The Esports Journal - Edition 8

1

NETWORKING, EDUCATION & DEBATE 2021 EVENTS SCHEDULE 30-31 MARCH

ESI Digital Spring 8-9 SEPTEMBER

ESI Digital Summer 1-2 DECEMBER

ESI Digital Winter The ultimate esports business showcase In 2020, ESI digitised its calendar and in 2021 we’ll offer a mixture of digital and physical events to ensure that you can keep up to date with the world of esports business.

Our ESI Digital series will feature three 2-day events throughout the year all offering the ESI Events guarantee of the best in class content, and online networking opportunities.

Please check www.esportsinsider.com for updates on these, and our physical events too!

#ESIDIGITAL

Via ESI Media, we can assist with a comprehensive, multimedia push with a view to enhancing awareness of your brand, product, event and/or service offering to the broader industry across ESI channels including: EDITORIAL | PODCAST | ADVERTISING BANNERS VIDEO | NEWSLETTER | DIRECTORY | MARKETPLACE Any interested parties can find out more at www.esportsinsider.com or reach out via info@esportsinsider.com.

CONTENT

In this Edition

18

Adam Apicella Assembling the Avengers of esports with Vindex.

29 Esports’ punk evolution The New Rose of popular culture?

32

MADMONQ On a mission for healthy gaming.

Digital version will also be available via www.theesportsjournal.news

06 Nerd Street Gamers

36 EPOS

10 Monetisation in esports

40 Building on the blockchain

14 The Race to World First

43 ESE Entertainment

21 Mindfulness

46 Astropay

24 GRID

48 Turquoise

Publisher-proof models, building venues and driving accessibility to esports.

Three (types of) companies that might unshackle monetisation in esports.

How World of Warcraft raided the esports industry.

Why Rogue and MAD Lions are embracing mindfulness.

Making esports data beautiful.

26 Patrick Mahoney

Diversifying the Nations.

Changing the perception of audio in esports.

Visit our site: theesportsjournal.news

Exploring the blossoming relationship between esports and crypto.

Esports? You want it, we got it.

Discovering the payments landscape of the LATAM esports and gaming market New colour in esports branding.

Follow us on Social Networks

Dear reader, I’d like to also give props to our friends at LATAM Media Group (LMG), who take care of the Spanishlanguage version of ESJ, for the incredible work they have done designing the magazine.

Thank you for opening the year’s first edition of The Esports Journal — and indeed my first ever as Content Lead. It has been my pleasure to work on this project with some great writers; I have edited some fantastic stories and hope you enjoy reading them.

I and the rest of the ESJ team hope you enjoy Edition 8, and if you don’t, well, there’s always Edition 9, I suppose.

In this edition, Nerd Street Gamers CEO John Fazio tells ESJ’s Max Schönknecht that NSG could become one of the world’s biggest companies; I explore the inevitable crossover between blockchain tech and esports, including current and potential uses; H.B. Duran details how World of Warcraft went from secretive, underground war to fullblown spectator sport; Henrieta Hyrlikova speaks with MADMONQ about how they are improving the conversation around health within gaming; and much more. This edition really does have something for everyone.

Stay safe and best wishes all!

Billy Studholme

Sam Cooke

Content Lead The Esports Journal

Managing Director & Co-Founder ESI

Meet the Team

Tom Daniels

Sub-Editor ESI & ESJ

H. B. Duran

Journalist ESI & ESJ

Max Schönknecht Journalist ESI & ESJ

Henrieta Hyrlikova Journalist ESI & ESJ

Kerry Waananen Multimedia Content ESI & ESJ

INTERVIEW

AUTHOR Max Schönknecht  @m4x_cs

Nerd Street Gamers: Publisher-proof models, building venues and driving accessibility to esports

John Fazio CEO and Founder Nerd Street Gamers

nvestments into esports from high-profile venture capital firms are still rare despite esports’ growth in recent years. Nerd Street Gamers raised eyebrows recently with its announcement of an $11.5m (~£8.34m) funding round led by Founders Fund in February.

I

Facebook, Airbnb and SpaceX are just a few of the companies Founders Fund supported early on. But this is not the firm’s first investment in esports; Founders Fund also invested in Cloud9 in 2017.

6

INTERVIEW

Nerd Street has its fingers in many pies, and is one of the companies we can expect to continue making noise in the industry. The Esports Journal spoke with John Fazio, CEO and Founder of Nerd Street Gamers, to learn more about the vision he is pursuing with the company.

The Esports Journal: Could you please explain to us what Nerd Street Gamers at its core is about?

John Fazio: Nerd Street is a gateway to esports opportunities. As we know, there’s a big discoverability issue in esports. You could be a hardcore gamer and it’s still hard to figure out where to play and where to compete. And there’s a legitimacy issue with the parents who would see their kids playing video games all day and don’t understand that there are legitimate productive usages of that video-game playing and competition.

At the essence of Nerd Street, what we’re trying to do is lower the barrier of entry to the industry and increase accessibility. The problem is, there’s a lot of people in the world and in the United States that don’t have access to the equipment that’s necessary to play.

That’s why we build our venues. And so the venues that we build are called Localhost.

“At the essence of Nerd Street, what we’re trying to do is lower the barrier of entry and increase accessibility” You can think of our Localhosts much like the Android phone. Google has its operating system, Android, on Samsung and LG devices for example. But they make their own device, the Pixel, to demonstrate what that platform is capable of doing. Very similarly Nerd Street will be found in all sorts of venues

across the country. In our partner venues that are currently in the Nerd Street network — HyperX in Las Vegas is one of them — you’ll find competitors that are playing in Nerd Street events, but you’ll also find competitors playing at our Localhost venues. And so, building these venues is all about increasing access, helping more people connect to this industry.

ESJ: Beyond the physical venues Nerd Street Gamers also offers various digital experiences, such as tournaments or boot camps. Please explain to us how both sides of the business work together.

JF: The physical space is all about getting more people access to this industry, and then at the same time, providing an even playing field. When we set out to build this business, we assumed that we would have to build these venues all across the country and that would help us develop a network of people that we could then funnel into these opportunities digitally, connecting them on a digital platform.

However, what we found was in the pandemic, when we shut down at that time, we only had four venues built. And when we shut down, we realised that all of the partners who had relied on our physical venues, like our professional teams or publishers and other large organisations, needed help with digital programming.

So we ran the VALORANT events with T1 and FaZe, we did large events with TSM, we did summer camps with Cloud9’s London Spitfire and that programming allowed us to reach so many people that our digital platform really took off. In 2019 we ran, like, two online tournaments, and in 2020 we ran over 350, so we really ramped up the online programming. So to me physical infrastructure provides the necessary human and hardware resources for this

esports industry to scale. And the digital is where we interconnect all of these different opportunities.

ESJ: Not too long ago, Riot Games named Nerd Street Gamers the operator of the 2021 VALORANT Champions Tour. What was the motive behind moving into event production?

JF: Publishers, right now, when they want to run an event for their game, what they have to do is pay somebody to run that event. But because we’ve created a platform where we make money on the users paying for access or somebody’s paying for access on their behalf, that means we’re financially aligned with the publishers. So I can go out and create an event for Riot, we can run a whole event without charging them to produce this series, because we’re making money. And so every time we go out and produce one of these events, say I add one thousand users to my platform and those users spend an average of $70 a year, I’m making $70,000 a year from doing this event.

“I can go out and create an event for Riot, we can run a whole event without charging them” And so what we’re doing is we’re shifting the economics, and this is from traditional sports. In traditional sports, when the NFL pushes out a broadcast to another broadcasting company, that broadcasting company takes on the cost basis; they’re not getting paid to do that. But in esports, it’s always been backwards. And what that means is that the cost burden is very heavy on the publisher and then gets passed to the consumer. And that’s not an accessible ecosystem.

And so Riot was the perfect example of where we were able to come in 7

INTERVIEW

and partner with them to develop this comprehensive ecosystem, where it’s their vision, it’s their professional tier and also their amateur entry path. And we’re able to do it without charging them really anything because we have so much platform upside.

And then the second reason we built this, besides empowering the publishers, was to write our own programming, our own events, our own content pieces, which come out of these events, in support of those publishers. And so alongside our [VALORANT] Champions Tour, we run our own VALORANT tournaments that are kind of the tier below and provide increased opportunity. We’ve already had players that play in our events go on to get college scholarships or to go professional. We’ve seen these pathways and it’s affordable.

8

It’s not something that we’re just charging Riot to do, because we have this aligned interest. And the interest alignment is platform economics because we are a platform, and because our economics are from the users paying us, we don’t have to go out and just charge the publisher.

ESJ: What is your ultimate vision for Nerd Street Gamers?

JF: Our long-term goal here is to make sure that everybody in the world can play esports, because right now, there’s probably 60 percent, maybe a little less of our world that does not have the access, the equipment or the capability to participate in this industry. Our goal is to build those facilities out all across the world, starting with North America, that allows those people to join and then build an ecosystem on

top of our software platform gateway that really provides these life-changing opportunities to everybody that wants them.

“What we’re building is a platform that could be one of the largest companies in the world” We truly believe that esports is going to be the centre of our culture. Sports is in a lot of ways right now. Sports is the great equaliser if you’re a kid who’s in a bad neighborhood with maybe not a secure home structure, and you find it difficult to partake in school. Sport is one of the primary pathways for you to get out, for you to find a productive life path. Now we’re adding video games,

INTERVIEW

which could reach more people if we build these facilities. So long-term, this is not just about gaming. Esports is not just about video games; this is about life opportunity. Where we think this goes in 10 years, is that esports is the largest entertainment vertical in the world … And so what we’re building is a platform that could be one of the largest companies in the world.

ESJ: Recently, Nerd Street Gamers made headlines with the investment from Founders Fund. As a renowned venture firm, whose portfolio includes Airbnb, Spotify, Stripe and more, could you please walk us through the origination of the deal?

JF: It came from a whim. I sent a cold email to somebody named Joe Lonsdale who is one of the founders of Palantir and also a VC. I said, “Hey, would you introduce me to Founders Fund?” and he was very gracious and introduced me to Brian [Singerman]. And then Brian Singerman from Founders Fund, who has a history in gaming and had previously led the investment in Cloud9, was very familiar with the industry and had been watching the industry for multiple decades, wondering when it would finally take off. And when he saw what we were doing and heard our thesis that this is an industry that’s been held back by lack of infrastructure, he really believed in it and we had a very philosophical alignment that made him want to commit.

ESJ: There were multiple successful crowdfunding campaigns in esports throughout 2020. Was crowdfunding something you ever considered?

JF: For us, taking on capital was never just about money. I think for us, we could always find money because we had a business that was making money, we had clear unit economics, we had a clear product/market fit, we have a clear market-growth strategy. So raising capital was never going to be

a challenge for this business. I think what was the challenge was finding the right investors, and so for us, what it was about was those connections. And crowdfunding can be a very good way to raise capital. It can be an efficient way for especially early stages, but you’re not necessarily tapping the network of the people who are investing in you. You’re not necessarily engaging with them for their expertise, or connecting with them on the other businesses that they’ve grown.

ESJ: Nerd Street Gamers raised $11.5m earlier this year. Please talk about how you will use the newly raised funds, and the next steps for Nerd Street Gamers.

JF: Our goal is to get to 20 facilities by the end of the year, which is another 14 that we’re building. And then from there, we’re going to pick up our pace. The goal is to build hundreds over the next few years, where we hit every major metro, and our growth strategy is hitting the areas with the high schools that need the most connection.

“Our goal is to get to 20 facilities by the end of the year, which is another 14 that we’re building”

an entire ecosystem and the entire programming without a cost basis.

ESJ: What would your advice be to other founders in esports looking for venture capital funding right now?

JF: While I think a lot of the money in esports flew to the professional teams first, I think now the focus has shifted towards infrastructure businesses, programming businesses and content businesses, and the businesses that can increase access and focus on youth. The key though is making sure you have both recession-proof and now pandemicproof, but also kind of publisher-proof models — models that help support and grow the publishers, because the publishers hold the keys. And so if I’m going to invest tens of millions of dollars in a company that relies on those keys, what if they take the keys away? Now I’ve lost my investment.

I think that as capital continues to flow in, it’s going to be imperative that those businesses find alignment with the publishers and create sustainable models that are not at risk to those types of issues with the bigger players. I think there’s gonna be a lot of leagues,a lot of content producers and a lot of platforms. But if they’re not focused on getting new people access to that platform, they’re not going to be nearly as appealing as the group that does.

Then we’ll be expanding our partnerships with third parties. These are really good venues that are growing alongside us and have connected to the Nerd Street platform. So we’re going to continue growing those partnerships.

Then, with our current partnership with Riot, pushing out VCT [VALORANT Champions Tour] and supporting the League of Legends scene, we plan to continue investing heavily there and can hopefully replicate that relationship with other publishers who’d like to take advantage of the fact that we’re offering 9

BRANDS

AUTHOR Billy Studholme  @BillyStudholme

Three (types of) companies that might unshackle monetisation in esports T

o see the myriad companies adapting to the digital world, one need only look.

In the last few years, entrenched business models in sport have been challenged by fresh-faced newcomers with different ideas. Esports is a classic disruptor. Down to the way in which competition is played and observed, this precious UFO is flying in the face of traditional sporting models. It is fresh and intriguing, but it also compels a monetisation rethink.

10

In 2021, esports teams and tournament operators (TOs) are not profitable. TOs are largely fighting for peanuts tossed nonchalantly from the hand that feeds them. Teams aren’t yet earning enough from media rights. Almost everything is consumed for free; there are no TV subscriptions. The space is different. It must be monetised differently.

Here is a collection of three (types of) companies that might fundamentally improve the way revenue is generated by stakeholders within the ecosystem.

‘Types of’ is included because in some instances there’s more than one company that offers a similar product.

RECAST Recast could be one of the most exciting apps you’ve never heard of. Its potential for helping all parties monetise — including content creators, esports orgs, and tournament operators — is massive.

It was founded in 2018 to help niche sports like squash or handball better monetise their audiences, with a somewhat brief consideration of esports. Nevertheless Recast’s model applies to esports as a hand does a glove.

In February The Esports Journal spoke to Recast’s Founder and CEO Andy Meikle. Meikle co-founded SportLobster,

BRANDS

a sports platform for fans showing news, sports pick-ems, and other similar features. He stepped away from the project to pursue what he felt was a more sustainable business model — Recast.

Let’s showcase the model with a hypothetical example.

Let’s say G2 livestreams a behind-thescenes, two-hour-long content day with the League of Legends team. Caps, Rekkles, and Jankos will be modelling the org’s new Adidas drop. The social media manager at G2 livestreams the entire thing on Recast. G2 might charge 30 casts (Recast’s in-app currency) for fans to watch. For rights holders, one cast spent = one penny earned (£0.01).

Let’s say 10,000 people spend the casts to watch. 10,000 x 30 = 300,000. 300,000 casts = £3,000. Recast takes a 15 percent cut on all transactions, meaning that’s £2550 earned for G2.

That doesn’t include other G2 players resharing the stream on their own verified Recast accounts. Rights holders also decide the split of revenue for the content they upload. For example, G2 might set the split at 50/50, meaning that for every new viewer that comes from a G2 player’s reshare, G2 and the G2 player would get 15 casts each (remember G2 is charging 30 casts per view in our hypothetical). Fans that watch the stream can also reshare, earning themselves extra casts (and can also earn casts by inviting friends to

Recast, posting their own short-form content, or by simply buying them).

Dynamic usage incentives are built into the app, for all parties.

It’s a brilliant idea and one that, aside from giving orgs the opportunity to monetise any content they like, enables content creators to monetise the resharing of events.

For esports, the potential here is obviously massive.

Think of Gaules, who broadcasts South American CS:GO to the tune of hundreds of thousands of viewers; Emad, who hosts viewing parties on Fortnite esports

events; Myth or Shroud who watch along with North American VALORANT. Each of these influencers invariably has higher viewership on a watch-party than the main broadcast itself. What if they could easily and efficiently monetise these new eyeballs?

Wouldn’t they prefer to rebroadcast via Recast?

It should be noted that it’s not clear whether Recast will offer this.

So far, all that is known is that other verified creators can reshare content and earn money from it; it’s unclear whether Recast’s functionality allows for creators to reshare with their own stream overlay.

But the model allows for rights holders to monetise content at no obligated cost to the fan, and for creators to earn money from introducing new fans to an event.

That is unbelievably exciting for esports — particularly in a world where individual brands may well be superseding traditional ones.

Enabling conduits of eyeballs to monetise said eyeballs is long overdue. Recast’s model, in time, may facilitate that.

11

BRANDS

RALLY On episode #499 of The Tim Ferriss Show, Katie Haun, General Partner at investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (AH) and also on Coinbase’s Board of Directors, spoke about Rally, a company that AH invests in. Haun said the following: “[Rally] allows creators and influencers to create and issue their own branded currency. And the unique thing here is that … imagine a content creator just getting started. [Rally] enables fans who discover that content creator early on to share in the economic upside of that content creator … and then they’re economically incentivised to kind of spread the word.”

12

How is this done? Well, creators on the platform create their own fungible, blockchain-based cryptocurrency.

Here is an example: say Cloud9’s new League of Legends top-laner Fudge joined the platform. He can create his own currency (say, ‘$FDGE’), which fans can buy and trade. Rally aims to ‘maximise liquidity’ of these assets from ‘real demand’ — meaning that the greater a creator’s ‘stock’, the greater the value of their currency. There is also a finite number of each of these unique currencies.

Like a 100-foot gorilla crashing through the streets of New York, the rise of the creator economy needn’t be pointed out.

Anybody with eyes can see that this kind of product could be good for creators as well as consumers; a kind of micro version of investing in a company, only

in this case, the company is the creator.

But perhaps a link should be drawn between this product and the esports industry.

On the periphery, anything that enables esports players to build their personal brands — with financial incentives for fans to stay involved — is good for the ecosystem as a whole. But more importantly, Susie Kim, who was London Spitfire’s General Manager, helped develop Cloud 9’s Training Grounds, and who helped Twitch expand into Korea, is now an advisor at Rally, helping the crypto company roll-out tokens to esports and gaming communities.

The company is also headed (and was founded) by Gen.G Founder and crypto entrepreneur Kevin Chou. Not only does Rally have the expertise to push into esports — the team shows intent.

Rally is but a glimpse at how blockchain software might sit at the intersection between esports, gaming, and content creation.

BRANDS

PICO / TRADABLE BITS In late 2020, ‘Pico Get Personal’ partnered with collegiate esports league Level Next in North America — its first foray into esports.

Pico’s raison d’etre is simple: while much of a sports team’s focus is on driving consumer engagement, this isn’t the main issue. “Sports fans are a highly engaged group,” Asaf Nevo, Pico Founder and CEO, told esportsinsider.com in January. “The problem is that they don’t know who they are engaging.”

In a digital world where esports content is consumed casually and without financial obligation — in which organisations know very little about their fans — is ‘fan engagement’ the most pressing concern? It might be. But it is not the only concern, and it certainly isn’t the only concern of Asaf Nevo and Pico.

Esports is a digital-first pastime. You’d be hard pressed to find a technologically inept esports fan; most content is consumed online, which is not true of almost all other traditional sports (which are shown mostly on TV, though this is changing fast). That makes this issue — one of how to identify digital fans — perhaps more crucial for esports than any other sport. It also suggests the esports industry could be a goldmine for Pico — or Canada-based Tradable Bits (TB).

Both companies utilise ‘digital activations’ that can be integrated with social platforms including Twitch, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter direct message. Activations often come in the form of questionnaires — a means to learn more about the preferences of consumers. Both Pico and TB can now integrate their digital activations with Twitch, and TB can integrate with Discord.

In esports, such a service can lubricate the pistons of monetisation. Pico

CEO Nevo said that less than 10 percent of a brand’s total audience has handed data over that can be used in customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Pico aims to increase that percentage.

This can, among other things, inform sponsorship strategy; if Astralis knows its fans tend to drink G Fuel while watching CS:GO, Astralis could pitch a deal to G Fuel based on real, actionable data. Less guesswork is involved.

Tradable Bits, a company that has worked with brands like Alpha Inc. (formerly Alpha Esports), the Tennessee Titans, and the Portland Trailblazers, plans to explore the esports market more deeply. TB has also worked

with the esports arms of various NBA franchises via the NBA 2K League.

“More organisations and teams are interested in really understanding who their fans are and how to create better revenue structures as a result of that,” Lenny Goh, VP of Business Development, Tradable Bits told The Esports Journal.

“We do plan on working with more teams

in the space, and will be announcing some more partners soon.

“Our product suite functions as a marketing ecosystem for partners. It helps them collect first-party fan data, understand and segment that data and activate it through advertising or marketing communication.”

We’re already seeing esports orgs like Team Liquid and Cloud9, through different initiatives like loyalty programmes, attempt to learn more about their fans. Companies like Pico and Tradable Bits can lend technology to orgs for fan-targeted solutions — and both show intent to enter the space. In esports, even more so than traditional sports, fans online are often blank silhouettes. Identifying and monetising them is good for everyone — particularly teams and TOs. New stuff is exciting, and everything in esports is new. It’s fascinating to watch companies revolutionise the way money is made in the digital sphere, and the upside is vast. Keep your eyes open.

13

INDUSTRY

AUTHOR H.B. Duran  @thathbduran

The Race to World First: How World of Warcraft raided the esports industry t has been nearly 17 years since the first adventurers put a World of Warcraft disc into their computers, and pop culture was never the same. Few games have created and maintained such active online communities as Blizzard Entertainment’s fantasy MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game), fueling rivalries and spawning friendships — not to mention more than a few marriages.

I

14

While a majority of World of Warcraft (aka ‘WoW’) players use the game as a fun way to challenge themselves casually, pass the time, and socialise online, there is a small but serious faction of competitors that train year-round for a single purpose — the Race to World First.

THE ULTIMATE BRAGGING RIGHTS Before esports existed as the billiondollar industry we know today, WoW players had their own high-stakes tournament that determined which guild (team of players) was the best.

WoW players explore a fantasy world and defeat monsters in order to levelup their characters and become more powerful. The toughest bosses offer the most benefits, but they require a team of 20 people to take down.

A few times a year, Blizzard Entertainment releases a new raid — a series of difficult monsters that ends with a final, crazy-difficult end boss.

Ever since the first WoW raid was released, guilds across the world have vied to complete it first.

The Race to World First was born.

INDUSTRY

As more raids were released, dedicated teams of raiders were formed online called ‘progression guilds’. Among them was Method, a European guild that claims the bragging rights for 12 worldfirst end-boss kills.

Guild fans and curious WoW players followed each group’s progress on forums and online chat rooms, but details were scarce. Strategies were kept under guard. Guilds would have members sit in an empty instance (private server location) to mask who was actually competing in the game.

There was an unwritten rule that no one would release any substantial information until five guilds had killed the boss. Only then, if you were lucky, could you watch the boss battle on YouTube a month later.

CALLING ALL GUILDS In 2018, Method did something completely different that changed the competition forever — they lifted the veil.

Over 260,000 viewers flocked to Twitch to watch the notorious WoW guild try to defeat an evil caterpillar-like god named G’huun in real time. Method broadcast all 200 attempts to slay the beast, and ultimately succeeded before anyone else.

The implications for Method’s ‘Race to World First’ were, and still are, enormous. Other guilds followed suit and began to stream their raids live to audiences worldwide. Brands offered their support to top guilds in exchange for a piece of the hype. Among them was Red Bull, Herman Miller, Zippo, and more.

The current champion is ComplexityLimit, a Texas-based organisation that became the first North American WoW guild to achieve World First in 2020. The guild’s most recent Race to World First broadcast was in December, generating over 625 million minutes watched and 220,000 peak concurrent viewers.

Complexity Gaming COO, Kyle Bautista, says the energy around Race to World First can be more easily felt now that it is livestreamed.

“We always say that Twitch is one of the biggest advents of modern esports,” Bautista told The Esports Journal. “For the first time, you were watching. You’d sit there for eight hours as they’re trying to get this boss down and the smallest mistake from one of 20 people costs them. You have that wave of emotion.”

Bautista added that when Method began streaming their communication, it allowed audience members to better understand the process and thus become more invested in the outcome.

“That took it up a whole other level,” he said. “People didn’t realise that there are 20 people playing the game and a 21st person leading that group. Plus five or six people on the bench with coaches and analysts. All they’re doing is looking at these encounters and thinking about the best possible way to get there.

15

INDUSTRY

“You get to see the iteration and understand the thought process,” Bautista added. “[It’s] not just a marathon of gaming — [you see] all the preparation that goes into it. That’s really what’s elevated [World First] to the level that it is currently. That combination of livestreaming, communications, and of course, the community element. That community support is like nothing else in gaming.”

TRY AND TRY AGAIN For progression guilds, training for the next World First begins a mere week after the last one ends. In mid-2019, Limit had narrowly missed World First to Method. Complexity Gaming reached out to them and offered to combine resources.

A month and a half later, 26 members of the newly minted Complexity-Limit guild were flown out to the GameStop Performance Center in Austin, Texas. It was a packed house, between players, talent, catering, a full production team, and 23 Complexity staff.

For 11 days, players stayed in an apartment complex rented by Complexity. They would arrive at 8:00am, raid from 9:00am to 11:30pm and leave around midnight. In between, Bautista and his team were swapping out players to make sure they were resting and eating. The GameStop Performance Center features several recovery rooms that include natural light, nap pods, massage chairs, and other resources.

After 11 days of intense raiding, Complexity-Limit won. They achieved World First.

Among the competitors was Luke ‘Tagzz’ Moran, Co-founder of Limit and veteran WoW player. He tells The Esports Journal that times have changed in the race … but, he feels, for the better.

16

“We were attempting to get World First specifically during the first year that the original forerunners at Method started streaming their progression,” Moran recalls. “Our experience was unique in that our competition was streaming and we were not. We were straddling the cross section of when that started to change. Everyone has mutually agreed that it doesn’t make sense to be secretive these days when everyone wants to stream.”

That’s not to say that rivalries no longer exist. Limit and Method enjoyed a friendly but highly competitive rivalry.

Today, Complexity-Limit communicates regularly with other guilds including the Golden Guardians raid team and Echo,

the new guild formed by core members of Method. Tagzz says he hopes to collaborate on one big broadcast for Race to World First that includes all the top guilds.

Being able to hear communication between teammates on the livestream more accurately represents WoW competition, Moran says, which is better for everyone.

“Common public perception of WoW raiding is historically a raid leader yelling at someone. With World First raiding, it’s actually the opposite. If you had that environment, you wouldn’t be successful at all. You can see these top guilds streaming and they’re all chill. Streaming

INDUSTRY

THE BUSINESS OF RAIDING Blizzard Entertainment offers three methods of competing in World of Warcraft on a professional level — 3x3 Player vs. Player in the Arena World Championship, 5x5 Player vs.

Environment in the Mythic Dungeon International, and Guild vs. The World in the Race to World First. The game developer/publisher arranges the first two tournament circuits but offers only technical support to World First.

Race to World First offers bragging rights in lieu of prize money. The race is a pure, community-based event.

Since organisations like ComplexityLimit control their own broadcasts, brands can connect with those engaged audiences in unique ways compared to esports like League of Legends or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

has shown that the best guilds are ones that can get along with each other all the time. It’s a demonstration of what group management can be.”

When he’s not raiding, Tagzz works a full-time job. Many of his guild mates also work regular jobs or stream full time. As support for the race adds to its legitimacy, he thinks that the event can only get bigger with time.

“With more sponsors involved, it definitely helps the barrier to entry,” said Tagzz. “It’s quite the time commitment, so having an organisation behind you helps enable us to spend that time necessary to compete for World First. If more guilds and more organisations can get the support to take

two to three weeks off from your life, that’s going to expand the competition.”

There is a symbiotic relationship, he says, between a group of players that want to go for the win and organisations that support them.

There is no reason to wait until the next race to get involved, either. Guild training begins a week after completion of the previous one, so for companies — including esports orgs and sponsoring brands — the engagement life cycle is almost non-stop. For sponsors, that means long-term relationships can be formed early in the raid preparation phase, offering support in anything from nutrition to gaming chairs.

It will be fascinating to see whether Race to World First continues gaining momentum, now that livestreaming provides a window into this once-topsecret competitive scene.

“I see [WoW esports] continuing to grow based on the trends. Each race has been not only more popular but also more competitive. Right now it’s kind of an arms race between Complexity-Limit and Echo. Hopefully more guilds will come into the fray to compete with Complexity and Echo. When it’s close and down to the wire on four guilds instead of two, I think it will be even more enjoyable for everyone — competitors and viewers.”

17

BRANDS

Adam Apicella Assembling the Avengers of esports with Vindex dam Apicella wants esports to bulk up. The Ohio Valley native isn’t so much building the gym for the esports industry as he is inventing exercises for the metaphorical Vindex all-in-one fitness machine. Use Vindex, get results.

A

AUTHOR Kerry Waananen  @haekafae

Between Vindex’s event-solution provision, Esports Engine, and physicallocation gaming hubs, Belong Gaming Arenas, Apicella and Vindex guarantee top-tier experiences for all involved — whether it’s a professional, corporatesponsored esports tournament with thousands of fans or a free-entry, grassroots round-robin with a gift-card prize.

MLG: A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE Apicella found success at Major League Gaming (MLG) as employee number one.

Made the first hire by Mike Sepso and Sundance DiGiovanni, he helped cement MLG, the first North American esports entertainment network, as an icon in the 2000s. MLG had stumbled upon the secret sauce that Western publishers had created by accident — a ‘longevity engine’.

“I was at MLG for 13 years,” Apicella told The Esports Journal. ”We had a lot of success. The journey of MLG coincided with esports discovering itself and publishers figuring out what the hell it was. Eight to ten years into it, publishers started saying, ‘Oh this is really big.

People aren’t just playing our game and then putting it to the side anymore; they are still playing it — this is a longevity engine, we’re selling microtransactions and digital products around this’.”

The Esports Journal spoke with Apicella, Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of Vindex and Founder and President of Esports Engine about how the group is solving the industry’s issues, what he’s learned after almost 20 years in the industry, and Vindex’s plans for the future.

Adam Apicella Chief Experience Officer Vindex

18

llustration by Micah Warner  @mikacheew

BRANDS

Publishers began hiring en masse for internal esports departments. MLG was purchased by Activision Blizzard (AB) in 2015 where Apicella served as Vice President of League and Event Operations for four years. A requirement of his role was to ensure “epic execution” of Activision’s competitive gaming events and marketing so that when they did decide to go all-in on esports, “their voice was as loud as possible,” according to Apicella.

During the years he spent at the publisher, Apicella felt the pain from gaps in esports’ infrastructural armour, especially when it came to big-budget productions. There wasn’t anything resembling an all-in-one solution that could help fuel his ‘epic execution’ and He felt that the level the industry was reaching for wasn’t being properly served.

Esports thrives in epic executions.

Apicella felt that a holistic solution, one that could satisfy what a publisher like AB would expect, didn’t exist.

Having lived through these pain-points professionally and having delivered these moments with MLG, he knew from experience what needed to be done — but couldn’t find anyone to do it.

Apicella went on to build the solution he knew that the industry needed, named it Esports Engine, and took it out of the garage in late 2019, two months after leaving AB. AN ESPORTS ENGINE Esports Engine, simply put, is a greylabel partnership that offers publishers transparency and trust in their esports operations so they can focus on making great games and “reaping sentiment with their community,” According to Apicella.

“We like to say that we’re more fingers on the hand of a publisher,” Apicella added. “For us, it’s a partnership. We’re not just trying to put as much revenue

in our pocket. If we gouge someone and make a ton of money on an event that is mediocre, that doesn’t help us either.

for a stadium [tournament event], we’re helping dream up what that experience is.”

“We want games to have as long lifespans as possible because that way we can keep working with that publisher, that community, and we can continue our business, so everyone wins. That tide lifts all boats.” Vindex wants to be that hydropowered pump, flooding the industry with infrastructure and using it to power its own execution. So long as there are boats, the pump has a purpose.

VINDEX, A LA CARTE Overseeing the interconnectivity between Vindex’s projects is ultimately what Apicella’s CXO title entails. When he talks about how Vindex is building out its services for publisher partners, his passion for esports shines through.

On bridging the gap between pro and amateur play through Vindex’s service, Apicella said: ”That step from couch to stadium is missing right now. You play online, and then you hope that you do well enough that you might show up at some type of open LAN event or you qualify for a bigger LAN event.” Vindex hopes to have found that solution through its acquisition of Belong Gaming Arenas in July 2020.

“Belong will be that sort of sanctioned hub for publishers worldwide, and [Vindex] will be the conduit to put publishers in there; to design programmes, to execute them,” Apicella said. “Then when someone comes out of a Belong to qualify

“Esports Engine is just one of the Vindex verticals,” he said. “It is very important for us to distinguish that we are not a tournament organiser; we’re way more.

Tournaments and competition are just one thing that we can do. We are a full suite of marketing support, event production, broadcast, competition, tournament operations obviously. There’s some new products that we’re working on that we’ll be rolling out next year.”

Apicella teased new products yet to be announced, but for now, the focus seems to be establishing Belong venues as Vindex portals. With Belong’s projected 1,500 global locations — 500 of those across the US — Apicella described options for publishers to activate their titles or focus marketing at specific locations. While there are 19

BRANDS

want to be somewhere in the middle. We want to be [the publisher’s] ally, we want to be the Dreamworks logo in the bottom corner. We don’t necessarily want to be in the opening credits.”

certainly ‘a la carte’ options, Vindex’s focus is providing turnkey solutions across the full spectrum of business or consumer journeys.

This grand vision originated during the early MLG days. “We realised, before publishers did, how powerful it was owning their community after they bought the game,” Apicella said. “They wanted to say, ‘hey, we sold 10 million copies, we made all this money this quarter’ and then they were almost done with the community to a degree.

Now again, this was yesterday. This isn’t what’s going on today.

“Obviously, publishers are hypersensitive to this now and it’s a key strategy, but we realised earlier that owning the community meant owning the publisher to a degree. [We were] able to provide that audience with an awesome competition product.”

TRANSFORMING ESPORTS — THEN AND NOW MLG managed to transform Western esports — that before was just a publisher’s marketing spend on events — into a viable business model, by engaging with the fanbase and the game product in a physical, competitive environment.

20

“I think that esports and competitive multiplayer did inform publishers that there are ways to monetise,” Apicella said. “The community just wants to be engaged, they want more stuff, because they are huge fans of the game. They’re not done with it once they buy it and beat the campaign. They want to keep playing.

“We were definitely out in front of that.

But I think that also sort of hurt us, because MLG was such a strong brand.”

Apicella feels that because of the strength of MLG — the brand operating these events — publishers didn’t want to owe a third party for engaging their fans.

“We want Esports Engine to be a strong brand, but we want to be more grey-label; we don’t want to be white-label. We don’t want to be a forward-facing brand; we

When asked about how other white-label and grey-label operations fit into the industry, Apicella was clear. “Everybody can have the recipe but it doesn’t mean they can cook the meal. We’re assembling the Avengers of the industry. If there is somebody great in the industry, we go get them.” Apicella likened Vindex productions to being a great director of a film; they don’t have an acting role.

Rather, they orchestrate the vision.

“We’re bringing in the absolute alpha predators across broadcast production, physical production, competition operation, the best designers in the world, the people that know publishers and have earned their trust, that haven’t burned a bridge — we’re bringing them all in-house.

“And like I said, you can have the recipe, other people can try to do it, but it doesn’t mean that someone’s going to work with you or that you can pull off what you’re planning. And that’s what we’re trying to do: we’re trying to talk the talk, and walk the walk.”

TRENDS

Peak performance in esports Why Rogue and MAD Lions are embracing mindfulness AUTHOR Billy Studholme  @BillyStudholme

n 11th April 2021, MAD Lions faced off against Rogue for the fifth game of a best-of-five League of Legends series. The stage was the LEC Spring Finals. Both squads beat G2 Esports — by all accounts, a European super-team — during their runs to the final, MAD Lions in the upper bracket and Rogue in the lower.

The two finalists were closely matched.

The battle between two dominant junglers — Inspired from Rogue and Elyoya from MAD Lions — encapsulated the neck-and-neck bout perfectly.

This was the penultimate match of an intensely competitive series, in one of the world’s toughest regions: who would be crowned European champion?

In such moments, outcomes are determined at the margins.

O

Ismael Pedraza Performance Coach Rogue

MINDFULNESS FOR PEAK PERFORMANCE Both MAD Lions and Rogue believe that such margins can be stretched with mindfulness — the ability for their players to stay composed and make sound decisions. Ismael Pedraza, Performance Coach at Rogue, cut his teeth in sport psychology. His fondness for mindfulness practices has two separate roots.

“I [completed] two Master’s degrees: Sport Psychology and Diagnostic 21

TRENDS

Intervention, in Finland and in Leipzig.

And of course in sport psychology, you get to see different approaches to performance … We started [learning about] this new approach called acceptance behavioural therapy, which is based on mindfulness approaches.

“But personally I got into mindfulness because of my own athletic career. I was playing at an elite level in football back in Colombia, and then somehow I ended up coming across meditation techniques and mindfulness, so I started to read a lot on that.”

What exactly is mindfulness meditation?

According to Pedraza, “Mindfulness itself is paying attention to the present moment, in a non-judgmental manner.”

Mindfulness meditation, then, is the practising of mindfulness skills, which itself can take many forms.

“It goes in the direction of some techniques or strategies that help you

22

to be in the present moment. You have formal and informal approaches to this. More informal approaches that we use a lot [at Rogue] are, for example, attentional strategies like trying to modify your physiology, like through slowpaced breathing … Trying to help players be better at emotional control, let’s say.

One of the formal approaches for mindfulness is doing sessions where we direct them towards attention-focused strategies which aim to teach them how thoughts work — how emotions work. You have a thought — maybe a negative thought — but they are learning to understand that they are not their thoughts, right? They are not their emotions.”

Deceptively simple as it may sound, just noticing thoughts or feelings as they arise — non-judgmentally — can have profound effects on wellbeing. Countless studies have highlighted the positive effects of mindfulness meditation. One

study conducted by researchers out of Oregon and Munich concluded that meditation, among a truckload of other benefits, ‘has potential for the treatment of clinical disorders and might facilitate the cultivation of a healthy mind and increased wellbeing’. Another study

by Katherine Weare at the University of Exeter found that ‘mindfulness can contribute directly to the development of cognitive and performance skills and executive function’. Executive function is the combination of crucial mental skills, like memory and self-control.

The literature on mindfulness meditation is extensive for athletes, too, though few studies have analysed esports athletes. “Mindfulness has been found to be related to improved athletic performance and propensity to achieve flow states,” it says in a 2014 article published in the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology.

TRENDS

BUILDING RESILIENCE Jake Ainsworth, who works with MAD Lions players to improve their physical wellbeing, operates in lockstep with Martina Cubric, the team’s Sport Psychologist. As Ainsworth told The Esports Journal: “We’ve taken slightly different paths to get to the point we’re at, but we’re very much aligned on what we’re trying to do with the players.”

What is it they are trying to do with MAD Lions’s League of Legends players? To Cubric and Ainsworth, perhaps most crucial is building resilience.

“I think with any sport, there’s an element of discomfort that comes with it,” Ainsworth said. “Like skiing. It’s horrible to be in those boots. There’s impact all the time. Even stuff like table tennis. Initially, like every sport, there’s a discomfort that comes with it.

“There isn’t the same discomfort that comes with gaming, so their ability to endure discomfort is very, very low, right?

Because it’s instant gratification.”

When talking to performance specialists, there’s a recurring theme in esports players: they are accustomed to constant stimulation. Hungry? Order food. Restless? Rather than address the cause, seek a phone for immediate pacification (though the process is far less conscious than that). While exploring this topic one is at risk of sounding like a militant boomer: technology is corrupting the youth!

But clearly there are risks involved with unabated gratification — particularly if your sport, the thing you do for a living, is a dopamine machine. Esports players are also young which compounds the effect; many aren’t even adults yet.

“They’re young and they’ve got little life experience,” Ainsworth said, “but I think another aspect of it is that they’ve lived a sheltered life where they’ve got everything they’ve wanted at the click of a button. So to do something that’s hard or

do something that’s difficult, it’s like, ‘why would I do that when I can have exactly what I want at the click of a button?’”

a reason. What’s more, both are having incredible success — certainly in League of Legends.

Esports athletes put in just as many hours as traditional-sports athletes, but their graft takes place inside a closed digital system that’s designed to trigger dopaminergic responses. Down to the look and sound of clearing minion waves in League of Legends, games are designed to illuminate pleasure pathways.

“I like meditation a lot,” Emil Larssen, Rogue’s star mid-laner, told The Esports Journal. “It brings peace and calm to an otherwise stressful life.”

Ainsworth alludes to the concept of “delayed gratification” — perhaps the catalyst for any self-improvement. It’s painful to get out of bed at 6am, go to the gym, and throw weights around, but it’s short-term agony for long-term relief.

That’s delaying gratification; forgoing the marshmallow so you can eat two later, to reference the classic Walter Mischel study. Meditation enables one to observe disruptive stimuli, including one’s own thoughts and feelings, and make more measured decisions — less beholden to the whims of impulse.

“Esports players tend to be younger, at least in LoL,” Pedraza said. “Go to other esports and players are older, more open to talking about emotions. Mindfulness is learning to accept any unpleasant or pleasant experiences. That means we have to communicate, ‘okay, how am I feeling right now? Why did I behave how I behaved, and how did it make me feel?’

Some players might not feel ready to speak openly about that.”

Sharp minds for elite performers Meditation isn’t the sole reason why Rogue and MAD Lions are successful of course; there are many reasons, chief of which is the players’ supreme talent. But Rogue and MAD Lions are owned by ReKTGlobal and OverActive Media respectively. Two behemoths of esports support meditation, and general mental-wellness practices, for

What the never-ending stimuli of today — particularly for an esports athlete — take away from the mind, is self-reflection. To meditate is to reflect, paying attention with minimal effort — or as a Buddhist might say, with right effort — and with minimal judgment. This slowing of the frenzy is critical for elite performers.

“Lots of the players, they have some, let’s say, self-talk or rumination of these thoughts … they’re not aware what’s going on inside,” MAD Lions’s Cubric said. “And this obviously subconsciously affects their confidence, their attention, their everything, but they don’t know what it is.

‘But I don’t know why I choked because I’m not aware of where I’m going’. One part of mindfulness is this. It’s only 10 minutes of practice, but I want these 10 minutes to affect the other 15 hours of being awake.

So I want you to be aware of when your mind gets stuck on that mistake, and you say, ‘ah, okay, okay’. “[Meditation] stays with you the whole day and this awareness, this leverage, is a big background benefit.”

MAD Lions won game five of the Spring Finals against Rogue, and Humanoid, Elyoya and co. were crowned champions of Europe. It was a knife-edge encounter that was decided by a 5v5 team fight.

The match and indeed the series was too close to call, and such moments are decided at the margins. Mindfulness meditation is one way to sharpen performance — and just might improve the players’ overall wellbeing in the process.

23

BRANDS

Making esports data beautiful AUTHOR Billy Studholme  @BillyStudholme

o a data company, ‘esports’ is about as useful a category as ‘European’ or ‘African’ is a nationality. Esports titles share some likenesses — they are all digital, chiefly — but they differ enormously, especially from a data analyst’s perspective. It’s like saying tennis is similar to football because both use a round ball; true in a sense, but it doesn’t tell enough of the story.

T

Romet Vinkel, Head of Delivery at esports data company GRID, is a Chelsea FC fan. Given he is Estonian, we might guess he supports a European team. We would be right. But we would know little more than that.

The same goes for esports. A Mortal Kombat fan might say she is an esports fan but care more about sushi-making

24

or knitting than Call of Duty. We often use a broad brush when a fine one is needed.

“When we talk about esports, we’re talking essentially about very different game data,” Vinkel said. “There is CS:GO, Dota, there is, like, FIFA, Hearthstone, and so on and so on. There are completely different genres, and completely different structures and formats. It’s the same as putting all traditional sports under one name. We say football, ice hockey, tennis, and then we mention them as sports.”

granular, there are hundreds of items and heroes, while CS:GO is way more limited. You have grenades, a certain amount of weapons, it’s a round-based game … So it depends a lot on the title.”

So, then, how should a company like GRID go about gathering in-game data that varies in complexity and type?

As Vinkel highlights, it’s important for the size of GRID’s service to fit all — or at least be capable of adjusting to different specs.

How much variation is there between esports titles? As Vinkel explained, a lot. “Dota 2 for example can be really

“How GRID does this, is we have a really unique, agnostic approach,” he said. “We want to tackle different game titles, but

BRANDS

as much in the same way as possible. Is it Dota or CS:GO? Are we talking about a grenade or a specific item? They are still the same thing from a data perspective … All those things we want to approach agnostically, and with that approach we can expand to new game titles way faster than it usually is in traditional sports, or for some other data-providing companies in esports.”

GRID must occasionally integrate brand-new titles with its service.

Radko Dimitrov, the company’s Head of Operations, agreed with Vinkel: having a platform that is ready for all challenges is crucial. “Our API [application programming interface] has created a way for us to easily acquire new titles and work with them … It’s relatively easy for us to add new titles.”

We hear a lot about the value of data.

It is no different in esports. Teams use GRID’s data for their own match and player analysis; tournament operators (TOs) use it to visualise events midbroadcast; sportsbooks rely entirely on said data for odds creation. Good data is the air the sports industry breathes.

Indeed, for gathering data quickly and efficiently, esports might be the best of all. “I believe there’s so much we can do in the esports scene, especially given how granular and accessible esports data is in the game servers compared to traditional sports,” Vinkel said. “If you have access to servers, you have access to this data, and it is so fast, so granular, you could get a crazy amount of data out of that.

There is so much potential in esports, compared to what is already there in other sports. All this allows for betterquality tournaments, with greater fan engagement and prize pools, and helps teams grow their brand, and bring their fans closer to their teams.”

Radko Dimitrov Head of Operations

Some of GRID’s partners are game publishers looking to commercialise their data. Some are TOs, some are bookies, some are teams. This range of application highlights how companies like GRID are and will remain central to the growth of esports. Vinkel told The Esports Journal of three main valuein-kind services GRID offers: “One is fan-facing; one is trading — like the sportsbook industry; and one is getting the new game titles into this data landscape.

“Esports is the fastest-growing market in the sports scene, because it’s relatively new as well compared to all traditional sports. With that in mind there are so many opportunities around it. With our technology-as-a-service platform, we allow our partners to unlock the potential of esports. Data assets, either to use commercially or fan-facing. For example we have developed an easy-to-integrate SDK [software development kit] for new game titles. If a game title wants to monetise or increase revenue from the data side, then we have this easyto-integrate SDK service which allows them to integrate with us. The DCL Drone Champions League is an interesting one we’re currently working on.

“We also have built trading tools that are data-driven visualisations, which are a vital part of the sportsbook industry, such as scoreboards and map schematics,

Romet Vinkel Head of Delivery

that show everything that happens in the game … Additionally, we have built media tools to tell the story of what happened in a game, effectively from the fan-facing side. We have visualisations that we can present on esports match pages, and also on the overlay of the streams.”

GRID is also positioned as well as any company in esports to embolden new startups, which are both inevitable and necessary for the industry to continue expanding. “A lot of startups have been popping up recently, and they need data,” said Vinkel. “Because we’ve built really good APIs, we can help them and empower their products.”

GRID filters raw data and turns it into something palatable, as a distiller makes water drinkable. And just like water, in the world of business, data is fundamental. Philosophically, what GRID is doing is simple, even if technically it is anything but.

“My parents are like, 60 now,” Radko Dimitrov said. “When I started to work in esports — because this is where my career started — they were curious what I was doing exactly. And when others ask me what GRID is doing, I have to say: ‘We take the raw data and make it look beautiful’. Really, you take numbers and letters and make them look really beautiful.”

25

BRANDS

Patrick Mahoney Diversifying the Nations AUTHOR Tom Daniels  @TheTomDaniels

s the esports industry continues to develop, one thing that has become apparent is the growing urge for brands to diversify their operations — whether that be an esports organisation developing a lifestyle brand alongside competitive ventures, or tournament operators shifting their events into other titles such as mobile gaming.

A

Diversification has always been fairly common in esports. Take FaZe Clan, for example — an organisation which recognised that competitive success doesn’t have to be, and probably shouldn’t be, the only option. NRG Esports recently announced the ‘NRG Castle’, a 20,000-square-foot content house in LA. OverActive Media’s recently announced plans for an esports venue buttress the point.

Another company that has branched out is merchandise company We Are Nations. Despite being one of the largest apparel firms in esports, over the last couple of years We Are Nations has diversified its operations, strengthened its position in the sector, and looked to bolster other markets, despite most of this period being marred by a pandemic.

In May 2020, the firm launched Nations Ventures, a venture capital fund focused

26

on early-stage companies. Since its inception, the fund has gone on to invest in Aggregated Media, Obsesh, HyprCarry and Smerf.

“If we can get involved in building communities, it will allow us to understand them and ultimately sell to them.”

The Esports Journal spoke with Patrick Mahoney, Co-founder of We Are Nations and Nations Ventures’s General Partner, about why the fund invested in those companies — as well as the company’s other verticals.

Smerf is a gaming-focused social platform that helps people find, and create, communities. As of right now, the platform focuses on the League of Legends and VALORANT communities.

However, the additional funding from Nations Ventures will see the introduction of more titles in the future.

INVESTING IN A COMMUNITY, FOR THE GOOD OF ESPORTS Almost any company wants to make money, and We Are Nations is no exception. But the team also has a conscience. Mahoney, a former punk rocker who cut his teeth in music merchandising, wants to invest in companies that are rewarding — financially and morally.

“The thinking was, any time you can tap into a community, you’ve got a good place to market,” Mahoney said when asked about Nations Ventures’s investment in Smerf.

Nations Ventures’s investment in Smerf last September was the fund’s first. Mahoney’s intention as to why the platform came first soon became clear: to him, creating a better, more inclusive community in the gaming space, particularly for females, is crucial.

“We have to make sure this community is safe and welcoming,” he said. “You should want to be here. No one wants to go to a place where they’re being harassed.

Smerf is hitting all the right buttons. In the late 80s, I was playing in a punk band, and we thought we were woke as hell, but we had no girls in the band. It’s insane that we thought we were so progressive.”

Following Nation Ventures’s Smerf investment, the firm then went on to

BRANDS

invest in more familiar grounds — the apparel sector.

MAVERICK INVESTMENTS Back when Nations Ventures first launched, the firm announced its intention to invest in companies that don’t compete with We Are Nations’s core business. So, it came as a surprise to see that the fund’s second investment was in HyprCarry, an Australian influencer-merchandise and media company.

“Every rule is made to be broken,” Mahoney said.

“To satisfy our expectations, and to satisfy initial investments, the fund [Nations Ventures] made sense and makes sense. It allows us to make investments into companies that aren’t direct competitors.

“It’s a way to reach a community. It enables project acceleration, helps mature our business. As far as HyprCarry, those guys are just great.”

Nation Ventures’s investment was reminiscent of We Are Nation’s acquisition of Sector Six back in 2019, with the company as a whole looking to bolster every corner of the esports merchandise sector.

Mahoney explained: “Between Sector Six and Nations there is a distinction. Sector focuses on collegiate and amateur, and has a system whereby it’s very DIY. You can go online, order your own designs, and so on. Nations is focused more on pro teams.

“That said, we do business development jointly. We evaluate everybody and decide where to plug them in. There’s an opportunity to upstream there, too. I’ll give anyone half an hour on the phone, then come back with a proposal. We might steer them towards Sector Six, or maybe Nations, and we can modify our approach to any team.”

Since We Are Nations’s acquisition of Sector Six, the collegiate apparel firm has opened its doors to a new market by expanding into Europe. Moreover, as grassroots esports continues to develop, the demand for custom merchandise has risen. Nations’s apparel investments clearly highlight the company’s ambition to expand upon its core service, alongside developing emerging markets in the esports space.

27

BRANDS

“We’d like to come out and spend the next couple of years acquiring competitors, merging with our competition.

There’s still room for us to scale, still plenty of headroom to grow,” Mahoney said.

“We’ve expanded into Latin America, we’ve been thinking about how to handle Oceania for a couple of years. The CIS is still a bit different in terms of trade. But ultimately, developing a global network is the next step.”

A POST-COVID WORLD Raising capital for those goals is likely to be done when the world returns to some semblance of normalcy, however.

“We’ve got to come out of COVID first, see how things recover. There’s no denying that sales have been affected, simply because live events drive merch sales more than online events. It drives excitement for the whole thing. We also need retailers open and stable.”

In fact, when asked about how much is left in Nations Ventures’s investment tank, Mahoney was transparent in mentioning that most of the firm’s

28

remaining funds will go towards current portfolio companies. In March, this was made apparent when the company invested in real-time platform and sports marketplace Obsesh.

As of right now, the platform doesn’t have much of an esports service, with the company primarily offering fans opportunities to connect with traditional sports athletes. However, the potential to integrate esports is achievable, which would open up another fan engagement opportunity for influencers and pro gamers.

Going forward, Mahoney revealed that the plan is for Nations to operate synergistically. The appointments of Alex Romer as the apparel firm’s CEO and Chris Weatherspoon as its new Chief Financial Officer in particular highlights this approach to taking a broader view.

According to the company’s Co-founder, the future’s looking bright for We Are Nations, Nations Ventures, and the rest of the company’s portfolio projects.

“My job is to work with our portfolio companies.

I help find opportunities, talk to people all the time, participate in various ‘mastermind’ and other similar sessions. I work to help both the portfolio companies with their core businesses and also help identify the synergies within the group.”

“We’re coming across cool stuff all the time, and I’m not even sure it’ll fit in with what we do, but there’s definitely great stuff out there.”

Over the last three years, We Are Nations has seen significant growth, a shift in its operations, and diversified its output through acquisitions and investments.

Through these decisions, the firm has withstood the pressure of the pandemic.

As the world begins to open up again and retail starts to recover, the firm’s apparel empire will continue to strengthen, whilst Nations Ventures will help develop other parts of the esports sector.

BRANDS

Esports’ punk evolution: The New Rose of popular culture?

AUTHOR Henrieta Hyrliková  @HenrietaHyrlik

sports is like punk rock. The latter began popping up in a few major cities around the mid-seventies, with bands such as the Ramones in New York City and The Clash and Sex Pistols in London. It all started happening around the same time, and it hasn’t gone away.

E

That said, punk has only rarely crossed into the mainstream, which should come as no surprise given that at its core, it

remains fundamentally opposed to it, its roots so entwined in nonconformist and anti-establishment principles.

Whilst these bands are familiar to many, the genre only revelled in the spotlight for a short while before it went back underground. Then, two decades later, the mainstream got hold of punk rock again. This time it was the likes of Green Day, Blink-182 and The Offspring who lit the fire.

Suddenly, punk rock was popular, but again, it was somewhat brief. The mainstream tends to cherry-pick what it likes best.

“I often wonder if esports is quite similar to punk rock in this regard,” said Cameron Reed, Business Development Manager for Esports at Ross Video. “It’s too ingrained into a huge number of peoples’ hearts and minds. It can’t go away.”

29

BRANDS

He pushed the analogy even further: “Despite Green Day and The Offspring becoming superstars and enjoying successful careers, the majority of punk rock bands never reach that level, and continue to play underground. Similarly, Fortnite or League of Legends are on the top of esports, while titles such as Hearthstone and StarCraft II operate to this day under the surface of the mainstream, representing the bulk of esports.”

Reed, who has produced and directed many of the largest esports events, including IEMs, ESL Ones, and The Madden NFL Championships on ESPN2 and the NFL Network, shared his thoughts on the evolution of esports from the viewpoint of a production specialist.

EARLY STAGES It’s been nearly 50 years since one of the first-known gaming tournaments took place at Stanford University, California.

However, it wasn’t until 1980 that the world’s first major esports tournament was held by Atari. The Space Invaders Championship attracted more than 10,000 participants, laying a cornerstone for esports as we know it today.

Talking about the ascension of competitive gaming, Reed mentioned three waves of modern esports. “The first wave dates back to the late 1990s and early 2000s when StarCraft: Brood War exploded simultaneously in South Korea and the US. however, it never got as big in the West as it got in Korea.

“In Korea, they were already organising big outdoor events for StarCraft while in the West, there was a sort of grassroots movement around games like Quake and Counter-Strike.”

In the following decade, StarCraft: Brood War became a huge spectator attraction for South Korean television.

30

The Western world, in contrast, wasn’t prepared to keep up with such a pace. “In Asia, gaming and technology have always meant something different to them. The West just had different interests back then,” Reed added.

The next wave of esports rose again thanks to a title courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment. It was 2010 when StarCraft II came out. “Here they were already leaning on history, knowing how popular StarCraft: Brood War became in Korea and understanding that it never went away,” Reed said.

At this point, the West inched closer to the next era of esports. YouTube became ubiquitous, and a small website named Justin.tv emerged, which would change everything in terms of online streaming — especially when it became Twitch. “Video games had become a part of our cultural identity,” Reed said. “We are talking about the generation that grew up with a console or a PC in their house.”

The second wave fully unleashed around 2011, when companies like Major League Gaming (MLG) and ESL began organising tournaments and forming esports leagues. It was around this time when esports started gaining not only in terms of viewership, but also, at least in

certain circles, in terms of recognition as a viable career option.

According to Reed, the third wave is the one we’re currently riding: “It’s this most recent surge towards the mainstream, where huge brands such as Coca-Cola or Mercedes-Benz are starting to pay attention.

“In the second wave, which is when I got into the industry, we never had sponsorships outside of developers.

Maybe a mouse company, but we would be incredibly excited to get a company like MSI to let us use their computers for the tournament.”

GAME-CHANGING TECHNOLOGY When the pandemic arrived, the esports industry’s response was straightforward: ‘We’re going to do it anyway, we’re just going to play online.’

“It brought us back to our roots when most of esports was in the form of online tournaments,” Reed said. “It gave us an understanding that this is actually the strength of esports. Back then, anybody could participate in any league if they had good enough internet. It’s why esports has such an international appeal.”

While nothing changed as far as esports is concerned, the broadcasts around

BRANDS

the events had to adapt to remote production. “Normally in a production workflow, there is a director, technical director, producer and many others, with everybody piled into one control room,” Reed said. “Sometimes it’s a mobile control room built into a truck that gets driven around the country. Other times it’s a studio. To be able to deliver a product that people want to watch, we had to quickly figure out a way to access that control room from our homes.”

As a result, technologies allowing broadcasters and production specialists to remotely direct shows and even operate the technical equipment with incredibly low latency were developed.

Ross Video was among those that responded immediately. Within four weeks, Ross had created a working prototype of what is now called Interstellar – a collaboration and production tool that combines physical devices in a control room with remote talent and guests to create broadcastquality results. “Everybody was put in a tough position, and I was impressed by the proactive attitude and resilience of the entire industry,” Reed said.

He considers such technology an opportunity rather than a temporary solution. “While this was an immediate response to a crisis, it really will change the way we do esports.”

The industry might leverage the lessons learned during the pandemic about how to do online broadcasting and tournament administration to push the boundaries of production quality, and facilitate innovation in production technology.

“We should start experimenting with the remote control of in-venue displays,” he suggested. “If we can operate those with the same efficiency and the same low latency as we did in online broadcast in the last year, then we might not have to

roll 53-foot trucks around the country anymore.”

ESPORTS 4.0 If we are already in the third wave of esports, which is largely defined by the coronavirus crisis, the end of the pandemic potentially means the start of the fourth wave. But what will Esports 4.0 look like? Will it remain underground with occasional forays into the mainstream just like punk rock, or will it continue to grow in scope?

“If I knew that, I’d probably be a millionaire,” laughed Reed. “I think it will bring a new level of maturity and probably a stabilisation of the market as well, but I don’t see any threats to the industry.

People always ask questions like, ‘Will esports make it?’ and ‘When will esports make it?’ And I’m oftentimes sitting here thinking, ‘We have already made it, guys!’

“When I started in 2012, all I wanted was to see esports on television. A few years later, I directed esports on national television, and then I started asking myself — ‘Do we really need TV? Isn’t linear TV dying anyway?’ And I completely changed my perspective. If anything, TV needs us.”

Answering the question of whether esports faces the same fate as punk rock, Reed brought the internet into the discussion. “It has made our entertainment options virtually limitless.

What will the mainstream even look like in ten years when everything you could possibly want is available to you? When I grew up, there weren’t that many choices.

The guys in suits making billions of dollars were dictating what was cool, and I could either accept it or rebel against it and be a weirdo. I chose the latter path.”

“There will still be huge events that will draw enormous numbers, but the concept of the mainstream will most probably change. I see it in the younger generation, they’re into what they’re into, and that’s cool and encouraged.”

Whatever the mainstream becomes, one thing is for sure: we will see a return of in-person esports events. It’s simple human nature, and whether it’s sport, music, film or anything else, as soon as it’s safe and legal, people will again gather en masse and celebrate the things they love together.

31

BRANDS

AUTHOR Henrieta Hyrlikova  @HenrietaHyrlik

On a mission for healthy gaming he lifestyle of a typical gamer usually isn’t great. Or, at the very least, gaming itself can lead to unhealthy habits; the activity calls for it. Sitting behind a computer for long hours can punish crucial areas of one’s anatomy, and consuming processed, sugary food and drink which are popular among gamers can punish one’s entire body.

diabetes. All of his conditions were linked to his lifestyle.

It was only June last year that League of Legends icon Jian ‘Uzi’ Zi-Hao retired, arguably in the prime of his career, due to chronic hand and shoulder injuries.

He was also diagnosed with Type 2

SELLING HEALTH TO GAMERS The situation needs to change. Not only is it the right thing to do; it’s also a way to destigmatise the industry and make it more sustainable.

T

32

Moreover, prescription drugs are too readily available to those without a diagnosis, which has led to an unhealthy amount of prescriptiondrug abuse. In gaming and esports, health is perhaps not prioritised as it should be.

“Health is difficult to sell to gamers if you try to do so in a conventional way,” said Michal Noga, Founder and CEO of MADMONQ, a health and performance company that helps gamers ‘level up’ by giving them access to resources and

BRANDS

supplements. Noga and MADMONQ want to take the lead in spreading awareness on the importance of a healthy lifestyle in gaming. “We want to make sure all gamers care about their health as much as they care about their hardware.”

But how to tackle such a task? It’s a complex issue at which many countries’ education systems have been failing tremendously. Noga suggests starting with recognising the need for discussion: “The first step is acknowledging that health is not the sexiest topic within gaming, but it’s a necessary one.”

Instead of acting like a parent and lecturing what’s right and wrong, the Czech company is convinced the best way of communicating with gamers is through inspiration. “We connect ourselves with like-minded influencers that help us share the message in a way that will resonate with gamers,” Noga said.

“Streamers with big communities have enormous influence over their viewers,” he added. “If education on this topic

is done in an entertaining way, it can become a trend, but someone needs to be the catalyst.” Simply put, someone needs to make health cool.

As an example, Noga described how the company distributed its first merchandise line among its ambassadors. “We put our merchandise into wooden boxes that were nailed together, and sent them to the nearest gyms. To open the box, streamers had to solve a puzzle that would navigate them to the gym, where they needed to perform a set of exercises specifically targeting the areas that are negatively affected by sitting a lot.”

MADMONQ ignited discussion on Twitch.

On one side, streamers complained that they had to travel to pick up the package. On the other side was a community that wanted to see the streamer go to the gym to see what was inside the box.

On another occasion, the company made a bizarre suggestion to a streamer that ultimately changed his life. “He was unmotivated because he was balding,

and he was too self-aware of how he was looking,” Noga said. “We told him: ‘You have to embrace your baldness’ and invited him to our office to have his head shaved on livestream.”

Over 10,000 people watched the event, which meant a new beginning for the creator in question. “He emerged as a new, confident person, who changed his lifestyle, started exercising and taking care of his body,” Noga said. “Since then, his viewership numbers started rising”.

“That’s the start of the journey for us — by helping gamers get the confidence to start doing something for themselves.

Through the people we partner with, we can hopefully inspire many others.”

BRAIN BOOSTER That said, the actual start of MADMONQ’s journey took place in 2017 when the company introduced its MADMONQ® brain booster — a health-conscious supplement meant to fight against prescription-drug abuse in esports.

The piquant, chewable violet pill promises a mix of positive effects,

33

BRANDS

including sharp focus, improved memory, steady energy levels, stress control, shorter reaction time, and enhanced gaming performance. “It’s a healthy alternative to prescription medication,” Noga said. “A stimulant, but without the damage it usually comes with.”

Michal Noga Founder and CEO MADMONQ

Although designed specifically for gamers, the product has earned the trust of folk in various professions.

“Besides esports athletes, we have professional poker players, students and doctors, as well as startups, that order MADMONQ instead of energy drinks for their employees,” Noga said. “They trust us because it works and because we passed their test of integrity. In several cases, people took MADMONQ to the laboratory to do the reverse engineering, and we always succeeded.”

The key benefit of the supplement is the complexity of action. “Unlike energy drinks, which give only a small caffeineinduced energy boost, MADMONQ takes a complex approach, providing a great number of immediate and long-term benefits,” said Noga.

So what’s in this seemingly miraculous pill? According to Noga, it’s a carefully selected blend of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants proven to have positive effects on brain function. It doesn’t contain sugar or any artificial additives.

“My favourite ingredient is called Spectra, and we present it as a ‘salad’ for gamers because it’s a mix of 29 very antioxidative extracts from fruits and plants,” he said.

It’s not a groundbreaking science, however. The use of some of MADMONQ’s ingredients, such as the extract from an Arctic plant called Rhodiola, dates centuries back to the age of Vikings, who used the plant before going into battle to combat physical and mental stress.

34

BRANDS

Noga gave another historical example: “Our formula contains anthocyanins — antioxidants found in European blueberries, which were also used by British fighter pilots during the Second World War because it improved their eyesight during nights.

memory, metabolism and eye health.

Finally, this unique combination of ingredients helps in coping with stress, which is especially useful for esports athletes who take their game on stage.”

“All of the ingredients can potentially be found in your diet. If you were picky about what you ate and had access to the best food from around the world, you could potentially replicate the benefits of MADMONQ.”

AN AMBITIOUS MISSION MADMONQ’s mission to help gamers become healthier in a sustainable way comprises three phases — developing a healthy supplement, establishing health as a pertinent topic within the industry, and normalising healthy habits within the community.

To sum up the benefits of using the gaming supplement, Noga defined three categories: “First, there are immediate effects on focus, energy and performance. Second, there are long-term benefits linked to improved

“It is going to be a full-frontal attack,” he said. “To finally achieve the paradigm shifts we all strive for, someone needs to lead the way. Right now, it doesn’t seem things are going in the right direction, but I know this can change.

“We have the health and science background and know how to speak to gamers. It’s all about the connection to ambassadors and inspiration.”

The company is on the lookout for suitable partners for the endeavour.

“Of course, we won’t be able to do this ourselves,” Noga said. “We are looking for strategic partners that will help us fulfil our vision, and believe in our mission.

That’s why we are very selective in who we work with.

“It’s going to be a tough job, but we want to do it well.” Indeed, it’s not an easy job that MADMONQ chose for itself, but it’s without doubt a crucial one. And someone has to do it.

35

BRANDS

Are you listening closely?

Changing the perception of audio in esports with EPOS AUTHOR Tom Daniels @TheTomDanielss

s esports continues to develop, so does the need to purchase ‘game-changing’ equipment.

This includes players having the correct PC to compete at the highest level, or pro esports athletes securing top-ofthe-range peripherals. When games can be won, or lost, due to minuscule differences, every advantage counts.

A

unfamiliar with, Demant is a global hearing-healthcare and technology group that produces hearing-aid solutions and has existed since 1904.

As such, EPOS plans to build on ‘more than 115 years of experience in audio innovation’ to highlight the importance of sound through its products, whilst

also educating people as to why audio is more important than things just ‘sounding good’.

“I believe it [audio peripherals] is an overlooked area,” said Andreas Jessen, EPOS’s Senior Director, Global Product Management and Marketing, Gaming.

This is why we see PC companies, peripheral firms and gaming-chair manufacturers join forces with esports organisations. Not just because there is crossover appeal, but because using the right products can increase performance.

However, according to EPOS, the importance of audio peripherals in esports has been overlooked — especially when almost every other aspect in competitive gaming has seemingly been analysed to optimisation. This isn’t to say that gaming-headset partnerships are a rarity; indeed they’re plentiful — HyperX, Razer, SteelSeries are names we see partner with esports teams and tournaments. It’s just that most of the time headsets are simply included alongside other peripherals without special emphasis.

EPOS, a joint venture between Sennheiser and Demant, is looking to change the perception of audio in esports. A name many might be

36

Andreas Jessen Senior Director, Global Product Management and Marketing EPOS

BRANDS

“Look at tournaments versus training for most athletes. They use different equipment when training for audio than when in a competitive setting. This is somewhat comparable to a professional footballer using different shoes in training than in matches.

“We are on a mission to educate and train esports players on the importance of using high-quality equipment not only for matches but also for training.”

ARE HEADSETS MORE OR LESS IMPORTANT THAN OTHER PERIPHERALS? The proposal to educate players, in particular, raises a valuable point: do athletes know the benefits of having the correct audio headset? Some would argue that other peripherals simply take a higher priority; in many games, for example VALORANT, the radius of some sounds such as footsteps is the same no matter what, meaning a top-tier headset wouldn’t necessarily bring much benefit (at least in some scenarios).

Moreover, games such as Rocket League and FGC titles are comparatively less reliant on crystal-clear audio. As such, an outstanding headset would not necessarily provide a significant benefit in-game, aside from enabling clearer communication.

It is widely discussed that having the right mouse can help with reaction time and can allow comfort while playing, and having a high-quality monitor can offer visual advantages. This is why peripheral-specific brands such as Endgame Gear (mice) and Matrix Keyboards have been established in recent years. However, what’s the reasoning behind purchasing a highquality headset?

“The better the audio equipment, the more details you receive as an athlete and the more information you can extract from the audio,” Jessen explained.

37

BRANDS

Mathieu ‘Maniac’ Quiquerez

“To give an example, we always strive to have as flat a midrange as possible, as this is where most of the positional audio is positioned, for example, 500-5000 HZ. If the audio equipment has unwanted spikes in the frequency response in this area, then suddenly objects that are close can sound further away, or the opposite.

High-quality equipment provides better and more information than inferior equipment.”

Having optimised peripherals also identifies sounds better by making it easier for the brain to filter out background noise, both in and out of game. This could be especially crucial for games such as CS:GO where it is imperative to detect footsteps and other movements. Some esports athletes, like Shroud — who is sponsored by Logitech — have detailed how crowds at LAN events can often give away where

38

an enemy is positioned through sound cues. High-end audio equipment that blocks unwanted sound would be crucial in such cases.

“As an esports athlete, you need as much of your brain as possible focused on your next move, not filtering out bad audio,” added Jessen.

Similar to other peripherals such as mice, keyboards, and monitors, there is no perfect solution that matches every player. This is why Jessen believes that esports athletes will eventually choose to use tailor-made peripherals as opposed to equipment that is readily available, similar to how a golfer has their own set of clubs.

MAKING A SPLASH IN ESPORTS Following the firm’s rebrand from Sennheiser Communications in 2019,

EPOS sought to establish itself within the gaming and esports market and has since partnered with the likes of BLAST Premier, Cloud9, and ESL Gaming Australia.

According to Maja Sand-Grimnitz, Head of Global Marketing, Gaming at EPOS, teaming up with esports entities simply made sense given the brand’s ethos of educating gamers about the ‘power of audio’.

She said: “Esports organisations are an ideal fit for this, as we can tell the story of audio and how it can elevate the gaming experience when you have the right audio equipment.

“The importance of audio and the technology behind it is, as Andreas mentions, an overlooked topic in the esports world.”

BRANDS

However, it is possible that as the industry grows, more equipmentspecific firms are likely to emerge.

Existing brands such as HyperX — with its Cloud Revolver Gaming Headset — as well as Razer and SteelSeries are already developing premium equipment categories specifically tailored towards esports.

Whilst still early on in its esports journey, EPOS has brought the power of audio more into the esports conversation.

Not everyone will agree that highrange audio peripherals should take priority, especially with a premium price attached. However, as the stakes of games continue to grow, hearing that game-changing call in front of a huge audience, or simply being able to wear a headset comfortably for hours on end, could play a significant role in supporting that crucial clutch moment.

Some of EPOS’s esports activations included Mic’D Up with BLAST Premier, an in-tournament activation that allowed fans to listen to game-deciding calls, and ‘EPOS Esports Masterclasses’, which saw the brand collaborate with organisations such as SK Gaming and Cloud9.

Through these partnerships, EPOS has managed to break into the esports sector with relative ease. However, Maja believes that EPOS’s initial integration into the industry is just the start of what the brand can achieve.

HIGH-PERFORMANCE MARGINS As esports continues to develop, so does the technology around it, which is especially important as competitors look to gain more of a competitive edge. With such fine margins between players in terms of skill, could esports

get to a point where without optimised equipment, it puts players at a disadvantage?

Jessen said: “Today professional swimmers can’t compete if they don’t use the newest technology, similar to a cyclist in the Tour de France. So we strongly believe it will also come for esports — it’s just a matter of time.

“Right now, most peripherals are strongly linked to a relatively cheap consumerelectronic segment, but we are trying every day to challenge that perception.”

This isn’t to say peripherals in esports right now are not fit for purpose.

Maja Sand-Grimnitz Head of Global Marketing EPOS

39

BLOCKCHAIN

40

Illustration by Vladimir Kazakov (Fiverr: Haldolium)

BLOCKCHAIN

Building on the blockchain Exploring the blossoming relationship between esports and crypto AUTHOR Billy Studholme  @BillyStudholme

lockchain technology is already being applied to esports in fascinating ways. Orgs such as NAVI and OG Esports offer fans tradable crypto tokens that unlock unique benefits. OG has minted esports memorabilia as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — an NFT is a provably unique digital asset — on digital marketplace OpenSea, and NAVI has done the same on DMarket. Blockchain tech is enabling permanent data storage among many other interesting use cases. Since the Satoshi whitepaper in 2008, blockchain tech has and will continue to change the world. It’s worth exploring how it might affect the esports industry.

B

“It was kind of, thinking differently about how to use blockchain for new things, you know?” Adam Kling is the CEO of FYX Gaming (pronounced fix), a gaming platform that offers blockchain-based solutions on the Bitcoin SV blockchain.

FYX just partnered with esports bookie Unikrn to create odds for people betting on competition that takes place on FYX’s platform.

Beware: ‘gaming platform that offers blockchain-based solutions’ sounds dull.

What FYX is actually doing is way more exciting.

“I remember at a [crypto] conference here in North Carolina, people were talking about smart contracts, and being able to do autonomous functions and stuff like that. I was like, ‘uhh, okay, cool, but we’re talking about payments right now’ … I started to go on YouTube and watch some videos, and it started to click in. I was like, ‘oh, this is how we can [use it] in gaming.’

“I didn’t know exactly how, but I knew there was a path to start exploring.”

FYX is essentially a blockchain gaming platform where players can bet real money to compete. To use an example, FYX’s flagship game, CryptoFights, is set to launch soon. Bob could fight Bill for a $2 pot (both put $1 in). What makes FYX different from other tournament platforms is the blockchain technology it’s built upon.

For starters, storing and managing data, according to Kling, is infinitely better when done on the blockchain. Talking about data in titles like League of Legends, Kling said the following: “[The server] would save a file from your game, I think it saved a little bit on the cloud for like, 60 days, but you had to download it.

Then you could load it back in and it’d play

your game. Well what we’re doing with blockchain is essentially the same thing, but I call it a permanent cloud save. We’re saving everything down to the move that you made in that game and it will always be there … And we can actually even take that data, feed it back into the game engine and recreate that game.

“Twitch, they’re recording the video. Well we’re recording the data, so I think we’re even better.”

One of FYX’s products will be ‘match replay’. One might take a League of Legends match from five years ago, retrieve all its data from the public blockchain it lives on, recreate the match, and analyse it. That’s Kling’s ultimate goal: to attract many game titles, big and small, to the FYX platform.

In a sense, what Kling wants to do with FYX is democratise esports. Players shouldn’t have to be the best in the world to earn money; lower-league footballers can earn a solid wage without being Eden Hazard, and thousands of poker players earn a living playing online and are not Daniel Negreanu.

“This is where I think it’s going,” Kling said.

“I think we can make it kind of like online poker on steroids.”

41

BLOCKCHAIN

Blockchain tech will also improve competitive integrity in esports — something we’re already catching whiffs of. Part of FYX’s service includes verifying personal data, which is stored on a public blockchain. This has dramatic implications for deterring cheaters. “If I start to cheat, that data pattern becomes transparent, public, and audible,” Kling said. And remember FYX’s ultimate goal: attract as many game publishers to the platform as possible.

If League of Legends, Fortnite, and Call of Duty can all be played on FYX for real money, the deterrence of cheaters using blockchain could be momentous.

While an app like Skrmiish, which is not built on a blockchain, is offering sound solutions to things like grassroots match reporting, the intrinsic features of a blockchain are immutable: data is stored forever on a peer-to-peer ledger.

Security is woven into the structure of the blockchain, like a great uncrackable safe in which each item of data is dependent on the rest. Match data is permanently registered. For grassroots esports, this could be a game changer.

Furthermore, FYX will at some point introduce a marketplace to the platform where users can trade NFTs. Kling spoke about what incorporating NFT item drops into esports might look like. “[After a match] if you get a legendary item drop, and it’s worth, like, a thousand dollars or something crazy, you can say ‘well, do I want to hold onto this or do I want to sell it?’”

And the best part? If everything goes how Kling envisions, players that compete on the FYX platform will be able to trade NFTs — in-game items, skins, characters, whatever else — between game titles. A big part of FYX’s philosophy is that it will be game-

42

engine-agnostic and will facilitate freedom of exchange between titles.

“In most other places, NFTs are kind of like serial numbers. We’re going a step further and making them so you can own the token, but the actual token on the blockchain has the 3D models and textures. So that means any other game can actually pull that from the blockchain.

“We really want to give utility to our NFTs … The higher the utility of an NFT, probably the more valuable it’ll be. That’s where I’d like to go, where NFTs comport from game to game, so you have the incentive for games to incorporate the market of NFTs; that way you get more players into your game, because now [NFTs] have more utility.”

Ultimately it is blockchain technology that would enable this. Blockchain proves that NFTs are rare, and that only a few, often just one, were minted. If an NFT is designed to cross over into any game title, then that’s what it will do — all while being verifiably scarce, unique, and thus, theoretically, valuable.

Crypto apostles sermonise it, but it’s best we don’t get too deep into the ‘Metaverse’ stuff. Needless to say this transferability of assets is a key component of a shared digital world. But more than that, Kling envisions a world where ‘esports’ — this vast space that we in the industry fold into a neat, square box — might mean Olympic-style variety competition.

“You could have triathlons. You could have 100 players in Fortnite, the top three players get to move onto the second game which could be a real-time strategy game like StarCraft. So you whittle them down. The third game could be the grand championship. But you could use

the same fighter in all three games.” Of course, FYX wants to be the platform to host such Olympic-style competition.

“There’s some really cool stuff that I could see in the future because of the technology and blockchain itself,” Kling added.

As alluded to earlier, a few esports orgs are already using blockchain for neat things. OG Esports is headed by JMR Luna, who has been CEO since May 2020. He was largely responsible for OG’s minting of NFTs on OpenSea, which includes Dota 2 rings (OG was the backto-back TI champion in 2018 and 2019).

The OG team were sceptical about NFTs first but soon came around: “I am CEO, I’d like to think they hired me because they liked my out-of-the-box ideas,” Luna told The Esports Journal. “They were sceptical at first, but it proves to be something super fun and engaging.”

Benny Giang, founding member at Dapper Labs — the company behind NBA Top Shot — told The Esports Journal: “Of course, esports is the future, and we’ve been big fans of the space. There’s tons of opportunities [related to NFTs] because esports ties in with games, and is digitalforward compared to other sports.”

Esports is as much part of our digital universe as gaming itself — and with blockchain, the possibilities are endless.

BRANDS

ESE Entertainment: Esports?

You want it, we got it AUTHOR Kerry Waananen  @haekafae

here’s slow dynamite in how Konrad Wasiela speaks about the esports industry, and gaming as the cultural zeitgeist.

The Founder & Director of ESE Entertainment is all about positive turnovers — always has been. A former professional Canadian-football cornerback, Wasiela has an eye for how moving targets line up. Since founding ESE, he’s been aiming to convert nongamers to gamers, fans to fanatics, and doubters to believers.

T

Konrad Wasiela Founder & Director ESE Entertainment

His company is publicly listed (TSXV: ESE), and ultimately, converting moving targets to hockey sticks on growth charts makes the company happy. Wasiela and ESE are determined to be the next €1 billion company, and they’re going to do it with products and services at every level on the way to the top: a skyscraper of offerings.

43

BRANDS

TOURNAMENT ORGANISATION Wasiela saw behind the curtain over a decade ago, at a localisation company — essentially ‘translating’ the look and feel of products and services to match different cultures — working for some of the world’s largest gaming companies.

Thrown into the deep-end of game development, Wasiela observed: ”Holy smokes, this is fascinating. And then I started to realise how big of an industry this was.

“The entire time I was building that company, I was going to countless conferences and events,” Wasiela told The Esports Journal. “I was constantly learning from industry experts and trying to figure out if there was an opportunity for me to start something big on my own.

I was in Poland on a due diligence trip looking into gaming and esports assets and I attended the IEM Katowice World Championships for CS:GO. “The second I walked up toward the stadium and saw all the gaming enthusiasts, it was just the lightbulb moment. I literally didn’t sleep for a week.

And I was like, ‘I’ve got it, I know exactly what I need to do’.”

Ol’ Katowice got another one. With over 150,000 people through the doors and Intel’s $100 million ten-year sponsorship of the event, Wasiela’s dynamite caught its spark.

Then the targets started to line up for Wasiela: Amazon’s purchase of Twitch for $900 million made perfect sense.

The Canadian assembled a veteran team with a combined 50 years of experience in gaming and esports to consider the industry’s great conundrum: ‘Why aren’t many people making money in esports?’

“We started looking at the infrastructure,” Wasiela said, “and looked at the advantages of providing services out of Eastern Europe at a reduced cost to the

44

rest of the world. From there, we formed a business plan and officially launched ESE Entertainment.”

At that point, the company would provide infrastructure, logistics, and back-end support to TOs and organisations around the world. But that was just the beginning. The company broke ground. Using the infrastructure they built white-label for other TOs, ESE began running its own tournaments.

Ground floor: infrastructure. First floor: tournament organisation.

PAYMENTS AND ECOMMERCE The blueprint was becoming reality — everything Wasiela and the team had planned hinged on making sure money moved seamlessly. “How do you scale,” he said, “if you don’t have a partner who can provide payment solutions, for example, in Poland, and the next day you want it in the Philippines? That’s a major problem. You can’t scale.”

K1CK: ESE’S ORGANISATION With K1CK, the company could test their mettle in the toughest arena of esports business: making an esports org profitable. ESE has already added Nuvei as a key sponsor for the 2021 esports season. Wasiela believes in his plan and his patience — that slow dynamite.

Wasiela is confident the company is ready for the commitment of entering top-tier franchised esports. “We’ve already talked to Riot about the actual dollar amounts necessary to, for example, enter into the LEC. That is 100 percent on our radar. But once again, going back to infrastructure, we don’t want to take a false step and go into it and then chase.

“We want to build to a level where we’re literally just teetering on tier one, and when everything’s ready to go and we’re comfortable, then we’re going to do it because we want it to be a sustainable jump.

At the end of 2020, the company signed a deal with global payment technology company Nuvei to support ESE’s future ecommerce undertakings, process global payments, and sponsor the company’s next move. “With Nuvei, we have global reach in payments solutions verified. We know that they’re the real deal.” Second floor: payments and ecommerce.

“If we enter into that tier-one level and put all those big bucks for the licences and all the fees, et cetera — we want to make sure that this is a long-term play. When we go in, we’re staying forever.” But just entering the big leagues doesn’t ensure glory, Wasiela is well aware; his time as a pro athlete and the research he’s conducted into esports’ ups and downs have made that clear.

Founded in 1998, K1CK is one of the oldest orgs in Europe, and the ink has only just dried from ESE’s completed acquisition earlier this year. “I valued their experience,” Wasiela said. “They have over 500 tournament wins on a global scale. I valued Pedro [‘Spirit’ Fernandes], the Founder, and his knowledge base. He is a legend in esports and has dedicated his life to K1CK. It was a perfect fit for ESE and the right way to enter the esports community with a trusted brand like K1CK.”

“We want to build K1CK’s teams — plural — and brand on a global scale,” Wasiela said. “They’re already very well known; they’ve been around for a long time. We want K1CK to be a team that pro players want to play for — a team they know they can trust and build with.

“They get paid on time, they are treated well and we ultimately want players that want to get into that tier-one status. I think we’re realistically more tier-two status right now, but we’re climbing up and we’re winning tournaments and

BRANDS

building that brand globally.“ Third floor: esports org and brand.

BUILDING SOMETHING GREAT To turn the “forever” Wasiela talks about into a tangible reality, he knows what he must do. “We need to professionalise the intricacies of [esports] business,” Wasiela told The Esports Journal. He knows that pretenders damage the integrity of the industry. ”It’s not that we have to be super strict about dress code or run things like a boarding school or anything,” Wasiela explained. “No, we want to be inclusive.

We want a positive environment that nurtures growth not only as players but as people. We want [everyone] to enjoy it, have fun and create a positive ecosystem that is sustainable. The more we raise the bar collectively and create an ecosystem that’s sustainable, guess what happens?

“More sponsorship dollars, more money for the players, more money in the industry. It’s a win-win for everyone. If we all support each other and we have this positive uplifting vibe, and we have a great infrastructure in place, this whole segment will really flourish. It’s just amazing.” His fuse lit, Wasiela is optimistic about esports’ future.

“Let’s say you land somebody like Coca-

Cola. You have one shot with these guys.

Why don’t we sit in a room together and do it right?”

He’s also optimistic about competition.

He feels if an agency outside of ESE is better suited to execute, ESE is keen to cooperate. “This way, we all make money, and let’s not kid ourselves, the whole point is to create this positive community where we’re all uplifting ourselves, right?

“There’s more than enough to go around for everyone. I want to see esports orgs and agencies working together, take a different approach to it. It’s an early-days industry. Let’s do it the right way. Let’s say you land somebody like Coca-Cola.

You have one shot with these guys. Why don’t we sit in a room together and do it right? Let’s get a five-year deal by working together, rather than a one-off deal by yourself and Coca-Cola leaves unsatisfied with the experience.”

Before even entertaining the idea of scoring such a deal, Wasiela believes esports must be prepared to suit-andtie more often. He thinks non-endemic corporations are still having a hard time finding something recognisable — and thus worth exploring — in the esports industry. He’s steering ESE to lead by example.

“Let’s create the bridge,” Wasiela said.

“We want to get that professionalism and make sure that that’s really portrayed, people are comfortable, and we can do things together at a high level — which ultimately trickles down to a very positive ecosystem and community, which is what I believe in the most important.

“Strengthening the community, making sure the community is happy and positive, and just making everything more seamless with the publishers. That kind of stuff is really important.

“Let’s work together. And let’s just all, let’s just uplift everyone. I mean, there’s more than enough to go around. I am very positive, I believe in working together, not against each other.”

To make the industry’s explosion a sustained blast to match the Founder’s enthusiasm, ESE has built a skyscraper of solutions for each challenge a partner might encounter. Just maybe the company will become the first mainstream esports products-andservices household brand. ESE plans to be in stock wherever esports is sold, as soon as possible. Fifth floor and above: all esports everything.

45

BRANDS

Discovering the payments landscape of the LATAM esports and gaming market sia, Europe and North America come as the most mature and established esports markets.

In terms of potential exposure, Latin America has gone somewhat under the radar for advertising brands until recently.

A

Latin America’s young demographic is boosting esports and gaming in the region, making it one of the fastestgrowing esports markets with a promising future. Take Brazil, whose esports revenue is expected to reach R$55.6m (~£7.4m) in 2021, up from R$24.1m (~£3.2m) in 2017, according to Statista.

There is a problem, however. Latin America’s low access to bank accounts and debit or credit cards has left the region struggling with financial inclusion in the digitally connected world. Only 55 percent of consumers in the area have a bank account, and more than

half of them are conducting their banking transactions online, according to research data commissioned by Mastercard and prepared by Americas Market Intelligence in 2020.

That leaves Latin America with millions of bankless folk who still rely on cash payments. Cash doesn’t exist in gaming, and to be able to buy in-game items or receive rewards, consumers widely use alternative payment methods, such as AstroPay. CASH SUCCESSOR OneTouch is AstroPay’s e-wallet that allows users to make deposits and withdrawals with a single touch on a smart device. It is a multi-currency

“Designed from scratch, OneTouch gives consumers a fast and reliable payment option, based on three pillars — instantaneity, security, and user experience,” said Mikael Lijtenstein, CEO of AstroPay. “In addition, users can generate an account and purchase directly from the operator’s site, as well as apply control measures,” he added. “OneTouch is AstroPay’s flagship product, which aims to make payments easier while maintaining high standards of security and compliance.”

The app boasts various optional controls for merchants, including user identification through a unique closed-loop code to ensure security.

AUTHOR Henrieta Hyrliková  @HenrietaHyrlik

46

payment solution aimed primarily at consumers who want to make international purchases online.

BRANDS

“It significantly decreases the chances of fraud and allows full compliance thanks to strong KYC verification and identification controls,” Lijtenstein explained. “However, to avoid overly complicated flows for low-risk profiles, these controls are enforced only when needed.

Operators have a series of analytics, reports and fraud alerts available, meeting the levels of security and compliance that our current reality requires.”

According to Lijtenstein, the core principle of AstroPay’s product security strategy is progressively building a trusting relationship between the user and the service. Based on that knowledge, design and user experience are tailored to their needs.

E-WALLETS ON THE RISE The tendency to pay digitally has increased noticeably in the last 12 months, Latin America included. There is no doubt the COVID-19 pandemic has directly affected this, as people stayed home and made purchases online.

“E-wallets play an important role within this landscape, as they offer a convenient and safe purchase channel for both user and operator,” Lijtenstein said.

Intuitive and easy to use, digital wallets eliminate the need to carry a physical wallet by storing all of a consumer’s payment information securely in one place. Besides online payments, they can be used for cash withdrawal or

sending money peer to peer. With the increasing popularity of esports among Latin Americans that often do not have bank accounts, digital wallets are perhaps a necessity.

Furthermore, many e-wallet services offer rewards and other benefits, which strengthens user engagement. “Digital wallets are also beneficial to merchants,” he said.

“They represent a source of collecting data from their customers, which can be used to promote their business or to better understand their clients’ needs.”

When it comes to customer needs, Lijtenstein emphasises the importance of the user experience being as smooth as possible: “User experience has proven to be paramount when providing a payment service. Users don’t feel at ease if they need to go through multiple fulfilment procedures or if they have to follow several steps to proceed with the payment.

“Delivering a payment journey that is as natural as possible and requires only a few clicks to get the transaction done will result in a conversion-rate increase, as well as higher engagement with the brand.”

One of the points where many potential customers fail is at the checkout.

“To retain clients, the trend is to move towards checkouts with minimal user interaction,” he added.

As more people are aware of digital wallets and their benefits, more locations and merchants accept them as

a form of payment. Discussing the future of e-wallets, Lijtenstein stays confident: “We don’t believe this will change after the pandemic is over. People have already experienced the benefits of e-wallets. In our opinion, it is a one-way path.”

ASTROPAY’S ESPORTS VENTURE According to the most recent report

by Statista, esports revenue in Brazil should reach $22m (~£14.5m) by 2023, which is more than double this year’s estimate. Consequently, the demand for online payments in the industry should increase too.

To fill an obvious market gap, AstroPay decided to enter the esports and gaming industries and become a ‘payment ally’ for gamers not only in Latin America but worldwide.

“The growing industry statistics clearly suggest the interest this space has for us,” said Lijtenstein. “Some esports organisations are also moving into areas like merchandise, making their brands more popular and thus opening a new vertical within the industry. At AstroPay, we embrace challenges, and entering this industry is undoubtedly one to go for.”

The company offers esports and gaming merchants a possibility to easily access emerging markets thanks to its knowledge of market needs. “As we always do, we first get to know the users and their needs, and from there we work on,” he said. “With our omnichannel philosophy we are in constant contact with them, trying to understand what they require in terms of payment solutions.”

To support the industry with a fitting payment solution, AstroPay promises to take the specificities of the esports market into account. “Emerging markets have specific needs that need to be catered for, and AstroPay is aware of that,” concluded Lijtenstein.

47

BRANDS

AUTHOR Kerry Waananen  @haekafae

Turquoise: New colour in esports branding he Eurovision Song Contest and esports both enjoy, or perhaps resent, a level of relative obscurity. Many have heard of it but perhaps cannot be bothered to understand such a spectacle. Even within Europe, Eurovision is put in the corner. Esports too.

T

“The first time we worked on the Eurovision Song Contest was in Hamburg, Germany,” Linda Garcia-Bowles told The Esports Journal. “It was quite unusual to be called as a UK-based agency to do something which has to very much feel like the host nation, because you compete as a nation to win [the competition], so that the next year you host it. It’s a proud national event.”

Garcia-Bowles is Client Partner for London’s Turquoise Branding, an agency that doesn’t shy away from obscurity.

“In the pitch,” she continued, “they did say to us, ‘The UK doesn’t seem to care 48

much for Eurovision, so why do you want to win the job?’” The legacy of the event and the grand scope of such a curious brief was Tuquoise’s reasoning. They’ve since grown accustomed to branding with such great impact. Turquoise was chosen again the following year to brand Eurovision for the new host nation in Baku, Azerbaijan.

New winner, new host nation. Do it again, Turquoise.

For Creative Partner Gareth Mapp, this is just another day in his 23 years of work.

“I turn on the telly and I see loads of our work; I travel the world and I see work I’ve done.” Turquoise’s shade has been broadcast across the world: they’ve branded telecoms, sports leagues, video game studios and TV shows, from London to the Middle East to Russia.

The 2019 Eurovision Song Contest’s finale tallied over 182 million viewers —

the contest’s lowest viewership since 2013 — and that same year, League of Legends Worlds boasted an average concurrent viewership of 1.04 million according to Esports Charts. Both events rally around song, both change host cities each year, and both are incredible spectacles. Turquoise has already branded one of these two legends (twice) and the agency is keen to add the other to its catalogue of work.

HELPING ESPORTS BRANDING MATURE The agency was formed in 2003 by Strategy Partner Sharon Wheeler, who was later joined by Garcia-Bowles and Mapp. With a loaded body of clients and a focus on sport and entertainment, the agency is bustling. But the team always takes time to reflect.

BRANDS

Contemplation is necessary for the refinement of craft — to create something long-lasting. Branding’s core purpose is to create a recognisable identity. Recently, the agency has been contemplating: ‘why does branding feel almost disposable for so many in the esports sector?’

The sector is young, Turquoise has noticed, and it’s learning as it goes.

The industry’s refusal to sit still during its growth hasn’t helped its branding identity crises. Many outsiders don’t have a firm grasp of what esports is — let alone what brands are doing within it. From the outside looking in, another question arises: ‘just what are they looking at?’

To Mapp’s trained eye, there is a clear need for architectural development to hold up brands in the space. The creative looks beyond the aesthetic — he’s concerned with structural integrity.

“I think someone needs to sit down and look at the point of view of consumers and fans,” Mapp said, “and try to create the best branding solutions for them.

There’s a lot of clutter out there and a lot of cross-over that I think can be simplified and made clearer.

PROFESSIONAL SOLUTIONS: THE COLOUR TURQUOISE The agency has collaborated with ESJ’s sister site, Esports Insider, to pore over the industry’s branding efforts, taking notice of opportunity and overlap with Turquoise’s competencies. The agency’s strength is its rock-steady consideration of branding fundamentals. Much more than the selection of colourways, logo design and typefaces, the group specialises in the strategy around a brand, its architecture, its purpose.

Testimonials are on display in their award cabinet: a Royal Television Society award for their Monaco F1 film for the BBC, an Eyes and Ears award for their Eurovision Song Contest identity, and multiple Promax and Transform Awards for their sports broadcast identities around the world.

Dissect their body of work and you’ll find all of the aspects required in a top-tier esports activation and branding brief.

Take Turquoise’s branding success of the 2018/19 season UEFA Europa

A problem that proper branding can solve, Turquoise believes.

The agency calls that colour Turquoise.

They’ve got it in bulk. The scope of the group’s work has been all-encompassing for the brands they’ve worked with, and the group has taken on massive briefs for large-scale events from the Eurovision Song Contest, the final of the UEFA Europa League, and Saudi Arabia’s NEXT Powerbrands Festival.

The agency has produced multiple state-of-the-art stadium brandings, including signage, stadium LEDs and exterior projections. They’ve branded merchandise, ticketing, pre-match promotional material, plus graphics and animations shown on broadcasts and in video games across the world, delivering huge activations for clients.

Now that esports has weathered the brunt of the pandemic, it’s as good a time as any to look around and invest into proper branding solutions. With over a dozen major esports rebrands in 2020, Turquoise might be right. The jury is still out on whether events will return this year, but the branding agency is ready at the drop of a hat.

“And that’s a really interesting problem to solve.”

Members of the Turquoise group have solved loads of interesting problems between them — boasting decades of experience in media and broadcasting, marketing and advertising, sports and entertainment, design and animation.

Discovering how the ecosystem works fascinates the agency. However, the intensity of discovery for every potential fan or consumer is clearly a problem.

Turquoise for a Design Week Award.

Blend together the agency’s sport, games, and entertainment executions and put it on canvas. It’s a lovely, mature shade of an agency with a certain je ne sais quoi.

League, which netted the contract to brand the new UEFA Europa Conference League. Mix in the agency’s brand identity work melding two iconic Russian gaming companies into the My.Games brand.

Add its execution of the refreshed visual identity for Series 2 of UK Channel 4’s hit reality-series, The Circle — shortlisting

Turquoise doesn’t presume wins elsewhere automatically ensure wins in esports, but the agency hopes that its curiosity and past accomplishments will help it secure an invite to the party.

Experience in mature markets will affect one’s tastes, and what excites the agency is to splash some new esports flavours on the palette, and in turn brand the obscure into the obvious.

49

BROKERAGE | CONSULTANCY & ADVISORY | CAMPAIGN ACTIVATION Esports Insider’s agency arm.

This service is split across Brokerage, Consultancy/Advisory, & Campaign Activation. In short, we bring together esports rights holders and suppliers, brands, and investors, on a global scale.

Any interested parties can find out more at www.esportsinsider.com or reach out via info@esportsinsider.com.

The Esports Journal is a joint venture between Esports Insider and LMG. The Esports Journal Management Team Sam Cooke Managing Director & Co-Founder - Esports Insider

The companies and executives that make esports one of the fastest growing industries worldwide

Distribution of the Print Edition Available year round in: - Platform, London’s leading esports & gaming bar. www.experienceplatform.co.uk - Team Vitality’s V.Hive in Paris Select postal distribution in Europe and NA

Content Team Billy Studholme - Content Lead Tom Daniels - Sub-Editor H. B Duran - Journalist Henrieta Hyrlikova - Journalist Max Schönknecht - Journalist Kerry Waananen - Multimedia Content Design Perthenia Thomas - Design Lead - Esports Insider Kerry Waananen - Multimedia Content Latam Media Group Social Media  http://twitter.com/esports_journal  http://www.instagram.com/theesportsjournal  https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-esportsjournal Site http://theesportsjournal.news Contact info@theesportsjournal.news

Digital versions will also be available via www.theesportsjournal.news Twitter, Linkedin & Instagram - Dedicated Channels.

Printing coordinated by: Young’s Media Productions Ltd 9 Aquarelle House, 259 City Road, London EC1V 1AG,UK T: +44 (0) 7811 864 001 E: craig@youngsmedia.productions Registered in England and Wales No. 10131185

To get involved, or if you have any questions at all, please reach out via info@theesportsjournal.news

Distribution The Esports Journal is printed in the United Kingdom, and distributed globally, throughout Europe and North America.

52