debate amongst students and industry about dedicated esports courses, Staffordshire University’s degree has undergone considerable redevelopment, Joshua Wales-

Ferguson, Staffordshire University’s Course Director for Esports, told The Esports Journal. “We spent 18 months shaping the course to what it is now. We worked with an academic development team at the university, which was really beneficial for thinking holistically about how this course should be developed to provide the best student experience.

Wales-Ferguson said they developed an ethos for each year of study, to make sure they were clear on what they wanted students to learn throughout each stage of the journey. He stressed that the university has worked to incorporate industry as much as possible so that the course has strong buy-in from relevant esports stakeholders.

“I don’t think that any university course can run without insight from industry,” he added. “It’s important that students get that experience and real-life application that comes from working to a live industry brief, because it gives them a lot of drive and allows them to get feedback from industry directly. Equally, it’s super important that industry partners like EPIC.LAN have input into what students need to know.”

Through the course, students are offered a mix of industry skills and academia. The course director said that they aim for a split of one third academic learning, one third practical learning and one third self-directed study. He maintained that the course does not have a predominant focus on any one area — a turning point from the course’s early days, when it had a big focus on events management — and that it now represents a more wellrounded degree that he said was applicable to all interests.

That pivot is reflected in the university’s decision to change the course’s benchmark — a sort of loose specification that university degrees align to — from the Event Management benchmark to a Leisure benchmark. WalesFerguson said the Leisure benchmark best encompasses digital media, offering flexibility that allows the course to focus on transferable skills key for adjacent industries. “We chose the Leisure benchmark because it allows us to be flexible in terms of having optional modules, allowing students to have a more hyper-personalised experience to better prepare them for a career specialism of their choosing.”

Learning at Staffordshire University takes place in purposebuilt computer labs as well as the Esports Hub, a dedicated esports facility at its Stoke-onTrent campus that opened when the course started in 2018. The university took the decision to expand its Esports Hub and in 2023 set off on a £2.7 million upgrade of its esports facilities, including a 60 seat arena, multi camera broadcast studio and two professional production galleries. Broadcast solutions specialist Digital Garage

was tasked with the design, build and installation of the new venue.

“The brief from Staffordshire University was to have a state of the art, industry leading and future proofed facility. We were passionate about this vision, and it played a big part in our decision-making process, whilst also being mindful of the specific esports requirements,” Tom Gill, Technical Services Engineer at Digital Garage, told The Esports Journal.

“Having the correct technology in place to fulfil the expectations of an esports facility was also at the forefront of every decision,” Gill continued. “Our expertise in broadcast studio design ensured that acoustics, workflow and ergonomics were all at the forefront of the construction and fit out process. One member of our technical team has an esports background, previously spending seven years working with ESL FACEIT Group on their stadium esports events for Dota 2 and CS:GO.”

“For an esports installation, it’s important to have cutting edge technology as esports shows are renowned for their theatrics of lights, sound and video content,

captivating in-house and online audiences. In the majority of projects, you must make compromises to either go with quantity or quality, whereas with the budget on the Staffs project we were able to have both.”

COURSE CONTENT

The first year of the degree is structured as a hands-on introduction to the course, and to the University’s industrystandard esports facilities. The year consists of the following core modules: Contemporary Marketing Applications, Digital Media Platforms, Esports in Context, Live Broadcast Technology, and Multidisciplinary Teamwork. The modules are a mix of practical production skills and a background understanding of the space, an introduction to the business side of esports, plus marketing skills (including how to market themselves) and soft skills such as teamwork and group work, according to Wales-Ferguson.

Students also get the chance to use the kit in the Esports Hub including training on how to use the cameras, studio lighting, vision mixers, audio solutions and professional streaming kits. The

first year students then use what they learn to run and operate their own esports broadcasts.

The second year of the course involves optional modules to help students develop more specialised skills that suit their desired role in the industry. They also plan a major project for an industry client, embedding themselves in pre-production, execution and post-production elements of a live event. There are three compulsory modules: Community Management, Industry Professional Skills & Practice, and Live Production Workflows.

“In the second year, the ethos is getting students to start to develop themselves within a specific area. So they can start to think about whether they want to work within a marketing perspective, management perspective, production perspective,” Wales-Ferguson explained. “And we do that with a lot of personalisation to their experience. We have a bunch of optional modules students can choose from in any one of those areas [and] options for students who want to remain within the esports sphere.” Those optional modules include options from both esports and adjacent industries, such as Media Production Skills, Digital Marketing Strategy or Business Law.

Year three, the final year of the course, sees students run a finalyear project — either a dissertation, production or other form of creative output. Alongside this, students explore the future of esports and critically analyse issues affecting the industry. Core modules include Analytics for Industry, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Emerging Media & Technologies, Global Esports, and then the Final Year Project.

The modules comprise a mix of looking at emerging media technologies, deep-dives into how esports approaches differ around the world, plus developing employability-focused skills through the CSR module. Students have ample choice for their final project, from running an esports event end-to-end to undertaking a qualitative or quantitative research project. Wales-Ferguson said that the final year is about developing a critical voice and trying to make it heard within the areas students are interested in pursuing after graduating.

Some students have said the final year project gave them the skills and confidence to enter the industry.

Benito Marlay-Nicholson, who recently graduated from the course, said he was able to experience all the roles in an esports event, from photography to project management, which gave him a feel for what he wanted to do afterwards.

“The real value that Staffordshire University has to offer is the diversity. I can make a more rounded judgement because I understand how it can affect the event as a whole,” Marlay-Nicholson said.

Joshua Griffin-Meek, another Staffordshire esports graduate, said he had “many great opportunities to build a fantastic, industry-ready baseline with the necessary components to secure myself a position at Oracle Red Bull Racing. Overall the course fit my needs perfectly and gave me the tools, experiences, and advice from the lecturing staff which I needed for me to be able to create a career within esports.”

Esports degrees have come a long way since Staffordshire’s course debuted in 2018. There’s now numerous esports degree options available globally, with some specialising in certain areas and others, like Staffordshire, giving students a sample of everything and allowing for specialisation later.

Wales-Ferguson reiterated that esports degrees are not for everyone, and students must think hard before deciding whether to spend three years studying esports. But for those passionate about the industry, Staffordshire offers an academic route into an industry that can be daunting to enter.

Esports Education Around The World: A Primer

sports is going through an unprecedented time in its short history as a professional industry. As generations begin to grow up with esports and gaming, the legitimacy of the sectors continues to rise, leading to governments and educational institutions looking at ways to support the industries. This is arguably capped off by the Olympics giving esports its biggest stamp of approval yet, with the launch of the Olympic Esports Games in 2025.

Still, the industry is not without its challenges. Companies and

teams have struggled to find viable revenue sources in an industry where its main source of entertainment, watching the games, is free. This has led to consolidations, layoffs and shutdowns with stakeholders looking for additional funding or a rethink of their operations.

Right now you could say that the esports industry is going through a learning curve, which comes, coincidentally, at the same time that esports education has risen in prominence, country-bycountry.

Some countries have opted to go the route of degrees and qualifications to train those who want to enter the industry. Meanwhile, others have opted to go for a more casual approach, launching esports clubs within schools and universities to destigmatise esports amongst cautious parents. Various educational institutions are also finding their footing in the sector.

In this article, we provide a snapshot of how some countries have approached esports education.

1. PORTUGAL

In recent years, Portugal has looked to establish itself within the European esports industry. Portugal recently made headlines for hosting a parliamentary conference on July 2nd, 2024 to discuss esports regulation and recognition. Supported by the Portuguese Socialist Party alongside promotion from the Portuguese Electronic Sports Federation (FPDE), the conference could have significant impacts on the esports landscape.

The country already has some education-focused projects underway. The FPDE, for example, has signed a collaboration with the Faculty of Human Kinetics of the University of Lisbon to jointly design a Post Graduation Course in Esports and Digital Communities. Moreover, Lisbon Digital School also offers a specialised course in Gaming and Esports.

Outside of esports qualifications, Portuguese non-profit Grow uP teamed up with football club Casa Pia A.C. in late 2023 to launch a range of esports and gaming ‘social projects’ at the Education and Development Centers of the Casa Pia de Lisboa Institute.

Finally, the Federation of University Sports (FADU) runs an esports university circuit which features titles such as CS2, EA FC24, League of Legends, Rocket League and VALORANT.

INDONESIA

Indonesia is heralded as the heartbeat of Southeast Asian Esports, in large part due to its huge mobile esports fanbase. The country also has somewhat of a progressive nature when it comes to esports and education with

an Indonesian Esports Executive Board (PBESI) officially inaugurated in 2020. The board, which is a part of Esports Indonesia, ultimately aims to incorporate esports into the country’s school curriculum.

It’s also important to note that Esports Indonesia (ESI) works under the Indonesian National Sports Committee.

Indonesian esports academy EAID partnered with the National Sports Committee of Indonesia in 2022 to deliver gaming programmes at a grassroots level. Moreover,

that same year PBESI launched the Garudaku Esports Academy which was designed to offer an extracurricular activity for high school and university students.

Despite Indonesia recognising esports as a sport in 2020, information on official qualifications by educational institutions is scarce.

3. UNITED KINGDOM

The United Kingdom is arguably the country that has spearheaded esports education the most over the last few years, particularly when it comes to degrees and qualifications.

In 2020, Staffordshire University became the first UK university to launch an esports-specific degree.

Following that decision, a variety of universities have since followed suit, introducing holistic and tailored qualifications. Tailored degrees focus on specific sectors of the esports industry such as Esports Production, Esports Event Management or International Esports Business.

Esports’ integration into the educational system doesn’t just focus on higher education learning, with national body British Esports and Pearson championing an esports BTEC qualification since 2020. These educational opportunities have also expanded outside of schools with esports added to the domestically-popular Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE) programme in 2021.

Whilst there has been a primary focus on esports courses, the country also has a growing competitive collegiate scene with NSE’s British University Esports Championship as well as being a part of Europe’s UNIVERSITY Esports Masters.

4. UNITED STATES

In traditional sports, the United States of America is known for its expansive collegiate ecosystem. Basketball and American Football, for example, have fully integrated their path-to-pro structure with universities through annual drafts. Moreover, sports scholarships are incredibly common in the country to celebrate sporting excellence.

Whilst the United States’ acceptance of esports hasn’t reached the same levels as sports, the country has launched similar initiatives to help develop esports players. Robert Morris University (Illinois) offered the first esports scholarship in 2014, with the

likes of Maryville University and Columbia College, among others, following suit.

The country has also established a healthy collegiate structure with the likes of Winthrop University and Maryville University, through a partnership with author Brandon Sanderson, competing in League of Legends’ second tier in North America. Various other universities field teams across a variety of esports titles, whether this is through the professional ecosystem or collegiate leagues like NACE Starleague.

There are also competitive opportunities for US high schools with organisers PlayVS and Generation Esports running regular tournaments. Moreover, non-profit Network of Academic and Scholastic Esports Federations (NASEF) has launched a range of esports-educationfocused initiatives for the scholastic (K-12) space in the US and globally.

Outside of the competitive scene, the United States also offers esports-specific degrees. Some universities that have esports degrees and qualifications include Full Sail University (Game Business & Esports), University of California Irvine and Oklahoma City University (Esports Management).

5. SAUDI ARABIA

Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in the esports space since it bought and merged esports tournament goliaths ESL and FACEIT in 2022. Since then the country has looked to establish itself as an esports hub through the development of new tournaments, facilities and competitive structures, largely from scratch.

This push to develop an esports ecosystem has also affected its education sector, though this section is still in its infancy. In 2024, the Saudi Electronic University (SEU) launched the HP Gaming Garage which will enable students to develop skills in Esports Management and Game Development. The Saudi Esports Academy also runs a variety of programmes ranging from training bootcamps to educational courses. Moreover, endemic partnerships have also been utilised to bolster the country’s esports educational opportunities. This includes Gen.G and the Saudi Telecom Company launching ‘Esports Certification Courses’ at the Esports World Cup, and British Esports signing an MOU with the Saudi Esports Federation.

6. CHINA

One of if not the biggest esports market in the world, China has integrated the sector into modern society by recognising esports as a sport, developing esports venues and establishing major leagues that have generated loyal fanbases. From an esports education standpoint, the country has also made an effort to develop personnel outside of the competitive bubble to continue expanding the scene.

In 2016, Esports and Management was added to China’s Ministry of Education’s list of permitted college majors. The decision ultimately resulted in over 50 higher education institutions debuting esports degree programmes, according to Chinese media outlet Yicai Global in 2022.

Despite the government’s willingness to accept esports education in China, it is worth

noting that the country has a history of restricting gaming access for those under 18. As of 2021, stringent restrictions limit minors to one hour of online gaming time on select days. The Chinese government’s approach to limits on gaming for children likely places limits on the way esports coaching, training and education are provided to the country’s youth.

7. SOUTH KOREA

Widely known as one of esports’ birthplaces, it’s not surprising to learn that South Korea has a robust esports education network. The country currently boasts over 10 universities that offer an esports major as well as some high schools that provide esports programmes. These include the likes of Osan University, Chunnam Techno University and Eunpyeong Meditech High School.

Educational initiatives in South Korea started as far back as 2014 when Chung-Ang University allowed esports professionals to apply for a spot at its Department of Sport Science.

There are also a range of esports organisations that are heavily involved in the esports education sector, albeit from a more competitive angle. Perhaps the most prominent is Gen.G with its Global Academy offering Esports Career Development programmes, Gaming Skill Training courses and further education opportunities at its academy building and through partnerships with institutions such as the University of Kentucky.

Convening Education

Why Bett’s esports focus paid off

AUTHOR Ivan Šimić @space_njoka

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when thinking about introducing esports into education is actually taking the first step. Many colleges and universities in the UK and abroad will have heard a thing or two about esports, but seeing how it works in action is usually the thing that ‘sells’ esports. Luckily, one UK-based education event has everything one needs to make their first steps into the world of scholastic esports.

Bett (formerly British Educational Training and Technology Show) is one of the world’s best-known education events, hosted in the UK, Brazil and Asia. Celebrating its 40th year at Bett UK 2025, the event evolves yearly to fill the needs of students and teachers from all over the world. Bett gathers teachers, students, brands and technology companies to discuss and network and has recently included esports as a part of its programme.

Bett initially started planning how to include esports as an official part of the event in 2018, after attendees expressed

interest in the topic of esports within education. According to Mia Sutherland, Senior Client Engagement Executive at Bett, and the event’s Head of Product, Bjorn Sirum, many institutions simply did not know where to start with esports and for esports companies, reaching schools and students was something they also struggled to do. In collaboration with British Esports, Bett launched the Esports @ Bett feature at Bett 2022, and esports has been a staple ever since.

Since its launch, the esports segment of the event has tripled in size, received its own identity

on the show floor, and is one of the six content theatres at the event.

According to its organisers, the esports track has been hugely popular with the Bett audience.

Max Copley, Esports Lead at DLD College, which has its esports department, said Bett was an eyeopening experience for him:

“I knew that esports could be run as an extracurricular option but I was blown away after attending the conference. Everyone who is involved in educational esports is so willing to help and I believe this is because we all understand that everyone’s experiences will only grow if it becomes more understood

and accepted by teachers, school leaders, and parents. I learned of all the benefits that esports can bring to students and the plethora of transferable skills that they gain from being involved in it.”

In 2022, when the esports theatre was first launched, the focus was placed on broad and basic topics such as the definition of esports, and the first steps of setting esports programmes in an educational institution. While that information is still available, in 2024, the third year of the esports theatre, the headline topic has evolved to best practices.

“At Bett 2024 we had thousands of attendees attend the feature, looking for deeper levels of best practice, case studies from teachers who have walked the walk, exploring new technology and networking with peers,” explained Sutherland and Sirum.

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE

An important part of the esports theatre at Bett is the event’s collaboration with British Esports, a national body for esports in the United Kingdom. The real-world experience provided by British Esports was “instrumental in the success of Esports @ Bett”, its organisers claimed. The partnership, interestingly, received the Silver Award for Best New Association Partnership at the EN Awards 2023.

“The team at British Esports organise our Rocket League tournaments, assist us with content curation, and provide support in coming up with new ideas and ways to constantly improve our offering,” Sutherland and Sirum added.

“They’ve been fantastic to work with and would recommend that anyone

interested in esports should reach out to them.”

The Rocket League tournaments have, through the years, proven to be an excellent demonstration of how esports events work in the real world. The live events enable those who have perhaps never heard of esports or witnessed an esports event an opportunity to see how it works and learn from those putting on the show. Sirum and Sutherland noted that seeing the engagement and passion from the students, as well as the range of roles and responsibilities needed to make an event possible, helped to paint the picture of esports.

Copley agreed, saying that originally the DLD College staff did not fully

understand how they could launch into esports or what the options were, but gained an understanding of the industry after visiting Bett and seeing everything in action.

“There are many educational institutions that are at the point we were at and want to discover more.

Bett can allow them to understand all the options and benefits delivered through educational esports. For me, as the coordinator in our school, I have seen so many benefits that it brings to students’ experiences, engagement and overall development, as well as allowing another way for our school community to develop.”

Rocket League, an immensely popular esports title with educational institutions, and

scholastic and collegiate leagues around the world, is chosen for several reasons — one of which is the fact that, since Bett is a free to attend event, content shown must not be age-restricted. Sirum and Sutherland added:

“Rocket League is great as it’s ageappropriate, and it is also an easy concept to understand for attendees who are new to the world of esports. It’s also great for showcasing the skills required by the competitors.”

INSPIRATION FOR AN ESPORTS PROGRAMME

Thanks to the esports events and educational talks during Bett, many

schools have started thinking about including esports in some way in their programmes. Sutherland and Sirum added that one of the most exciting things for the organisational team was witnessing the interest in esports grow for those who had zero experience with the industry.

The Bett organisers added: “A UK teacher visited Bett in 2022, with his main goal being to learn as much as possible about esports. He sat in the front row of many of the sessions, networked, met with suppliers and brought back a host of learnings to his school. Fast forward a year and he has set up an esports programme

and came back to Bett to talk onstage to share his experience with other teachers.”

Copley agreed, stating that DLD College started thinking about the inclusion of esports shortly after visiting Bett for the first time and seeing firsthand that it is indeed possible to combine competitive gaming and education. Today, the college offers a Level 2 BTEC course, and is working towards creating a Level 3 course as well.

“We also have dedicated esports teams, the DLD Dragons, and teams that competed in three British Esports National Students Championships in the past academic year. In the future, we hope to expand our esports suite, the Dragons Den, to allow more teams and students to compete and hopefully to be involved in further student championships.”

As for the future of esports at Bett, the event’s organisers are working to further expand the esports section for Bett UK 2025. Sutherland and Sirum commented that a Higher and Further Education takeover of Esports @ Bett is planned for the next edition, as well as a new Rocket League tournament. The Bett team also aims to work with other educational institutions and organisations from other parts of the world to show how they have developed their approach in esports.

Amid wider industry struggles in esports, the education sector is still running strong. Ultimately, Sutherland and Sirum said that Bett should be a reminder of the positive impact esports can have on young people — and that esports still can pay off today!

Esports Journalism in Crisis?

Esports journalism is changing in concerning ways

AUTHOR Sascha Heinisch @YiskaOut

Journalism? Well, that doesn’t exist anymore!” the recruiter snickered. He hadn’t even noticed the beat on my resume yet. As he halfheartedly scrolled through the paltry job listings to offer up — none related to esports — he launched into a wellworn litany of journalism’s woes: dwindling advertisers, shrinking audiences, the looming threat of AI, and a host of other challenges that have become a constant source of anxiety for media professionals. When he noticed the additional ‘esports’ label, the meeting took the tone of an intervention: my life after esports journalism.

His cynicism, while grating, wasn’t entirely misplaced. The vocational struggles he outlined are indeed real, and for esports journalism, they’re even more acute. Our niche finds itself caught in a perfect storm of industrywide issues, amplified by unique challenges. The broader esports sector itself is reeling from a mass exodus of investors, who, disillusioned by unfulfilled promises of quick returns, have largely abandoned ship. This financial drought has left the industry scrambling

to establish sustainable revenue models, creating a precarious environment for as-yet largely unprofitable media outlets to function in.

With a young readership that is even more uninterested in traditional reporting than the general public, you have a core product issue. Tying integrity to optics, for many fans the words of social media personalities and content aggregators carry as much weight as journalists that follow the dictums of journalistic protocol. Moreover, sources are only ever just one unverified Twitlonger away from reaching the esports audience directly through social media.They no longer need a news outlet to be heard and be taken seriously. The judgement of a handful of high-status community members

is far more effective in shaping public opinion, which often is the only form of justice in this space.

DOWNSIZED MANPOWER AND HOURS

In the volatile world of digital entertainment, esports journalism finds itself on increasingly shaky ground. The closure of prominent outlets and widespread downsizing of editorial staff serve as stark reminders of industry overreach and harsh market realities. While new outlets were still opening across the scene with at least some financial backing behind them in the mid to late 2010s, that economic energy has now been diverted to the many sprawling PR firms which, to add insult to injury, are often staffed by former esports journalists.

Those who remain now too often have to report on their colleagues at other publications who have lost their jobs while they themselves polish their CVs and put a tweet in the drafts to prepare for their own potential redundancy. Especially the written word is struggling and only the best articles that really resonate

with an audience are rewarded — by having their entire contents pasted in the top Reddit comment of its own thread.

The many attempts at adaptation to new mediums have had mixed results as the dozens of now inactive YouTube channels and social media accounts of various esports publications are a testament to. How do you make journalism entertaining enough to compete for the click while beholding to the standards of its field? A question few have successfully answered so far though it remains the lowest hanging fruit to feed the industry during esports winter and beyond.

As a result of those difficulties, there has been an exodus of talent that is both alarming and telling. Even award-winning reporters, once the pride of esports media, are moving elsewhere. Newcomers, who previously showed promise and could’ve gone on to serve the industry, are turning away. Some of esports’ best have given it an honest try, but only very few have managed to create revenue streams through their dedicated fanbases, often only thanks to other roles they have taken on within the industry to make ends meet.

Increasingly, for those who remain, tasks outside of what might be considered journalism are encroaching on the hours of dedicated work. The primary drain of work hours goes to SEO churnalism. Other, arguably luckier ones engage in content creation that also stretches the definition of journalism — reaction commentary, broadcast work,

ghostwriting and more — all in service of building personal brands and keeping the lights on. Admittedly, ‘pure’ journalism that a few at big outlets got to enjoy was probably never fit to survive at the humble scale of the industry and was propped up by venture capital, before it lost its faith.

Funding, always a thorny issue in journalism, has taken on an uncomfortable quality in esports. The field is increasingly beholden to dubious sources of revenue, with grey market crypto-gambling ventures and businesses tied to sovereign wealth funds now holding considerable sway over the industry at large. This precarious financial landscape presents a clear and present danger to journalistic integrity, forcing many to walk an ethical tightrope and fight the unwinnable internal battle of Chad idealist versus coping utilitarian.

The challenges extend to the very foundations of journalistic practice. Attending offline events, crucial for networking and building trust, has become a luxury few can afford, a reality that has caused a noticeable change in the faces you see in press rooms. The costbenefit analysis often leads outlets to either accept sponsors with potential conflicts of interest or forego attendance altogether. This situation is particularly detrimental to young journalists, who miss out on valuable opportunities to establish themselves in the field and build networks. Exchanging Discord DMs, while inexpensive, is hardly a substitute and directly impacts the quality of their work and development.

STRETCHED DEFINITIONS

Despite this landscape of compromise and concession,

quality esports journalism persists through the passionate few, driven by the necessity for it. Given the state of the industry, it may no longer be traditional news outlets that source journalism but an eclectic mix of content creators, industry insiders, and the remaining passionate enthusiasts who’ve taken up the mantle abandoned by mainstream sources that have deprioritised esports in recent years.

The function of providing checks and balances in the esports ecosystem is being reframed, with veteran personalities holding strong and opportunistic content creators conducting investigations and delivering their findings in more social-media-native formats that can generate profit and ensure survival. A reasonable amount of gatekeeping for what constitutes journalism is required, and with most of those transformations from journalist to content creator already underway, we’ve seen these lines renegotiated on various occasions over the last few years.

No doubt dedicated esports publications will continue to struggle and there will be fewer capital J-journalists in the short term. The trajectory of esports journalism is veering toward a decentralised future, one that redistributes narrative control from professional journalists to engaged community stakeholders. Whether or not there will be less journalism done is down to the preservation of journalistic standards under the new paradigm. It will be upon the audience and the old guard to hold the new truthtellers to account.

Forever Young Why Juventus is doubling down on esports

AUTHOR Riccardo Lichene @riky_lichene

ost clubs in Italian Football bear the name of the city they represent. That’s not the case for Juventus, one of two clubs in the city of Turin, which decided to adopt the Latin word for youth as its moniker. The decision was made at the time of its founding because the first players to band together and form a club in 1897 were high school students.

Thanks to its long history rich in tradition and trophies, the Juventus name is iconic — and while it may

be associated with youth, it is a club that demands respect, like nobility.

If royals don’t stay up with the times, however, the people can grow disenfranchised. That’s why, for the past two years and with compelling results, Juventus has been investing in the esports world. Italy is not at the forefront of the European gaming scene, but Juventus will not let that get in its way of building a strong esports portfolio, especially in the international scene.

“In the Italian esports world, Juventus is a pioneer,” Gianmarco Pino, Brand Manager at Juventus, told The Esports Journal. “A few years back we saw a trend emerge, especially on the ever-growing global scene, so that’s why we started investing in competitive gaming back in December 2022.”

Much like all the other storied football clubs before them, Juventus knows esports is an excellent way to reach younger audiences. But that’s not the only

reason the club decided to invest.

“We know our audience plays FC 24, so our hope is not only to intercept those already engaged in football related titles but to reach audiences that are interested in esports more generally and that see Juventus as an active club on the scene,” Pino explained.

As more and more clubs are investing in competitive gaming to take part in the eSerie A, the esports tournament parallel to the Serie A, Italy’s top football division, Juventus is still trying to decipher the trajectory of the esports world in Italy. That’s why the team decided to sign an exclusivity deal with EA’s FC franchise. “We try to be as data driven as possible and the numbers told us that EA’s title was the most popular in our fanbase, the strongest in terms of gameplay and,

most importantly, the one capable of generating the most amount of word-of-mouth interactions between esports fans.”

The next step was finding an organisation to partner with that had expertise and talent that matched Juventus’ ambitions.

“We started working with DSYRE in 2022 predominantly for the Italian scene and for football related titles because we found a lot of common ground in terms of values and ambitions.”

DSYRE is one of the most lifestyle oriented esports organisations in Italy, and it had in its roster one of the most talented EA Sports FC players in the country: Danilo ‘Danipitbull’ Pinto. He, during DSYRE’s debut season of the eSerie A in 2023, got Juventus to the first

place and won the eSuper Cup TIM in december. In 2024, Danipitbull won Juventus its first ever top 8 placement in the eChampions League, making a mark on the international stage.

Along with the business side of the team, there’s also a more immaterial side, one of tradition and reverence. The manifestation of the club’s status is the Trophies Temple in the Juventus Museum, a place where more than 120 years worth of victories are put on display. To understand how seriously the club is taking esports, an anecdote does the job better than everything else.

“During our first year of our collaboration with DSYRE we won the eSerie A, so, to celebrate the moment, we put the trophy in the

temple of the Juventus Museum, where it remains to this day. The reason why we put a trophy won through digital football among all the ones from real football was because we wanted to show that esports are a pillar that the club is investing in; that this is very important to us and that we want to grow, fueled by our ambition. Putting the eSerie A trophy amongst those won over 120 years of history is a signal to

everyone: the esports world is very important for Juventus.”

While FC was “the initial and obvious step” for Juventus in the world of esports, as Pino siad, the team decided to further its partnership with DSYRE and entered the Rocket League scene. Rocket League, a unique game that blends football, cars and outlandish physics, is something of a natural

stepping point for organisations that want to venture outside of just the sports simulation genre.

“We wanted to both expand our presence in the football related video games but also try to appeal to an even wider, esports loving, audience. We think that Juventus could interest many new fans allowing us to take another step towards the broader gaming community.” Pino claimed the results are already showing, with interest in the team from outside the football sphere of influence.

After establishing a strong presence in Italy, Juventus started work on another big collaboration that would open up the club to be truly international in the esports world. In April 2024, Juventus announced a collaboration with none other than OpTic Gaming, an entrenched North American esports organisation with access to one of the biggest markets in the sector.

The choice was made with a clear objective in mind. “this partnership creates opportunities to engage with a more specialised audience that in Italy is still lacking” said Pino.

Juventus’ strategy, then, is to be a pioneer in Italy and advance the national esports world (the partnership with DSYRE even won Juventus an Italian Esports Award for best activation), and reach the core esports fan base internationally through OpTic.

Juventus knows that competition alone doesn’t make a club’s or an org’s presence in the esports world sustainable. Content creation is widely recognised to be a pillar of the competitive gaming community as much as good results. Luckily,

virtual football and real football have many opportunities to intersect.

It first happened inside the Allianz Stadium, Juventus’ home: the club organised a virtual friendly match as a warmup for the Serie A game that was about to be played.

In the EA Sports SkyBox at the Allianz Stadium, Danipitbull faced off against the pro player from Frosinone, the team the physical Juventus was about to play against, in a series of show matches that were broadcasted onto the stadium’s huge screens as the fans were coming in.

“We had a very positive response from the audience as many wished for the virtual games’ results to materialise in the upcoming match. We also made a series of videos with Dani and his coach where they recreated in-game the scores of the real match. This kind of content resonated a lot with our community thanks to the potential for analysis and entertainment,” explained Pino.

Keeping the fans engaged is “vital” for Juventus. “Week after week we’re trying to merge competitions with entertainment to create an ever-growing experience,” hence why the club invested in building the Juventus Creator Lab, along with a dedicated streaming room.

This structure serves as a hub where content creation on all things Juventus can happen, to cater to the many different audiences of the club. It now also forms an integral part of the club’s partnerships — the Creator Lab will be used to activate on both Optic’s and DSYRE’s collaborations.

There are a few important choices that Juventus has to make now. First, there’s the conundrum many

other clubs have faced: whether to remain in football in the esports world as well or expand into other titles. Pino doesn’t shut any door but remains cautious: “As far as our vision for the long term we do not exclude an expansion into other titles, but that’s not something we want in the near future.”

Then there’s the long term goal of Juventus and the thing at the top of the list in that department is to nail

down the ever changing landscape of esports, not only internationally (where trends are easier to spot) but most importantly in Italy. “In five years’ time we would love not only to have a firm understanding of our esports audience but also to see a Juventus that has consolidated its competitive results on a national and international level,” Pino concluded. “We want to keep on growing and keep on winning, both in Italy and abroad.”

If you ’ re interested in partnering with us to further this mission and help guide the future workforce in esports, visit NASEF.org or contact us today: info@NASEF.org

The Network of Academic and Scholastic Esports Federations is a non-profit organization that connects play and learning through our system of clubs, coaching, and curriculum for FREE! S E E K I N G P L A Y E R S F O R

NASEF is a global program that helps students build awareness of career pathways in esports

The United States Esports Federation is in search of top-tier players to proudly represent the country in esports. Do you have the skills? Ready to support our journey? Answer the call at USEF.GG U N I T E D S T A T E S E S P O R T S

TThe Future of Esports Spectatorship

Smart TVs are the premium viewing experience gamers deserve

he global esports audience is forecast to surpass 630 million by 2025, a significant rise from the 435 million tuning-in in 2020, per Statista. Last year’s League of Legends World Championship achieved a peak audience of more

AUTHOR Sean Smith / Samsung Ads Sponsored by Samsung Ads

than 6.4 million — making it the most-watched esports tournament in history. Several tournaments across different games in 2024 have also recorded peak viewership figures above the one million mark.

With the ‘Summer of Sport’ in full swing, households across the country are coming together to watch their favourite teams and athletes compete for glory on the main stage. Community is at the heart of sports spectating; an opportunity to share a rich viewing

Sean Smith

EMEA Gaming Sales Lead Samsung Ads

experience alongside people with the same passion. Samsung Ads’ recent study ‘Revolution in the Living Room’, in collaboration with GroupM, found that on average 1.7 people watch content together on their Smart TV in the German market (this year’s Men’s Euros host nation).

The same principle can be applied to esports. After all, the sector invokes the same excitement, emotion, and high production value as any traditional sport. It stands to reason, then, that creating appointment-to-view broadcasting for major events could be a game changer for esports.

It’s important to note, though, that the journey has just begun. As esports gains ground as a mainstream viewing experience, fans and esport event owners are now turning their attention to the biggest screen in the home — the TV.

TRANSITIONING TO TV

Samsung Ads’ own Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data, gathered from 60 million active Samsung Smart devices in Europe showcases that an esports audiences’ transition to TV might not be as difficult as you would expect. This is largely due to the fact that audiences have already grown accustomed to gaming on TV’s through consoles. In fact, 26% of devices in European homes have an active games console plugged in and 30% of total time spent by console-connected Samsung TV owners was spent gaming. As such, the idea of gamers transitioning their esports viewing habits from PC to TV is becoming more prominent.

This seamless transition from PC to the biggest screen in the home is supported by improvements in TV user experience (UX), now catering to esports fans’ viewing habits. In the case of Samsung,

the worlds #1 TV brand, this means equipping Smart TVs with the most popular esports and gaming apps pre-downloaded — Twitch and YouTube.

“This seamless transition from PC to the biggest screen in the home is supported by improvements in TV user experience (UX), now catering to esports fans’ viewing habits.”

AUDIENCE IS EVERYTHING

But how can brands ensure fans continue growing their association between esports and TV? How do esports organisers solidify TV’s role in enriching the shared appointment-to-view experience?

The home screen of the Samsung Smart TV provides a platform to capture audiences at the most opportune moment to entice them into the most engaging entertainment. Through ACR technology — Samsung Ads’ glasslevel content recognition technology gathers insights while the audience watches their Smart TV.

It’s only through this first party data that gaming brands can identify which Samsung TVs are engaging with gaming, or with gaming adjacent content. This unique data enables TVs to be granularly targeted with the relevant gaming content available.

And the journey has just begun. Enabling and embracing esports audiences on the biggest screen in the home means esport tournament viewership will go from strength-to-strength — engaging existing audiences and attracting future generations of esport fans.

Streaming In The influence of streamers on esports

AUTHOR Dafydd Gwynn @Dafydd00

sports has had strong ties to mainstream gaming culture throughout its history, with one of the strongest connections between the two being streaming. A broadcasting tool for esports and a form of content creation for gaming, streaming has always tied the two together. Through the growth of streaming, the celebrity status of streamers has also grown with examples such as Ninja performing at Times Square or famous NBA players taking to Twitch during COVID.

These streamers have become more and more prevalent and some have brought their influence into esports, revitalising viewership by bringing in new audiences. Streamers have begun to play a big role in the esports space through multiple avenues.

There are three main ways that streamers are influencing

esports. The first is the streamers that have created their own esports organisations, such as MoistCr1TiKaL with Moist Esports and Disguised Toast with Disguised. Second you have, in a similar vein, the streamers who have invested in esports organisations that already exist or promoted esports organisations and events. The most recent example of this is Amouranth investing in North American esports organisation Wildcard.

The first two ways see streamers investing funds into esports organisations — whilst the third sees them invest time. So-called co-streaming has been hugely popular in esports recently and is only growing. Co-streaming is where tournament organisers give the media rights of tournaments to live streamers so that they can stream alongside the official broadcast. Examples of this are

Tarik in VALORANT and Brazilian streamer Gaules in Counter-Strike.

Co-streaming has been particularly influential because it solves a problem in esports, which is how fans choose what team to support. In traditional sports many fans form allegiances due to local geographic ties, which are largely absent in esports. People who grew up in Liverpool are likely to support Liverpool or Everton in club football, for example.

In most esports, organisations are not based in cities and therefore there is no such connection. Some fans support organisations that sport teams from their nations, but with a trend of international lineups in many esports teams, this becomes harder to do.

When an influential streamer enters the esports space with an organisation of their own they eliminate this problem, as they can exercise their celebrity status to turn fans of their streams into fans of their team.

One of those streamers is MoistCr1TiKaL, who frequently holds watch parties on his team with the Moist Esports crew. MoistCr1TiKaL, who is predominantly known for his gaming content and internet culture commentary, also releases updates about his esports

TRENDS

venture, including discussing team finances or his lawsuit against the U.S Department of Immigration. These videos reached millions of fans, with one video peaking at five million viewers, many of whom might not otherwise follow esports.

Other streamers involved in their own esports organisations are Ludwig, via Moist Moguls, a joint-venture with MoistCr1TiKaL; Karmine Corp, a now highly-popular French team created by Twitch streamers Kameto and Kotei; and KOI, co-founded by Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos.

Esports organisations have long signed content creators to represent their team indirectly, offering content creators a steady income in return for tapping into the streamer’s audience. However the trend of content creators becoming direct owners themselves is newer, and goes a step further — to great effect. In the case of Wildcard, the announcement had multiple news outlets, influencers and social media commentators talking about the organisation which had a relatively small following in comparison to other big streamer organisations like Disguised or Moist Esports.

Streamers are quickly becoming very influential for esports organisations, as traditional esports organisations have not proven able to tap into the same fervent fanbases as streamerfounded organisations.

The other avenue mentioned was co-streaming. Co-streaming was not always as popular as it has become. Originally it was looked down upon by tournament

organisers who summarised that co-streaming took away viewers from the TO’s own broadcast which meant less eyes on sponsors and lower statistics to show to budding partners.

Resultantly, not all esports and tournament organisers have hopped aboard the co-streaming train. The main concern for tournament organisers is branding. The company loses some control of its broadcast and loses the ability to dictate how the broadcast sponsors are presented to the audience. Furthermore streamers are not contracted in the same way that commentators and other talent are, so if a streamer voices their negative opinions about the event this could hurt the event’s image.

The original fears may have held back some broadcasters, but the influence of co-streaming is undeniable. In 2021, StreamHatchet found that around 31% of the hours watched in top North American esports events came from costreaming. During the PGL Antwerp CS:GO Major, Brazilian co-streamer Gaules broke his own viewership record, which still holds to this day, with a peak concurrent viewership of 684,000.

With Gaules continuing to costream Counter-Strike events and streamers such as Shroud and Tarik streaming the top VALORANT North American events this trend is only growing.

Evidence of co-streamers becoming far more accepted in the industry is evidenced by tournament operator BLAST, which began flying co-streamers out to events so that they could co-stream inside the venue. This was notably seen at BLAST Spring Finals 2024 in Ovo Arena Wembley, London.

As more and more mainstream events welcome co-streaming, such as the recent Esports World Cup, the influence of streamers on esports will only increase.

Whether it’s through creating an esports organisation or through participating in esports events as a co-streamer, streamers are giving huge financial and viewership boosts to events and teams. Whilst previously esports has been obsessed with reaching a mainstream sports audience, streamers have allowed willing events and organisations to tap into a large and amenable audience — ordinary gamers.

Image credit: Michal Konkol

Beyond The Buzzword

A How official data powers AI applications in esports

I is the buzzword that has everyone talking but what is it exactly used for? Nowadays, so many know it only as large language models like ChatGPT, but it can also appear in many different forms and has been prevalent throughout the tech industry for many years already.

Since I don’t like buzzwords being thrown around, here is my take

AUTHOR Agnes Wasikowska / Bayes Esports

on how the industry is actually benefiting from AI and the various forms it can take. Beware it can be a real shapeshifter, so strap in.

CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT! In any entertainment industry, content and more specifically the attention it generates is king.

Imagine you are responsible for running one of the biggest

tournaments of the year, a multimillion-dollar endeavour, in partnership with some top global brands. As the organiser, a primary KPI you aim to achieve is generating as much viewership and hype around the events and within the fan community. Social media and content creation can be an amazing tool in your arsenal and one that each tournament organiser is intimately familiar with already.

Sponsored by Bayes Esports

Think about the tournament content lifecycle in two stages. During the event when you want to quickly push out highlights from ongoing matches and in periods of content downtime when you want to stay relevant by helping your fans relive their favourite moments. But unless you have a large social media team sifting through months and months of tournament footage, this can be an almost impossible task — a needle in a haystack.

This is where our new product, Bayes Highlights, comes in handy. We set out on a mission to build a tool that will support a content team in using natural language to effortlessly search the database of all esports events and retrieve the relevant video clips. Imagine simply typing ‘S1mple vs Karrigan 1v1 FaZe clutch’ and immediately being able to retrieve all the instances where they faced against each other in a tense stare-down with the latter coming out on top. The next time these two go headto-head, you will be able to edit highlight clips together of their previous battles, and easily share them on social media.

Our partners are already benefiting and showcasing Bayes Highlights and its impact on key business value drivers, from efficiencies to engagement excellence.

DON’T LET THEM FOOL YOU

Something that cannot be understated in importance in esports is integrity. At Bayes Esports we deal primarily with two facets of integrity which both have overlapping as well as independent concerns: esports tournament integrity and betting integrity. Esports integrity primarily focuses on ensuring the competition itself is not compromised while betting

integrity focuses on ensuring that our bookmaker clients can secure themselves against any potential losses.

The applications of AI within the integrity topic can take on many forms, but most of them will rely on some sort of pattern recognition. The more data you have access to, the more confident you can be in detecting suspicious repeated behaviours. This enables us to monitor the integrity of the tournaments by detecting suspicious player behaviour such as cheating or match-fixing, and flag it with relevant parties instantaneously.

We are able to safeguard the integrity for the betting operators and sportsbooks we work with by analysing the incoming bets as they are being placed. We can detect behaviours such as match-fixing or arbitrage which both can mean significant losses for the bookmakers.

It’s a win, win, win scenario. For the tournament organiser, the betting industry, and of course, for Bayes Esports as well!

TELLING THE FUTURE?

Last but not least, we arrive at the oldest and most storied use of AI in the esports data industry: predictions. This quite simple idea of analysing the match and being able to predict the winner is in reality a complex and multi-stage process — and getting it right is absolutely paramount.

At Bayes Esports, we are in a prime position to tackle this problem because of the magical combination of official live data and our star-studded data science team. As retired esports players with PhDs in modelling, they also have a deep understanding of the esports landscape.

First, we extract the data from the very source itself, the tournament organisers, with unparalleled

granularity. Just think about the number of parameters you can track at any given point in time. Each player, their economy, and equipment. Every bullet, or ability whizzing through the map. Every NPC, their stats, and health. Every structure, its health, bounties, and position. The possibilities are endless.

Being able to collect this data is one thing; the other is actually being able to use it and make meaningful and educated assumptions about what happens next. Here is where our AI team comes in, or as we would call it at Bayes Esports, data science.

We have to somehow take this collection of data points and give it meaning. How this actually works is incredibly complex with multiple gears turning together like a very well-oiled machine. This is also a key reason that

those looking to excel at esports work with domain experts such as Bayes Esports. It is necessary to have an in-depth knowledge of data science as well as an intimate understanding of the esports game titles themselves.

To appreciate the complexity of our systems, here are some cool things they are able to predict using AI: 1) how are different teams’ strengths matched up

ahead of the tournament start, 2) when will the first turret fall 3) how many players will die in the opening pistol round (my personal favourite). The benefits of reliable and welltrained prediction models are far-reaching and can mean the difference between a profit and a loss for the business.

THE IMPACT OF AI WILL CONTINUE TO GROW

As the esports data industry continues evolving and professionalising itself, the impact of AI-backed technology will only continue to grow. From furthering predictive techniques, profiling bettors, and creating joy in the hearts of fans around the world, we are realising the future’s potential.

Watch this space as the Bayes Esports product team has many exciting developments lined up over the rest of this year!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Agnes Wasikowska, Director of Product. Agnes brings a unique combination of a big tech software background and a passion for esports. After working as a software engineer for the likes of Google and Microsoft, she moved to Berlin to pursue a career in product management with Jina AI. Since 2021, she has played a key role in growing Bayes Esports’ product portfolio.

Artificially Intelligent

How AI works, and doesn’t, in

AUTHOR Jack Williams @JackJGaming

The term ‘AI’ has skyrocketed in use these last few years, particularly since the release of widely popular tools such as ChatGPT for text conversations, and Midjourney for image generation. Its rapid rise has meant the term itself continues to evolve, covering more and more of what was previously referred to simply as ‘statistics’.

Ultimately, AI is when data is used to teach machines to perform tasks that typically require humanlevel intelligence. This covers anything from predicting the weather, playing chess, identifying dogs in pictures, or responding to nuanced questions.

How, then, could an esports organisation use these capabilities to win more games? What other areas of performance are most applicable to this newfound technology?.

We start with the most sophisticated use-case in an area of AI known as ‘Reinforcement Learning’, where a computer perfects a task through extensive trial and error. In other words, build an AI Bot that can play the game better than any player in the world, then learn from it. Famous examples of these unbeatable machines include the chess GrandMaster, Garry Kasparov losing to an IBM machine in 1997, or more recently (2019) the World Champion teams of Dota 2 and Starcraft 2 who were both brought down by OpenAI and Google’s AI controlled teams, respectively.

A better-known use-case for AI, which draws parallels to the famous book and film ‘Moneyball’, is the use of machine learning to identify under-rated (and thus cheaper) players by studying the hundreds of thousands of data points available about them. A common approach

esports

in traditional sports is to identify upcoming rookies that, statistically speaking, look like All-Star veterans at the beginning of their careers. Your team might not be able to afford Faker or S1mple, but you could afford the rookie that plays just like them.

Better still, if you have a model that is capable of identifying future top talent, that same model could also be used to tell you why your players aren’t future All-Stars, and what they can do to change that. Imagine the power this gives a coach to not only be able to see how similar their team is to the World Champions, but what most needs to change in order to get there.

From before the game even starts, right up until the final frame, teams are continuously making decisions. Which map should we choose? Which characters and loadouts do we take? What objective do we play

for? What weaknesses of theirs can we exploit? Hundreds of questions that could be boiled down to unbiased, objective and precise statistical probabilities. A team that unlocks this potential has the ability to consistently make better decisions, every game.

And these are only the examples for playing the game itself, AI is also revolutionising performance for esports athletes by monitoring the real-world, from optimising sleep, measuring levels of stress, and identifying improvement areas in team communication. Where there’s data, there’s an AI solution waiting to be built.

ESPORTS - A PERFECT FIT FOR AI?

If you’re sceptical of AI in esports, it doesn’t take much to find countless examples of its use across traditional sports. Football teams hiring droves of PhDs to help identify top talent, F1 cars producing over a terabyte of data each race, and tennis courts with precise ball-tracking in order to help optimise every shot. In these established and well-funded sports, it’s already happened. The best part? It’s even easier in esports.

The primary cost of creating these models in sports isn’t the GPUs to power them or the PhDs to code

them, it’s the process of creating the data. In football, for example, the game needs to be recorded from multiple angles on highresolution video cameras. This data then needs to be engineered into a usable format, before finally being churned through an expensive Computer Vision model that can convert millions of static images into usable numeric data. Esports, on the other hand, is already virtual. In other words, there’s no middle-step required to turn the sport into 1s and 0s. The sport is 1s and 0s! This makes generating data far, far easier.

Similarly, since the game is electronic, it’s also exact. Outside of game-related RNG, everything that happens can be calculated perfectly. If you tell me the character, the weapon and the combo, I’ll tell you exactly the damage they’ll deal. Imagine being able to calculate the precise position a ball lands every time it’s kicked. You can get ranges, but real-life physics is considerably more complex than the hard-coded rules of a game.

Esports also has the ultimate weapon, something inconceivable in any traditional sport: Solo Queue, where ordinary players compete against each other online in a

ranked ladder. Millions of games are being played every single day, including by the very same players who step out on stage each week to play professionally. This offers an immense opportunity to study, analyse and hypothesise all manners of strategies to apply to your team.

IT ISN’T WITHOUT LIMITATIONS…

If this excites, or even scares you, then it’s worth also discussing the limitations. It’s an exciting new world, but it’s not here yet and to get there requires real players, coaches and analysts to help shape it. The end-goal of technology like this is to enable the team to do more, not to make them all superfluous.

Firstly, if you’re concerned about some cold, emotionless future in which the only esports action is two AI models perfectly mirroring each other until one of them wins by pure chance, that isn’t going to happen. AI mastered chess over 25 years ago and yet it’s never seen higher viewership, which, outside of a few niche AI centric competitions, is still played by real players.

And how about our first use-case, building unbeatable AI Bots to train with and learn from? It all sounds promising, until you find they

have one irrefutable downside; they are NOT human! The AI could theoretically beat any person in the world at any game, but how much of that is down to superior decision making, and how much of that is simply because they can click inhumanely fast? Not to mention their ability to monitor the entire map simultaneously, react to anything in a nanosecond and never miss a click. For example, if you studied how an AI Bot would take a bomb site in an FPS, it would simply walk in and headshot everyone in under a second. Does that mean it’s the optimal strategy for your team, too? Of course not, because they literally aren’t capable of replicating it!

How about Solo Queue data, our proclaimed ultimate weapon for esports AI? That endless trove of stage-like games played every single day. Well, that’s just the thing. It’s ‘stage-like’, with an emphasis on ‘like’. It’s certainly the same game, and it’s certainly sometimes played by the professional players themselves, but that doesn’t mean they can be compared apple-for-apple. To start, these games are played from the comfort of the players home, usually with very little on the line. The mindset of a competitor

stepping on stage, with the lights blaring and crowd cheering, can’t be compared to queueing up at home after dinner (or in some cases, during).

For a team-based game, solo queue is also usually played by individuals randomly assigned to a team. Many of these titles don’t include voice communication, and even some default to having the chat function disabled. How can we compare a strategy played precisely by a welloiled team which scrims together for several hours a day under the eyes of a coach, to that same strategy played by an assortment of uncommunicative randoms?.

However, above all is the counter to the argument that if traditional sports can do it, esports can do it better. That argument in one word is: Patches. Every month, sometimes even weekly, changes are released which substantially impact the state of the game. What is strong is weak, and weak is strong. Up is down, Dragons deal more damage, bombs defuse 10% faster. Who’s that? It’s a new character! How strong is it? Terrible. Wait, actually it’s immensely over-powered! Football, chess, NBA or NFL, outside of minor rule-changes the

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack J. Williams is the Head of Gaming Technology at GIANTX Esports, and previously the founder of iTero Gaming, an AI coaching platform, for which he won The Clutch 2021. The iTero app, which helps League of Legends players improve, has been downloaded almost a quarter of a million times.

Jack J. Williams Head of Gaming Technology GIANTX Esports

game stays broadly the same year in and year out. A model trained today will be almost as accurate next season, and the one after that. Esports has no such luck, and one of the hardest parts of any analyst or coaches’ job is keeping track of these changes and trying to estimate the impact that they might have long before they get the data to prove it one way or another.

Really, it should just be about taking a balanced view. There are, without a doubt, immense opportunities for AI to shake the foundations of esports and create a level of performance that is currently inconceivable. However, it’s not without distinct and indisputable weaknesses that must be fully appreciated and accounted for before we start to have genuinely useful applications. The solutions must come from within, starting in their most basic form and becoming increasingly sophisticated as they are better understood and adopted by the teams, players, and staff. As we move through any technological revolution, there lies the opportunity to be at the frontier of change — just watch your step, as there’s plenty of pitfalls along the way.

Sponsored by Spectatr

Catching the Spotlight

Stand out content in a crowded industry

A

ttention is a valuable currency in the digital world, and engaging content is key to obtaining it.

That is especially true in esports. As an entirely digital pursuit, much of the esports citizenry live online and interact on social media platforms where millions of people, brands and advertisers are competing for the same, limited attention. For esports teams looking to engage potential and existing fans, that poses a problem.

Esports moves fast, and standing out is difficult. Without the longterm bonds fostered between traditional sports fans and their

local clubs through localisation (and time), fandom in esports is notoriously fickle. Professional players have large followings, but converting them into fans of the team that player competes for takes time, effort and a clever approach.

It is an old problem, but software development company Spectatr is bringing in new tech to help solve it. The New York-based company has leaned into advances in AI to

AUTHOR Jake Nordland @callmeprivate Rishabh Bhansali Founder Spectatr

create a new tool that automatically generates highlights and content for esports organisations and sports clubs.

The Esports Journal chatted to Rishabh Bhansali, the Founder of Spectatr, via a written interview to ask why the company sees a need for better fan engagement, and how it envisions that playing out in the real world.

The Esports Journal (ESJ): Fan engagement can be difficult in esports, where without the geographic tie of traditional sports it can be hard to grow long-term relationships. What does esports do well, and badly, when it comes to fan engagement?

Rishabh Bhansali (RB): Esports has a unique advantage in fan engagement through live streaming and interactivity, particularly on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. This real-time interaction fosters a strong sense of community among fans. The global and social nature of esports, combined with easy access through popular platforms, enables it to reach a wide audience.

However, the lack of a geographic tie poses challenges. Esports teams must build their fan base from scratch without the inherent local support that traditional sports teams enjoy. Additionally, esports competes with various other forms of entertainment particularly involving the younger, digitally native audience.

Esports organisations also face challenges in content creation. Many have yet to embrace diverse content formats, including shortform, real-time, and personalised content for their fan base. The current content is often delayed,

limited, and inconsistent in quality. This is disheartening as there is ample evidence across titles suggesting a strong relationship between fanbase and commercial revenues. The fact that around three-fourths of esports revenue is via sponsorships, underscores the importance of engaging this fan base.

ESJ: Is there too much content for esports fans to realistically keep up with? If so, what can be done about that?

RB: There is indeed an overwhelming amount of content for esports fans to realistically

keep up with. To address this, one effective solution is to provide condensed, high-quality recaps and highlights through curated platforms. These platforms can offer a streamlined experience, allowing fans to catch up on key moments without needing to sift through hours of content.

With even more titles gaining popularity and increases in the number of tournaments, shortform content will become a key acquisition tool for new IPs to acquire followers. Curated highlights are not only a discovery tool for new fans, but it also helps ardent fans manage their time

better, reducing the opportunity cost associated with following esports. Fans don’t have to choose between watching a full-length match and attending to other commitments; they can quickly get the essential updates and continue with their day. This approach enhances the overall fan experience and ensures that esports remains accessible and enjoyable for everyone, regardless of their schedule.

ESJ: Does esports lag behind traditional sports in terms of highlights?

RB: Yes, beyond a doubt, esports lags behind traditional sports in terms of highlights. Many match events do not receive the spotlight they deserve or rarely get relevant highlights. When highlights are generated, they often suffer from significant delays. This gap presents a crucial opportunity that has yet to be fully tapped.

One of the key issues is the lack of resources in esports, as organisations now often focus on trimming budgets. Additionally,

there is a scarcity of cost-effective tools optimised for esports that meet the requirements of tournament organisers and teams alike. Without these dedicated resources and tools, creating and distributing timely and engaging official highlights remains a significant challenge for the industry. This leads to capitalising of the gap by unauthorised channels, with official channels missing out on views and engagement. All of this hurts commercial revenues.

ESJ: Walk me through Spectatr’s Highlights solution. What is it & how does it work?

RB: Spectatr began as an esportsfirst tech company, driven by a team of passionate esports enthusiasts. Building solutions tailored for esports is in our DNA. We observed that while many highquality tournaments and matches were happening, the only way to stay updated was by watching full multi-hour-long videos — a demanding task for fans. This left a vast amount of content potential untapped. To address this, we

developed a solution specifically for esports that captures key moments from any stream, whether it’s on YouTube, Twitch, or a clean feed provided by organisers.

Our solution empowers IP rights holders by capturing, tagging, and organising all their key moments. With our easy-to-use plugins, these videos can be merged, edited, and optimised for various social media templates. This allows editors to focus on adding creative touches and magnifying fan engagement. Additionally, it serves as a repository of all key highlights that can be shared with stakeholders. For example, a template can convert all quad kills and aces into branded content for sponsors, which can then be easily shared with those brands. We recently introduced a feature that detects brand logos on streams and provides sponsorship analytics for brands.

The primary goal is to enhance the value of content rights for IP rights owners by growing the fan base through engaging content, providing sponsors with

branded content to activate their audience, offering sponsors better tools to measure their return on investment, and opening up new avenues for visibility such as google web stories. This comprehensive approach ensures that key moments are not only captured and shared effectively but also monetised efficiently, benefiting everyone in the esports ecosystem.

ESJ: How exactly is AI used in the process?

RB: Our solution leverages AI to identify key moments in a game by using video, audio as well as data. This involves extensive training on video and audio to optimise the AI models for different game formats, as each esports title has unique dynamics. We enhance this capability with data feeds, where available, to further increase the accuracy of our software.

A significant amount of effort has gone into refining these algorithms to deliver results as quickly as possible. For instance, we can now generate a condensed highlight

video of an entire CS2 match within minutes of its conclusion. These highlight videos are not just quick summaries; they also include transitions and scorecards between maps, providing a comprehensive and polished viewing experience.

ESJ: Why is there a need for automating the highlight process in the first place? What are the benefits?

RB: The need for automating the highlight process stems from the current, labour-intensive methodology used to create them. Traditionally, editors are glued to the screen during live matches, manually marking key moments. After the match, they go back to the stream, cut, edit, and merge these moments. This process is not only tedious but also extremely time-consuming, causing delays in the availability of highlights post-match.

We can now generate a condensed highlight video of an entire match within minutes of its conclusion, ensuring fans receive

timely content. Automation also addresses several other key issues including efficiency, scalability, automatic content tagging, and continual engagement for fans.

ESJ: As digital natives the way esports fans consume content is arguably different to traditional sports fans. Does that inform your approach?

RB: Absolutely. Esports fans have different expectations and consumption habits. We focus on two key differences: first is the need for real-time interaction and instant access to content, which we cater to by ensuring that key moments are captured, processed, and shared as quickly as possible to meet their expectations. The second is a desire for short-form content amongst this audience. Shorts and reels are now essential tools for brands to recruit followers in esports; we ensure content can be packaged for platforms like Reels and TikTok as well as Twitter/X.

Sponsored by DATA.BET

Creating User Experiences

A bookmaker’s key to betting success

AUTHOR

Alex Kozachenko / DATA.BET

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Kozachenko is the Chief Product Officer at DATA.BET. With over 10 years of industry experience, he has overseen the launch of several new features that have improved the company’s market reach and user experience.

What makes a business successful? Quality product, excellent service, strong strategy – these are all the components of it, but the real deal-breaker is a loyal customer who continuously returns to engage with the brand.

In the betting field, the key to getting clients with the highest lifetime value is to keep them interested through constant updates and upgrades with different tools. Recent trends show that platforms focusing on personalised user experiences are witnessing significantly higher user retention rates.

TAILORING THE BETTING LINE

Bettors expect an experience that aligns with their interests

and preferences. Tailored customisation reduces the need for users to filter through irrelevant content, making their experience more efficient and enjoyable. When users log in, they want to see relevant betting lines, current game statistics and updates based on their favorite teams and players.

Personalisation helps to create a reliable brand name. By providing tailored content, DATA.BET looks to ensure that each user has the desired experiences, making them want to come back and share their experience with others. This importantly leads to strong user loyalty and brand attractiveness.

Player Props is our feature that provides individual markets, such as Total Kills or Total Deaths of a player, with an extra layer of excitement and engagement. The development of features, such as Player Props and other offerings for the esports market, is an important part of leveling up the betting market. Moreover, these factors have even impacted DATA.BET’s growth. In-house DATA.BET statistics showed a 100% increase in the number of bets for Q2 2024. Bettors are increasingly choosing markets based on particular players’ performances, as it makes them stay in-game and feel connected to their favourites.

REAL-TIME DATA AND DECISIONMAKING TOOLS

Esports betting operators require a suite of tools to provide an exceptional user experience. Living in an era defined by clip-length attention spans and the pursuit of rapid dopamine hits, today’s users want quick settlements and the ability to reinvest their winnings immediately.

Esports events occur on servers that provide reliable data with minimal delays, enabling operators to deliver sophisticated tools, video streams and widgets for player statistics and in-game analytics, essential for informed decisions. For instance, bettors can see which players are currently alive, their in-game economy and recent actions, all of which influence betting choices.

Together with game visualisation tools, betting providers need to use features that give additional insights, such as Bet Booster, which helps a user dive deeper into betting with recommendations and tips based

on data analysis and predictive algorithms. Bookmakers also need to offer a range of dynamic and engaging options that are aimed at different types of bettors, such as Fast Markets, Quick Bet Settlements, and One-click Bets.

Fast Markets allow bettors to wager on rapid, short-term outcomes within a game, such as the next team to score or the winner of the next round. Quick Bet Settlements ensure that bets are resolved almost instantly after the outcome is determined, allowing users to see their winnings in real time and place subsequent bets without delay. The One-Click Bet feature simplifies the betting process, enabling users to place bets with a single click. By reducing the time and steps needed to place a bet, one-click bets make the experience more seamless and user-friendly.

Ultimately, delivering a fast, intuitive and engaging betting experience is key to retaining users in the competitive betting market.

FLEXIBLE DYNAMIC BETTING

Creating a flexible product is very similar to personalisation but the significant difference is that this factor gives users a sense of control over their experience.

Alex Kozachenko Chief Product Officer DATA.BET

When players can customise betting strategies, manage risk and make decisions in real time, their satisfaction level increases, encouraging them to continue using the platform.

By offering a set of flexible tools and features, such as Bet Builder and Cashout, operators not only meet the diverse needs of their users but also position themselves as a reputable brand in a competitive esports betting market. This combination of personalisation and flexibility creates a compelling, user-centric product that drives long-term engagement and growth.

Bet Builder allows users to create personalised bets by combining multiple selections from the same event into a single wager, offering a more tailored and engaging experience. The Cashout feature provides users with the option to partially get some money back if they decide to reinvest their bet into a more favorable choice before the event starts. These features collectively ensure that bettors have a dynamic and responsive environment, allowing them to customise their strategies and adapt quickly to changing circumstances.

HOW TOOL DEVELOPMENT IMPACTS THE INDUSTRY

The unique conditions of the esports betting industry, such as the reliance on real-time server data, allow for the development of highly responsive and accurate tools. This access to data means that operators can create more dynamic and interactive betting environments compared to traditional sports betting. However, this also poses challenges, such as the need for robust server infrastructure and data accuracy.

The digitisation of esports means there is more freedom in developing innovative products. Operators can leverage the data available from servers to create engaging and sophisticated betting tools that enhance the user experience and retention.

MAXIMISING USER ENGAGEMENT

It’s important to understand that simply integrating features and strategies into a platform will not guarantee the success of an operator. The winning formula lies in the harmonious blend of technological innovation and

strategic marketing, which is also a major source that is used to draw in new clients.

Moreover, it’s essential to keep users after attracting them to the website. The first thing new visitors pay attention to is the appearance and user interface (UI) of a betting platform. A convenient, esports-themed UI can draw users in and make their experience more enjoyable and relatable. Incorporating gamification and action-packed elements, such as achievements and rewards, adds an extra layer of engagement, encouraging users to interact more with the platform. Bonus systems work in tandem with this strategy to keep users coming back.

Lastly, ensuring the security of user data and providing excellent customer support are fundamental to retaining users. Players need to trust that their information is safe and that they can get help when needed.

BALANCE IS KEY

A profitable betting business strategy consists of a balanced

mixture of technologically advanced tools, excellent service and an attractive retention programme for VIP clients. Personalisation, speed, flexibility, decision-making and visualisation features, as well as robust security measures are all critical components of a successful esports betting platform.

By focusing on these key areas, operators can create a betting experience that not only attracts users but keeps them coming back for more.

As the esports betting industry continues to evolve, the development of new tools will be essential for maintaining user engagement. Future innovations may include more advanced AIdriven tools, personalised betting experiences and enhanced live betting features. Operators will need to stay ahead of the curve by continuously improving their platforms. The focus will be on creating a more immersive and interactive betting experience that caters to the evolving preferences of esports enthusiasts.

The Unhidden Gem

The rising importance of Southeast Asia

AUTHOR Tom Daniels @TheTomDaniels

he Southeast Asian esports market is the industry’s shining light amidst currently treacherous waters.

The mobile-centric region has quickly evolved from a developing esports market to a sought-after destination, with organisations from the Western world now starting to take note. Southeast Asia (SEA)’s rise is also synonymous with the emergence of a new esports powerhouse — Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB).

The development of MLBB and the growth of esports in SEA has led to the market achieving staggering viewership feats, such as Mobile Legends’ regional franchised esports league — MPL Indonesia — generating over 2m peak viewers for the past couple of years.

But how did Southeast Asia become the talk of the town?

“Esports in Southeast Asia, I would say is unique primarily due to the diverse audience and the

widespread popularity of mobile gaming,” said Daniel Santoso, the Co-Founder of STUN.GG, an esports company recently acquired by Team Liquid.

“Unlike regions like North America and Europe, where PC and console gaming dominate, in Southeast Asia, mobile esports is at the forefront. This is usually due to the accessibility of our products at a lower cost.”

Southeast Asia’s mobile-focused esports boom led to the emergence

of different titles that aren’t as commonly lauded in the Western world. When asked what he’d consider the three major esports titles in SEA, Santoso pointed to FreeFire and PUBG Mobile as a close second and third, respectively, with Mobile Legends: Bang Bang by far in first place.

“It’s got a lot to do with the genre,” added fellow STUN.GG Co-Founder

Christopher Djaja. “I think RTS is very different on mobile phones. I think FPS is also equally difficult as well. You also have the Battle Royale genre as well. But the moment that MOBA was possible on mobile games, the pioneer of which was Mobile Legends, that just accelerated viewership like no other.”

The Southeast Asian esports ecosystem has gone through some monumental changes over the last few years as countries in the region identify the market as a highly sought-after sector. In Asia, way ahead of the West, esports was an officially meddled discipline sectioned by the International Olympic Committee at the 2019 SEA Games. Malaysia’s Youth and Sports Ministry (KBS) also has a 144-page report highlighting its intentions in the industry called the ‘Strategic Plan for Esports Development 2020-2025’. These regions have also developed incredibly passionate fandoms that have been built through localised esports content, the development of MLBB’s ecosystem, and its growing acceptance of esports in society.

Both Indonesia and the Philippines have also adopted franchised models for their Mobile Legends ecosystem, which Djaja and Santoso claimed has further stabilised the scene. Despite franchising’s negative perceptions

amongst Western esports communities, franchised leagues in SEA, and Asia holistically, have allowed teams to develop competitive ecosystems.

“When you have spectator sport, in order for fandom to be built, you need brands to anchor fans to,” added Djaja.

“The league allows opportunity in terms of commercialisation and why that’s extremely important is that it permits brands to live longer, to invest longer and to invest in the long run. The time horizon of decision-making is much longer. Hence, existences like our organisation. We wouldn’t be able to exist if there wasn’t a franchise league.”

SOUTHEAST ASIA’S NEW ADMIRERS

Given Mobile Legends’ meteoric rise over the last five years and the growth of Southeast Asia esports, it was seemingly only a matter of time before Western esports organisations would be involved.

Team Liquid is a name that many within the West are familiar with.

Founded in 2000, Team Liquid

has competed in countless games, from StarCraft II to League of Legends, winning major championships throughout.

In 2024 though, the multi-national esports organisation made a significant move into Southeast Asia by acquiring STUN.GG, a regional esports company that owns popular esports teams ECHO and AURA in the Philippines and Indonesia, respectively. Team Liquid ECHO, soon to be renamed Team Liquid PH, has an impressive trophy collection in Mobile Legends with two MPL Philippines championships (Season 11 and Season 13) as well as the M3 World Championship trophy in 2023.

Meanwhile, Team Liquid AURA (soon to be Team Liquid Indonesia) competes in one of esports’ most popular leagues. The following for both of these brands in particular highlights Southeast Asia’s huge fanbase with Team Liquid ECHO recording 1.1 million followers on Facebook, while Team Liquid AURA has garnered over 4 million on Instagram.

“Steve [Arhancet, Co-CEO and Owner of Team Liquid] was on the

lookout for a mobile Legends team to enter into the scene in Southeast Asia. A lot of it has to do with the viewership,” added Djaja. “We connected over a call and more than just literally connect, I think we vibe.

“From a vision standpoint, we both felt that esports is a long game, it’s all about building a multigenerational esports brand and, to be honest, I haven’t met many founders that have the same vision.”

Team Liquid is not the only Western organisation that has recognised the potential of Southeast Asia and Mobile Legends’ markets. In 2024 alone, Team Vitality acquired Bigetron Era, one of Mobile Legends’ best women’s teams, Ninjas in Pyjamas teamed up with Team Flash and Fnatic secured a deal with ONIC. In the MENA region, Team Falcons secured a deal with M4 World Champions AP.Bren.

All of these expansions into Mobile Legends have coincided with the Esports World Cup, a Saudi-government-backed multi-title esports event that has Mobile Legends as one of its 21 disciplines. Organisations have been encouraged to expand into different games, through the Esports World Cup’s Club Program,

to compete in the event’s overall Club Championship.

As such, the level of investment by Western organisations will differ depending on whether entering SEA is a long-term or short-term goal.

For STUN.GG and Team Liquid, there is certainly a long-term strategy at play. Team Liquid has gone all in on Southeast Asia and Mobile Legends, fully acquiring ECHO and AURA and integrating them firmly into the company’s infrastructure. As a result of the acquisition, the new teams gain the reputational benefits that Team Liquid has established as well as structural advantages that come from being supported by a global organisation.

“We’re now working with a global brand,” highlighted Santoso. “They have so much experience as well as knowledge that can transfer over to us. Not to mention the resources now that we can share.”

“They [Team Liquid] are serious about people, they’re serious about strategy, they’re serious about commercialisation and they’re serious about being here for the test of time,” Djaja added. “That sort of strategy, extrapolated across

time, is knowledge that is extremely beneficial for us on a local level. So you have that support, that insight and that strategy on a global level.”

The rapid expansion by major esports organisations into Southeast Asia has opened the door to new opportunities and ecosystems, a door that likely won’t close anytime soon. Moreover, the moves could provide greater opportunities for esports in Southeast Asia.

Interest in the Southeast Asian esports market has also transcended to football teams, with Malaysia Super League club Selangor FC the first football club to enter Malaysia’s Mobile Legends: Bang Bang league in 2023.

“Football is the most popular sport in Malaysia with a lot of heritage, history and following. Esports is relatively new in comparison to football but we can see that its popularity is growing fast and intrend with esports globally,” said Simon Lim, Chairman of Selangor Red Giants Esports “People are now also realising that esports is pretty competitive, which makes it similar to football and we have also seen similar levels of passion and support during esports matches.”

NAVIGATING SOUTHEAST ASIA

Southeast Asia is a big market, and localisation is key to successfully navigating the market. “Having that localised feeling for fans to attach to is so important. They want to feel like this is by Indonesia, for Indonesian fans. This is by Filipinos for Filipino fans,” explained Sentoso.

Djaja also went on to add that localisation of a brand in Southeast Asia relates to strategy, ideation

and content. He highlighted that Team Liquid fully acknowledged this need. “[Team Liquid] felt that our organisation hit the right spot when it came to localisation. They plan on making no changes, just supporting us in enhancing it.”

There remain other key differences among various Southeast Asian markets, explained Daniel Chew, Head of Esports for Singapore and Cambodia at MOONTON Games.

“Unlike its Southeast Asian neighbours, the esports scene in Singapore remains relatively niche.

A key reason has been the lack of driving forces to develop the competitive ecosystem and elevate it to the mainstream. MPL Singapore remains the island state’s only esports league, but continues to grow season-on-season,” said Chew.

He did go on to say that esports at a grassroots level in Singapore is growing, with educational institutions working with the Singapore Cybersports and Online Gaming Association to incorporate Mobile Legends into programmes.

“The youth of Singapore are readily embracing gaming and esports, but the real question is, are brands and regulators?”

Meanwhile, the Mobile Legends scene in Cambodia paints a different story. “The MLBB esports scene in Cambodia has seen exponential growth in three key aspects—competitiveness, community building, and ecosystem,” he added.

“MPL Cambodia had the highest number of imports from key MLBB regions this season, while also producing homegrown talents whose careers go beyond the local scene. For the first time, we

exported a Cambodian player to be part of an MLBB team in China.”

At the end of the day, Team Liquid understands that the SEA market is about tailoring the brand to the country, instead of just statically expanding into the region.

“Strategy, ideation, content, everything, that’s not possible if you don’t have localisation,” said Djaja. “Steve and Victor [Goossens Founder and Co-CEO of Team Liquid] recognise that and that’s why they felt that our organisation hit the right spot when it came to localisation. They plan on making no changes, just supporting us and enhancing it.”

Despite its viewership successes, Olympic-level support and mobilecentric fanbases, it is easy to forget that Southeast Asia is still a developing region, particularly from a commercial perspective. It could also be said that the market is still dominated by one title, Mobile

Legends, and has a long way to go to grow its other esports scenes.

However, Djaja is confident that this development will come. “The future is maturity in three categories, MOBA, FPS and Battle Royale. I think maturity will come in the form of commercialisation and that is extremely important.

“You’re going to see maturity in the form of players becoming heroes for kids, maturity in the form of office banter regarding esports.”

Two years ago, The Esports Journal first profiled the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang scene for Edition 11 of this magazine. Since then, pioneering global organisations like Team Liquid have taken note of its growing influence, and have taken advantage of the opportunities on offer to establish a foothold in Southeast Asia. Two further years from now, the scene may look very different indeed.

Image credit: Psyonix

This is Rocket League!

The good and the bad of Rocket League esports

AUTHOR Jeff Simpkins @HereLiesJeff / Resolve Esports

THIS IS ROCKET LEAGUE” is one of the best commentary lines ever, in my opinion. Shouted, literally, by the phenomenal Callum ‘Shogun’ Keir, as NRG’s jstn taps home a zero-second goal during the Rocket League Championship Series Season 5 Grand Final, to take his team to overtime. But it’s more than just a line of commentary or a moment in our esports history; it encapsulates the very essence of what Rocket League is. It’s hectic and frantic, yet it takes a high level of skill, dedication and

talent to master. It can go down to the absolute wire with every second counting, and you can still walk away with nothing. Most importantly though, it’s incredibly entertaining and exciting.

It hasn’t, however, been without its problems. This piece of writing is intended to be an overview of the good, the bad and the ugly of the current Rocket League esports scene, but it’s also a total excuse for me to talk about an esport and its community that I’ve fallen in love with. Let’s begin.

Rocket League’s main competition, the RLCS, is unfortunately almost over for 2024 with Gentle Mates and G2 Esports claiming the glory at international tournaments so far. Only the World Championship now remains. Positively though, Rocket League’s tournament structure outside of RLCS is expanding. The Esports World Cup (Previously Gamers8) held in Saudi Arabia will again host a Rocket League tournament, albeit with fewer teams, and there will also be a newly announced FIFA-backed

World Cup tournament later this year. Alongside those, we have a plethora of smaller tournaments that run year-round, including the recent ‘Morekats Mayhem’ with the finals hosted at LEVEL UP Festival in Salzburg, which GRIDSERVE Resolve won, by the way.

Alongside a multitude of new tournaments, we have seen increased viewership, in Europe in particular, season on season.

Admittedly, this is largely due to the presence of new creator-led teams such as Karmine Corp, Gentlemates and Moist Esports ‘watch partying’ their team’s games. However, I also believe this increase is due to how competitive and entertaining the Rocket League esports scene is.

Karmine, a team that had just won every regional tournament in the first half of the season, failed to qualify at all for two out of three of the regional tournaments in the

second split. If that doesn’t show the level of competition, I don’t know what does.

Then there is the community. I’ve been part of a lot of different esports scenes in my time in the industry now — League of Legends, Call of Duty, Overwatch to name but a few — and frankly none have come close. The Rocket League community appreciates transparency, honesty, and ingenuity but is also unafraid of being heard and advocates for improvement and development of our scene. It’s outspoken and opinionated but also extremely welcoming. In-person, they are even better. I’m not sure if I’m slightly biased due to my love of football too, but the chanting, the drums, the groups of fans going back and forth is fantastic and from my experience, unique to Rocket League!

The French and South American fan groups in particular are phenomenal, bringing large swathes of passionate supporters to events. I also want to shout out community members like Adam ‘Craftman’ Stewart too, who does an exceptional job of organising big groups of largely mixed fans, chanting and cheering together, and raising the atmosphere of Rocket League events beyond anything else in esports. The Rocket League esports community is wonderful and that is why they have become my favourites.

There are however definite things that need to improve for Rocket League to truly become a Tier 1 esport. Firstly, whilst there are more 3rd party tournaments, the overall RLCS season is now far too short. Down from three splits to just two, if you don’t qualify for the Majors or Worlds (and only

four teams from Europe and North America do) then your season is over by June. A six month offseason is not sustainable for teams or players. The format for the current season also does not provide any sustainability for top-level teams. Constantly forcing them through bi-weekly open qualifiers, only to slip up in one game on the final day and not make the main tournament is less than ideal. This season also saw a pretty substantial reduction in the size of the RLCS circuit prize pool, from $6 million last season to $4.3 million this season, alongside less LAN events than in 2022/23.

We need to revert back to a format that rewards teams for placing highly in previous tournaments. Besides that, in the first two days of open qualifiers, top-level teams are forced to play against teams of

newcomers who they often beat by 20+ goals… who is that fun for? At the beginning of the season, 926 teams signed up to play RLCS, by the end of split two, that number had dropped by over 150 teams (450 players). I believe the format is partly to blame for that fall-off.

Alongside this, the current commercial opportunities for esports teams competing in Rocket League esports aren’t the best. Top-performing teams can be invited to developer Psyonix’s ‘Rocket League Affiliate Program’ which grants them the opportunity to have a car design and team banner in the game. This has been reduced as teams previously received both a home and away decal, banner and goal explosion. Alongside the decreased offering, the publisher also failed to allocate enough time for the team’s designs

to be implemented properly, which resulted in the finalised designs being significantly downgraded. This reduction to the offering, decreased length of season and reduction in design quality have all contributed to less revenue generation for both teams and Psyonix. The publisher also takes 70% of the revenue from these sales, whilst the teams only receive 30%, meaning this is not a significant source of revenue. I hope that the publisher will review this model for 2025 and look to make positive improvements that increase the sustainability for teams in the space.

There’s plenty more the publisher could do. The esports shop being relatively inconspicuous within the in-game store, no proper esports tab in the game client, no proper esports/news

Image credit: Psyonix

offering on the website for Rocket League (even though one was promised), no revenue share for teams from Major event bundles/ items, the lack of any formalised and consistent women’s league structure — and those are just off the top of my head.

I do appreciate however that nothing is ever perfect and at a time when the publisher has just made significant layoffs, these things can’t and won’t change overnight. Some of them, they may also just disagree with me on and that’s also fine.

I want to end on a positive note by talking about Major events and production because this is where Rocket League esports excels.

Yes, the community and crowds definitely help but the production value, both in the venue and on broadcast, is phenomenal. The casters and talent generally make the show and they are amazing, especially the Brits, no bias. That said, however, there’s nobody that comes close to Stax: the man, the myth, the legend. If you haven’t seen him introduce teams or give a monologue, you are missing out and I urge you to go watch some online. Goosebumps. Every time. Alongside this you also have the likes of the First Touch podcast that discusses everything between tournaments, you have content creators like Stumpy, Cole and Dazerin writing skits and sketches for broadcast. The whole team is involved and tournament operator

BLAST has brought it all together beautifully so far this season.

So, if you’re somehow reading this having never watched Rocket League esports, obviously make sure you correct that. Secondly, make sure you support Resolve, I hear they are a great team. Finally, there are some pressing concerns from a sustainability perspective for teams. Are we a Tier 1 esport? Probably not yet. We’re this big awkward and slightly dysfunctional family but it is a big family who are ultimately all pushing towards the same goals, and that my friends, is Rocket League.

Nailed it.

Image credit: Psyonix

The Bang Bang Boom

Why Western teams are piling into Mobile Legends

AUTHOR Riccardo Lichene @riky_lichene

sports roster news throughout the second quarter of 2024 was dominated by a trend nobody would have predicted a year ago. Major global esports organisations have been signing Southeast Asian Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) teams, signalling an important

shift in Western organisations’ approach to growth in the mobile esports sphere.

Ostensibly, the obvious reason there has been a sudden uptick in interest over MLBB, a mobile MOBA game from Asia with a minor following in the West, is the

Saudi Arabian government-funded Esports World Cup (EWC). The more titles an esports organisation competes in, the better its chance of bringing home additional prize money through the event’s Club Support Program, which offers financial rewards for drawing in interactions and viewers. The fact that MLBB was the only title to have both a men’s and women’s tournament at the EWC makes that incentive even more relevant.

However, while the controversial Saudi event has been a catalyst, it has arguably masked other compelling reasons why so many big names have entered a game largely unknown to their core audiences.

One such leading reason why so much interest from the West has come to MLBB is that, quite simply, it’s an extremely popular esports scene that looks poised to keep on growing. The MLBB Indonesian regular season of 2024, for example, had a peak viewership

of 2.25 million, per Esports Charts. That’s almost four times the peak audience of League of Legends’ LEC Spring 2024. MLBB, also according to Esports Charts, was the title played in the 4th and 5th most watched esports events of all time.

For esports organisations, it’s a two birds with one stone situation: with one investment not only do the chances of bringing home cash from the EWC and its Club Support Program increase, but organisations (and their sponsors) gain access to a bustling new market.

One of the latest signings prior to the EWC was the one made by the French esports org Team Vitality, which has acquired Indonesian powerhouse Bigetron Era, marking a historic entry into the MLBB esports scene. “New teams must be able to attract new fans, have interesting content developed and generate new revenues outside of the prize money, like new sponsorships,” Nicolas Maurer, CEO & Co-founder of Team Vitality, told The Esports Journal.

Another seasoned global esports org, Team Liquid, has entered MLBB by acquiring AURA and World Champions ECHO, while Fnatic has partnered with ONIC, a team that has also cemented its name in the world of MLBB esports. Lastly, Saudi Arabian hometown team Team Falcons have partnered with World Champions APBren.

“These movements are a testament to how [the] Mobile Legends: Bang Bang ecosystem has been expanding and become a game investment of choice,” Eric Wu, MOONTON Games’ Senior Partnership Manager, told The Esports Journal. “We

welcome these collaborations that significantly contribute to the title’s growth.”

The scene, according to testimonies from both western and Southeast Asian teams, is also very welcoming towards newcomers, be they organisations or fans. “Through collaborations with internationally renowned orgs, the associated teams will grow rapidly as both sides learn from each other,” Wu continued. “We expect to see more global opportunities in the future, not just for players, but also for talents and teams within the ecosystem. For instance, the 2024 Snapdragon Pro Series (SPS) includes the EU/MENA region, highlighting the globalisation of MLBB’s development.”

MOONTON is also investing in growing Mobile Legends: Bang Bang outside of Southeast Asia, both in terms of audience reach as well as the physical locations of the tournaments. That’s why this year it added a new midseason invitational to the calendar, the MLBB Mid Season Cup (MSC).

“MSC has transitioned into becoming a global mid-season cup featuring international teams outside

Southeast Asia”, said Wu. “With MSC 2024 welcoming teams from all over the world and being hosted outside Southeast Asia, we believe that through such collaborations, more fans from the EU and NA will be able to experience the excitement of MLBB esports in the future.”

MSC was held at the EWC, an event that, due to its size and relevance (despite the controversies) has been one of the key factors in the development of the title’s ecosystem and the sudden rise in interest coming from the West. The game’s developer, therefore, considers it of “significant importance within the ecosystem,” Wu added. “We are pleased that MLBB was one of the first partners chosen, showcasing our status in the global esports market. MLBB

Image credit: Moonton

is also the only title in EWC that features both men’s and women’s competitions, reflecting our core value that esports are for everyone.”

Indeed, the last factor that is contributing to the West’s interest in the MLBB scene is that it has one of the biggest women’s competitions in the world, the Woman Star League in Indonesia. Vitality’s investment was in the best performing team of this league, likely an effort to maximise engagement. To put it in perspective, the WSL Season 6 held in December of 2023 had double the peak viewers and the same average viewers of the Game Changers EMEA Stage 1, a women’s VALORANT tournament popular in the West.

“We are committed to creating an ever more suitable esports environment for women players” Wu concluded. “We aim to highlight the talents of these athletes to our audience. For example, last year’s South East Asian Games, a biennial multi-sport event involving participants from 11 countries of Southeast Asia, set a viewership record with 1.36 million peak viewers. This event turned these talented individuals into icons

overnight and showcased the allure of MLBB esports to the public.”

The popularity of the women’s scene is exactly what piqued the interest of Danny Engels, the newly appointed Corporate Director of Global Operations for Team Vitality. He spent months analysing the global scenes of Esports World Cup titles in which Team Vitality didn’t have a team. “I really like how sophisticated Mobile Legends is in Southeast Asia not only with the franchised League that they have, which really reminds me of the circuits we know in the Western World, but from a women’s esports perspective” Engels told The Esports Journal. “They are not

coming short of any Game Changers events, and the integration of these girls playing in SEA games or other Olympic style tournaments is really meaningful for their countries and is actually really meaningful for women’s esports overall.”

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang represents a safe investment for Western organisations that, they’re hoping, will pay big dividends. Not only is the audience vast and engaged — MLBB counts millions of daily players — but it is one of the few titles that managed to get a woman’s scene up and running and that is able to stand on its own legs, offering both social and financial value to teams.

There’s also plenty of talent that’s eager to go international. In a region with relatively low wages and less economic opportunity, that means it’s likely significantly cheaper to pick up a team and establish operations compared to the West.

Taken together, this online MOBA is providing fertile ground for expansion by large esports organisations, a new frontier as they search for ways to grow out of the esports winter.

Image credit: Moonton

Image credit: Esports World Cup

R Dive into the Tulpar PROTALITY EMEA TOUR

un by Turkish tournament organiser eSports360, the Tulpar PROTALITY EMEA Tour is a premiere PUBG: Battlegrounds tournament in the MENA region. In 2024, the Tour expanded into a Europe-wide competition for the first time.

Alongside an $8,000 prize pool, the tournament also acts as a thirdparty qualifier for the $50,000 regional PUBG EMEA Championship. Still, the series remains true to its Turkish roots. “It’s a great feeling to see the excitement of Turkish players globally,” said Ilker Karaş, cofounder of eSports360 “They add a different flavour to the lobby with their chaotic games. The founding members of our team have more than 20 years of experience observing, developing projects and living in the habitat of esports in Türkiye.”

As an official PUBG Esports event, the top two teams from each Series are granted coveted ‘wildcard’ spots in the PUBG EMEA Championship, making PROTALITY the first tournament organiser in 2024 to be given the rights to distribute wildcard slots. For Season 9, the

PROTALITY EMEA Tour will also distribute two wildcard spots — and it doesn’t end there. “We are planning special PUBG events centred on the show format with new partners. Before the end of this year, we may see the return of PROTALITY’s end-of-the-year special event DROPSTARS. As always, we aim for a quality event for players and spectators.”

High-performance peripherals brand Monster Notebook is once again the global headline sponsor of the Tour, with its gaming laptop brand Tulpar featuring prominently.

“Our sponsorship of the PROTALITY EMEA Tour is a testament to our dedication to inclusivity and raising awareness in esports,” said Monster Notebook’s Marketing Director Birol Sülük “This collaboration has enabled us to unite a diverse group of esports enthusiasts from Europe, the Middle East, and Türkiye. As a brand, adding value to our sector remains a top priority, with esports being a pivotal focus.

“At Monster Notebook, we’re passionate about sharing our expertise in gaming computers

with everyone who shares our love for the field — from gamers to industry stakeholders. Our ongoing investments in esports, both locally and globally, reflect our commitment to nurturing this vibrant community.”

The PROTALITY Series’ move into EMEA is a big expansion for eSports360 from its roots in Türkiye. The MENA region is growing in importance for PUBG, as well as esports generally, while Europe is a lucrative market to establish a presence in.

“We have learnt a lot from the journey of major events such as WCG, CPL, ESWC and BLAST Pro Series Istanbul in Türkiye,” eSports360’s Karaş explained. “We have a combative spirit that combines passion and desire with productivity and does not avoid trying new things. I would like to thank the PUBG Esports team for their endless support since day one and for being as much a part of the PROTALITY adventure as we are. Our desire is to create one of the most prestigious PUBG championships with their vision.”

The WOW Factor

Will Blizzard ever pull off World of Warcraft esports?

AUTHOR Izabela Tomakic @BelaTomakic

sports in some form has been woven into the fabric of World of Warcraft (WoW) ever since the game first came out in 2004, as guilds across the world competed to clear out old iconic bosses like Onyxia and Ragnaros. Over time, this has evolved into what we know today as the Race to the World First — a race to be the first team to complete a raid, the most difficult type of content. The Burning Crusade expansion introduced the first Arena Tournament, an overt competitive mode where players could show off their PvP mastery and outwit their opponents in a series of 3v3s. World of Warcraft esports only grew and today you can witness events like Race to the World First, Arena Tournaments, Mythic Dungeon International, creator tournaments and The Great Push.

Despite developer Blizzard Entertainment’s attempts to diversify its esports and give each and every type of player a piece of competitive content they might enjoy, it is hard to even begin to compare it to the esports giants like VALORANT, Counter-Strike, and League of Legends, which easily amass millions of viewers on Twitch. But if competitive play is an integral part of your game, one of the most prominent issues that arises is balancing — should you balance your game for esports, or average players? As of late, this has been a hot topic in the World of Warcraft community, with some players claiming Blizzard is too focused on esports and should look to cater more to average players.

One of the best examples of World of Warcraft being too challenging comes from the Shadowlands

expansion, when professional guilds like Liquid, Echo, and Method competed in the Race to World First for 18 continuous days. This was mainly due to overly-difficult bosses that took the best guilds in the world too much time to take down, effectively making it one of the most difficult raids to this day. World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas promised that Blizzard will be making less challenging raids in the future. This can be clearly seen by looking at stats from data repository Data for Azeroth. While 42% of the playerbase has cleared Vault of the Incarnates (on any difficulty), only 35% can brag they cleared Sepulcher of the First Ones, the final raid of ‘Shadowlands’.

A strong argument against the case for esports in WoW is that not many players actually participate in these competitive, esports-like activities. For example, roughly one third of the playerbase is clearing the current raid content, and that number is even lower for the top difficulty level. According to Data for Azeroth stats, only 28% of the playerbase has gotten the most iconic achievement for Mythic+ dungeons that comes with a mount (Keystone Master) in ‘Dragonflight’ season three. On top of this, one of Blizzard’s devs admitted in 2019 that actually only a very small percentage of players

finish raids. So, it is safe to assume that the average World of Warcraft player spends most of their time doing the main storyline, side quests, professions, and collecting items; that is, on non-competitive content. Which leaves us with a question — (why) is Blizzard designing World of Warcraft dungeons and raids around esports and pro players?.

According to Kinaeshetic, an officer at esports organisation and WoW guild Method, Mythic raids are initially designed for high-end guilds who participate in Race to the World First, but are later tuned down for the sake of more casual players. Using the Tindral boss of Dragonflight raid Amirdrassil as an example, he said:

“The level of difficulty required [by] pre-nerf Tindral in phase two when you had six seconds to soak every seed before you wiped, and then obviously, if you soaked multiple seeds, you wiped the raid — that’s a very interesting mechanic that we were able to experience. And honestly, about a thousand people got to experience pre-nerf Tindral, which is an incredible piece of art in terms of design, implementation, and difficulty. But that bar is too high for average semi-hardcore players/ guilds…so the fight gets gutted.”

This has become the design approach Blizzard is repeatedly taking with WoW raids — release them designed for the competitive community first and make them easier after the race ends.

The demographics of the WoW playerbase are also changing in ways that may affect the game’s focus on esports. According to a report from World Metrics from 2024, the average WoW player age is 32. That means that most players

Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment

probably have family, friends, a job, leaving less time for the gruelling time requirements of competitive play. As a result, many players are either turning to open-world content, or Mythic+ dungeons, where they can enjoy World of Warcraft at their own pace.

“The players aren’t there to invest that kind of time and energy into the game,” Kinaeshetic explained, “and it’s unfair to them. People are trying to emulate what we’re doing, but that’s degenerate and timeconsuming. So, people are just not playing Mythic [raids] because why am I going to get screamed at when I can play Mythic+?”

“The players aren’t there to invest that kind of time and energy into the game.”

One of the most popular World of Warcraft content creators, Bellular, shares the same sentiment. According to his data, the number of Mythic+ runs has never been higher than in Dragonflight season four, and this

is mainly because roughly 90% of the keys being run are being timed. This essentially means that the easier the game is, the more fun players will have and they’ll play more.

So, should Blizzard ditch balancing World of Warcraft for esports and focus entirely on designing and tuning it for the majority of the playerbase?

Kinaeshetic thinks Blizzard has found a sweet spot with its current approach; catering to both casual and hardcore players by tinkering with available content to allow players of all ability levels to challenge themselves. Tuning the game for average players, by contrast, may risk making the game feel hollow, uninspired, or boring. The developer’s current approach to esports strikes a certain compromise — there’s a corner of competitive Azeroth for all playstyles and abilities. With The War Within expansion on the horizon, time will tell just how popular that approach is proving with the masses.

Women’s Esports

The state of play

AUTHOR Lea Maas @N3ylani

Women make up a significant portion of gaming fans worldwide but are underrepresented at the highest level of play. According to gaming and esports research firm Newzoo, most women play games casually. This trend is also reflected in player earnings. With total earnings of $471,250, the highestearning woman athlete Sasha ‘Scarlett’ Hostyn ranks only 532nd among athletes of all genders, per Esports Earnings.

While long-established esports circuits have never been exclusive to men, women and transgender individuals encounter numerous

barriers. According to Guild Esports and Sky UK, three out of four women under the age of 25 experience harassment while gaming online. Moreover, as underrepresented groups within esports, many posit that they lack role models.

Yet women’s esports has also reached new heights in recent years. Never before have so many fans tuned in to watch women’s teams compete in their favourite titles.

GROWTH OF THE WOMEN’S GAME

The growth of women’s esports is evident in the overall increase in competitive opportunities for women and other marginalised genders.

Since the early years of esports, some stakeholders and athletes have invested in creating competitive opportunities, such as the Super Girl Gamer Pro series and the GIRL GAMER Esports Festival. Some female veterans in the scene include Counter-Strike player Emmalee ‘EMUHLEET’ Powe, the first female Overwatch League player Se-yeon ‘Geguri’ Kim, and Eefje ‘Sjokz’ Depoortere, who’s been involved in League of Legends esports since 2012.

However, such efforts often suffered from resource constraints as well as a lack of game developer support — though this is not

uniform across the industry. Some developers have invested heavily in their women’s esports ecosystem, such as Riot Games with VALORANT since its launch in 2020.

Heather ‘sapphiRe’ Garozzo, who competed in Counter-Strike from the early 2000s until 2014, recalls her time as a pro player: “In my early days of competing, well before I started competing in women’s events a decade later, I was often the only woman in the server or on LAN. Like many, I’d constantly receive various levels of harassment online.

“The thing that bothered me the most is the doubt people had that I was who I claimed to be. Given my brother was a professional player too, any exceptional play I had online often resulted in people claiming it surely wasn’t me capable of making that play. I felt like attending LANs was the only option to prove my abilities. I consistently felt I had to work harder than my male peers to prove I was good enough.”

As the esports industry grew, so did the voices of those striving for better representation and fairer infrastructures. New communities and companies specifically dedicated to fostering inclusivity sprang up, such as Women in Esports, which British Esports set up to improve representation through education and competitive opportunities.

Garozzo founded Raidiant in 2021, a women-led esports production company. “Radiant started as a ‘by women, for women’ type of platform where we created spaces for women and marginalised genders to compete, be offered the same attention, quality and opportunities as equivalent online events that

traditionally are male-dominated,” she told The Esports Journal. “However, we have since expanded to be ‘by women, for everyone’. We came to realise, we simply made good events regardless of who they are for.”

Similarly, initiatives aimed at improving the issues affecting marginalised genders are on the rise. Educational and awareness campaigns have sought to shed light on DEI shortcomings in esports, such as #NoRoomForAbuse, a campaign by esports organisation Guild Esports and telecommunications company Sky UK. Playing in an immersive gaming room, male gaming personalities were confronted with the harassment commonly experienced by women to highlight the impact of abusive player behaviour.

Thanks to new initiatives and more competitive opportunities, women’s esports is more popular than ever, setting viewership records every year. In 2023, tournaments for marginalised genders made up 28 million hours of viewing time, an increase of nearly 15% compared to 2022, according to data from Esports Charts. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s 32nd SEA Games Women’s Tournament led viewership statistics of 2023

with 6.36 million watch hours and 1.37 million peak viewers. Comparatively smaller events, such as the ESL Impact Katowice 2023 (16,019 peak viewers) in CounterStrike and the Ally Women’s Open (16,213 peak viewers) in Rocket League, garnered notable organic audiences, too.

The overall most-watched discipline in women’s esports for 2023 was VALORANT. Thanks to the expansive women’s VCT Game Changers ecosystem, the FPS game’s hours watched of women’s tournaments grew by 48% compared to the 2022 season to accumulate 16.3m watch hours, per Esports Charts data. Like the main VCT circuit it consists of regional leagues in EMEA, Americas and Pacific. It culminates in a $500,000 LAN final that saw 293,000 concurrent viewers tune into the 2023 event at its peak — a figure that rivals the viewership numbers of some mainstream esports leagues.

In contrast to established esports, including League of Legends (LoL) – whose women’s tournaments profited from publisher support only years after their inception – VALORANT focused on inclusive competitions from the very beginning.

Image credit: Bruno Alvarez / Riot Games

“VCT Game Changers has done an incredible job of bringing more awareness to the massive women’s player base in VALORANT,” Garozzo added. “The Game Changers Championship gets all the bells and whistles of a top tier event, in talent, in production and in content.”

The ripple effect that followed Game Changer’s formation was indeed game-changing for women’s esports. The circuit’s success and positive community reception proved that women’s tournaments could be impactful from both a business perspective and social impact perspective. As a consequence, leagues for other titles, such as LCS Game Changers (LoL) and ESL Impact (CounterStrike), began to emerge.

In response to the influx of competitive opportunities for women between 2021 and 2022, several notable esports organisations picked up women’s rosters. G2 Esports’ Game Changers team, G2 Gozen, has been at the top of its region for years, while Shopify Rebellion, its counterpart in the Americas region, has arguably exceeded the organisation’s ‘flagship’ NA Challengers roster in terms of popularity.

More recently, women’s Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) has seen increased investment. Veteran organisations, such as Team Vitality and Cloud9, have acquired female rosters to compete in the 2024 MLBB Women’s Invitational. The event took place at the Esports World Cup in June, attracting 265,117 peak viewers and becoming the fifth most-watched competition in the history of women’s esports.

THE NEED FOR IMPROVEMENT

Despite the progress the esports industry has made in recent years, there remains much room for improvement.

Viewers and competitors of women’s events have pointed at insufficient chat moderation during live broadcasts. On numerous occasions, the livestream chat during major women’s tournaments has been flooded with harassment based on the identity and appearance of players and on-stage talent. For instance, transgender athlete Bob ‘Bob’ Tran would often be the subject of harassment targeting her gender identity during Game Changers matches with her former team, Cloud9 White. Stakeholders fear these occurrences could discourage up-

and-coming players from going pro to avoid harassment.

Moreover, the increasing involvement of controversial entities in esports, particularly the Saudi Arabian government, has been another cause of concern for some DEI proponents in the industry. Due to Saudi Arabia’s stance on women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and free speech, some in the esports community consider its growing influence in esports to be in opposition to the DEI movement. Organisations such as British Esports, which runs the Women in Esports initiative, as well as esports organisations attending Saudi Arabian events, have come under fire from some sections of the community for working with Saudi Arabia. British Esports and many organisations, for their part, argue the relationship does not undermine DEI efforts.

In addition to critical community feedback, women’s esports has been shaken by various scandals, eroding the trust and interest of the public. One such incident was the shutdown of Rocket League’s largest circuit for women and non-binary players, Women’s Car Ball (WCB).

In early 2023, the league was temporarily halted as its former owner, KC Pioneers, reportedly failed to pay staff after running WCB on speculative income from unsigned partnerships. The circuit was later bought by esports organisation Gamers First (G1), which reportedly repeated the same mistakes as its predecessor. Following missed payments in August and November of 2023, G1 abandoned WCB entirely.

Although WCB is an extreme case, it shows how quickly even the best

Image credit: Esports World Cup

intentions can fall apart without reliable organisation and financial backing. Women’s competitions are especially vulnerable to the negative effects of scandals as their financial sustainability, competitive integrity, and social impact are already controversial topics in the esports community. Therefore, scandals serve as excellent excuses that amplify the few voices that loudly disagree with the consensus of DEI proponents in esports.

The slow and cautious investment in women’s leagues has led some women athletes to retire. So far, women’s leagues, including Game Changers, rarely see upward mobility as participants struggle to be signed by co-ed teams in mixedgender circuits.

To incentivise the upward mobility of Game Changers athletes, Riot recently announced a raft of changes that made it easier for women’s Game Changers rosters to progress into the game’s tier one and tier two scenes.

The women’s scene in Riot’s other esports title, League of Legends, has however suffered. The publisher has yet to launch a global LoL women’s competitive ecosystem, leaving organisations that had formed women’s rosters in hopes of a LoL equivalent to VCT Game Changers in the dark.

Many of the issues marginalised individuals face on their path towards top-tier competition are influenced by a nuanced set of intersectional forces that surface both inside and outside the game. In-game harassment and adverse views about esports professionals from marginalised backgrounds continue to persist. Women and transgender athletes remain

scrutinised disproportionally compared to their male peers. “People whine about how it’s ‘nothing to do with gender’ but I didn’t see gender get brought into the conversations ONCE when some [male] VCT teams were losing every week,” esports host Yinsu Collins recently commented on social media.

THE ROAD AHEAD

All in all, women’s esports is heading towards a more equitable future. The long-overlooked seeds planted by industry veterans have finally begun to sprout, leading to competitive opportunities for underrepresented genders and stakeholder involvement.

“If you look at the trajectory of women’s esports, we’re seeing exponential growth compared to traditional women’s sport,” said Gazorro. “There’s a bright future ahead and we’re not that far off from seeing a few women playing at the top. We’ve already seen ‘potter’, who happens to be one of my former teammates, coach a World Champion team and is considered one of the best coaches in the world.”

To continue this growth, tournament organisers need to learn from past scandals and listen to community feedback to create

truly safe, high-tier competitions. Publishers and game developers might implement improved in-game safety measures. VALORANT, for example, recently announced greater and faster penalties for harmful player behaviour as well as the upcoming introduction of hardware bans in severe cases.

There’s a long way to go, Garozzo said, but she identified a route forward based on the early successes seen so far in women’s esports.

“Coming from Counter-Strike, I always felt that the community truly embraced what it meant to have women’s events,” Garozzo explained.

“I want to take that model and apply it to every esport title that exists. Women should be encouraged to compete in a space that makes them feel welcomed, yet challenged. They should be given the tools, resources, opportunities and spotlight to thrive and then be guided on how to take the next step in their competitive career, which I hope would be playing in co-ed events.”

“I encourage all game publishers... to look at Counter-Strike, look at VALORANT, look at Overwatch and look at Rocket League to see a thriving women’s scene and consider that for their game title as well.”