The Esports Journal - Edition 5

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EDITION 1

ICE Esports Arena | February 4-6

Esports BAR Cannes | February 11-13

EDITION 2

ESI Digital Summit | May 25 - May 26

Postal Distribution to key industry stakeholders

EDITION 3

Esports BAR Miami | September 22-24

Postal Distribution

EDITION 4

ESI London | Oct/Nov Dates TBC

ESI NYC | November 30 - Dec 1

Postal Distribution

Available year round in: Platform, London’s leading esports & gaming bar. www.experienceplatform.co.uk

V.Hive, Team Vitality’s HQ and store in central Paris.

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

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

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

Agustin Cikes

COO and Co-Founder - Latam Media Group

Content Team

Andrew Hayward - Content Lead - The Esports Journal

Adam Fitch - Editor - Esports Insider

Pablo Monti - Editor - LMG

Cody Luongo - Journalist - Esports Insider

Mitch Reames - Journalist - Esports Insider

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Micaela Palotti - Design Lead - LMG

Perthenia Thomas - Design Lead - Esports Insider

Community Manager

Daniela Rocha Aranzana - LMG

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The Esports Journal is printed in the United Kingdom, and distributed globally, throughout Europe and North America. It is available at London’s most premium esports and gaming bar and restaurant, Platform, and at Team Vitality’s HQ and flagship store in Paris.

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

Dear readers,

First and foremost we would like to send our best wishes to you all, and we hope that both you and your loved ones are staying safe and well in these troubling times.

So, Edition 5 of The Esports Journal, and one which ordinarily would have been available at ESI NYC and other key industry events, as well as Platform, the esports and gaming focused bar restaurant in London, and Team Vitality’s V.Hive in Paris. Alas, that was not to be. But the old adage is true, adversity breeds creativity.

We’ve pivoted to a far more comprehensive digital focus for this edition, we’ve launched The Esports Journal on Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram and henceforth will be creating and publishing content across those channels. We would appreciate a follow! We have also invested in postal distribution, and indeed, not just to mostly empty office blocks worldwide, but to the homes of key stakeholders and partners from in and around the industry. We are trialling this method of postal distribution for this edition,

and indeed should it prove popular it will remain a constant for future editions of this quarterly publication. Let us know if you’d like to be added to that list!

Onto the content. This is another excellent collection of interesting stories from across the esports industry landscape, from a focus on data with not one but three leading suppliers in the form of GRID, Abios and Bayes to a look at gaming chairs, and the latest on the explosion of esports betting. Many thanks to our cover star and industry stalwart Mike Sepso for being involved too, and indeed supporting us with a last minute Vogue photo shoot.

Elsewhere we’ve interviews with the likes of Critical Force, rugby giants Munster, We Are Nations, RNG, Edge, 3D Trophy Factory and more. We hope it should be enough to keep you going whilst social distancing wherever you are in the world!

Stay safe, and we’ll see you when things are back to normal.

Sam and Agustin

Meet the Team

Sam Cooke Managing Director & Co-Founder ESI

Andrew Hayward Content Lead The Esports Journal

Agustín Cikes COO & Co-Founder LMG

Adam Fitch Editor ESI

Mitch Reames Journalist ESI

Cody Luongo Journalist ESI

Pablo Monti Writer LMG

About Us

Based in London and founded in 2016, Esports Insider is an industry focused esports news platform, B2B agency, media and events company.

ESI runs a world leading and international esports industry news site, operates The Esports Journal magazine, and has run more industry events than any other company globally, from London to Los Angeles. Other arms of the company include ESI Media, and ESI Connect which assists brands, investors and suppliers with strategy and a route to market via esports rights holders.

EsportsInsider.com - One of the leading esports industry focused platforms worldwide. We feature the latest news stories from a global perspective, alongside opinion pieces, and interviews with those making waves in esports business. We also have magazine publication; The Esports Journal, and a twice weekly newsletter, the ESI Dispatch.

ESI Events - We run esports focused events and have produced more esports business events than any other, globally. These have included the Forum Series, ESI London, the annual ESI Hall of Fame and ESI NYC. We offer white label events services too.

ESI Media - We offer B2B and B2C content services (editorial, podcast and video), which can be via ESI channels, or it can be fully whitelabel, and we have the print magazine The Esports Journal, which we run with our partners LMG.

ESI Connect - ESI Connect sits in-between current esports rights holders and companies seeking to do business the right way, without all the hassle. Acting as a media house, translator and mentorship group, ESI Connect will evaluate what you seek to do, propose the best fit, initiate the right contacts and support you in the delivery of your plans. Find out more about ESI Connect on the site, and you can drop us a line at info@esportsinsider.com to apply.

About Us

Based in Buenos Aires and founded in 2016, Latam Media Group was launched to bring a new concept in communication, networking and content creation.

Latam Media Group is a media group specialized in the Latin American Gaming industry. Its expertise in public relationships let them multiply their business audience, building a selected and exclusive network that acts as a guide to keep evolving in the right direction.

LMG now organizes events, VIP dinners, conferences and summits for the Latin American gaming industry.

Betting Mgz - The first and only magazine focused on the online gaming industry in Latin America. It´s distributed in the main events of the region, reaching the main operators, suppliers, regulators and businessmen.

LMGMAS.com - It´s one of the leading websites of the Latin American gaming industry. Apart from promoting the latest trends of the companies and the executives, LMGMAS makes the difference with their innovative way of communication, exploiting all the resources that social networks and new trends allow.

All the content is perfectly segmented, according to the interests of each of their readers. This is:

Esports Industry: All the information related to esports industry, focused on Latin America with a worldwide perspective.

Gaming Agenda: Exhibitions, Conferences, Summits and Webinars.

LMG Eventos - Thanks to our daily contact with the whole industry, we know the needs of our clients. That´s why we organize events that fit perfect with their demand. Some of our events:

Esports Brands Conference

Betting Sports Marketing Conference

Affiliate Summit LatAm

Welcome Cocktails

MEDIA

We’ve assembled a hit squad of content creators who, as a collective, know the industry and each competitive scene inside, out.

Whether it’s editorial, podcast, video, or social media campaigns, we can help. If you need expert esports content for your platform, and/or want to promote your business to the key industry stakeholders, drop us a line For

or email info@esportsinsider.com

From MLG to Vindex: The story of Mike Sepso

AUTHOR Adam Fitch  byadamfitch

In October 2019, Major League Gaming (MLG) co-founders

Mike Sepso and Sundance DiGiovanni launched a new venture, Vindex, with $60 million (£46.6 million) in funding. When they first started working together back in the early 2000s, they couldn’t convince anybody at all to invest in their ideas. What happened in that period that saw them evolve from zeroes to heroes?

Sepso and DiGiovanni are known as one of the most iconic duos in the entire industry, but their working relationship started before the legacy they built with MLG and they are looking to continue with Vindex.

Mike Sepso

Co-founder & CEO at Vindex

Let’s start at the beginning.

“I got into esports in the summer of 2002,” Sepso told The Esports Journal “Sundance and I had a prior business that we were in the process of exiting at that time with another partner. It was a technical development agency where we would build consumer products for telecommunications and cable companies that were rolling out residential broadband across North America and Europe.

“We spent that summer betting on games of Halo and going to watch the New York Yankees. At some point during the season, I told Sundance that we made ‘take the summer off money’ but not ‘retire at 28 or 29 money.’ We had to either figure out something to start now or to get jobs.”

Though being a die-hard sports fan for his entire life, Sepso and DiGiovanni enjoyed playing Halo. They soon discovered that they weren’t as great as they may have once thought, but that was a welcome epiphany.

“We would go onto message boards and find people to play Halo against; we realised pretty quickly that there was an online and small tournament grassroots scene happening organically,” he said. “We started to look around internationally and had already heard of what was happening with StarCraft in Korea, but hadn’t spent much time thinking about it because we weren’t fans of the game and had no plans of going to Korea.

“It all seemed really interesting but, while I liked playing Quake, it didn’t really translate into the mainstream,” continued Sepso “Korea’s take on StarCraft was not going to work over here. But with all of these kids playing Halo, they’re effectively doing the same thing, but consoles were far and away the dominant gaming platform at that time across North America and the United Kingdom. We thought we could apply it to the kids that play Halo in a way that’s

more in line with American sports media.”

“We thought: ‘How could we dress this up to make it look like it could sit next to the NFL and NBA, airing on ESPN, with Bud Light and Ford as sponsors?’”

The challenge wasn’t envisioning esports as the next big sport, with millions of players, spectators, and revenue alike. The hard part was engineering a plan that would turn a small, yet passionate grassroots endeavour into an international competition that people would happily spectate.

“Having identified that competitive gaming has all of the components for it to be a sport, it’s about how it’s organised, operated, and the business model,” he explained. “Our take on it was to make sure to create a product that suited the United States. Halo’s climate was a good foundation, and we could potentially use a game such as Madden to introduce the concept to a larger population while getting a larger commercial interest.

“We concluded that the best way to do that was to create a league,” he added. “We did a ton of research on the right structure for a league, and we decided upon something similar to NASCAR as games weren’t public domain. I could start a basketball league tomorrow and the NBA couldn’t stop me, but we got cease and desist letters right away from publishers - all of whom we went on to have great relationships with.

“Those were the early days.”

From there, the brand many esports

players, fans, and workers affectionately knew as MLG was birthed. Starting a circuit with no investment, no real pre-existing fan base, and no prior experience in building such a competition is no small feat, but Sepso and DiGiovanni went ahead with the prospect.

“We came up with the name of Major League Gaming and launched the Pro Circuit,” Sepso said. “We wanted to organise the commercial structure through distributing media, selling sponsorships, and so on. From a consumer point of view, we thought: ‘How do we make this accessible and friendly to someone who isn’t a hardcore gamer?’”

As is reasonable to presume, there were a whole host of challenges ahead of MLG if it was to fulfil the lofty expectations that had predated it. The first challenge was collecting the capital needed to produce and execute events of a considerable level, with venues, equipment, and logistics to take care of.

“I started my career in finance and had a good network of people to go to to raise money from if we had an idea that was technology-based,” said Sepso. “When I started talking to my friends in the venture world about MLG in early 2003, they said it was the stupidest thing they had ever heard of.

“We had spent all of the money we had made that prior summer to get MLG off the ground, without getting paid, and started bootstrapping by trying to sell sponsorship deals against the event tour,” he continued.

It took a considerable amount of time for this to change. Sepso, DiGiovanni, and the small team they had put together did what they could to keep things going, until they could convince investors that what they had devised was really an innovative initiative that had legs.

“We didn’t raise a single dollar for MLG until 2006,” Sepso exclaimed. “We eventually found a bigger, later-stage venture fund that was interested because we could put a lot of money to use. We went out, hit the roads, talked to venture capitalists, and got initial investment from a hedge fund that was mostly focused on trading oil.

“We went out to raise $3 million and raised $10 million,” he said. “Six months later, we found another later-stage venture fund and raised another $25 million. We went from zero investment for four years to $35 million capital invested over the course of about 12 months.”

What would you do with $35 million?

Most people would have a flood of ideas on how they could spend such an amount, but as Sepso explained, it was just a door-opener - not a solution.

New problems arose, like how would MLG scale suitably? Putting the money to good use in the right areas of the business is a strategic step, but not necessarily an easy one.

“How do you make it bigger? Money doesn’t solve that,” he said. “It gives you the capability to try things but it doesn’t figure it out for you. We started to diversify back into PC games, like Counter-Strike and Quake, and we tried to broaden our media footprint to have more advertising inventory to sell as a method of revenue generation.”

In 2006, MLG made a major move that was, in many respects, a groundbreaking move for the yet-to-be-named esports industry. Inking a deal with a major broadcasting company, esports had its first taste of mainstream exposure in the West by being broadcast on a prominent network.

“MLG did a deal with NBC Sports,” Sepso told The Esports Journal “We filmed the entire 2006 MLG Pro Circuit for Halo as it went and turned each stop into an hourlong show. They aired every week but the events were a month apart. People who got into esports in the last decade ask me ‘When do you think this will be on television?’ but we had already done it. It was much harder to do at that time.”

A major, pivotal moment in MLG’s tenure - in which it rose to prominence as a major tournament organiser across all titles in esports - was its acquisition by Activision Blizzard. That took some time though, and certainly was a calculated move. The reason Sepso and DiGiovanni decided to make the move was part of a problem they had identified in the company, and in its sector as a whole.

“One thing that became clear in around 2012 or 2013 was that it was going to be challenging, if not impossible, to make the business of MLG work if we didn’t own one piece of the value chain,” said Sepso

“Once we got into Call of Duty, that’s when it got pretty obvious to me that we would either have to be a network - like a digital version of ESPN for esports - or we would have to make a game,” he added. “The latter goes back to our original business plan, when we started to raise money the first time - unsuccessfully - one of the ideas we had was to develop an esports game. We had a league but depended on others for the game.

“As we were having that conversation, Bobby Kotick [Activision Blizzard CEO] called me,” he continued. “We had highlevel, ongoing conversations. He had been watching us and thought we were building a big business, but we didn’t own a game and we were going to need to.”

Once MLG had successfully boarded Activision Blizzard and the team took on positions at the game developer, a new challenge presented itself for Sepso. Having observed many sports leagues in the early days of MLG, and having isolated a weakness for tournament organisers in that they typically don’t own part of the value chain, he sought out to address that sore spot.

“I firmly believed that the NBA and NFL franchise system is the absolute best commercial system for sports,” Sepso explained.

“I fundamentally thought if you could match what MLG had in league operation capability, media production and distribution capability, and understanding the audience with a big portfolio of games, you could create franchise leagues around each of the games,” he added. “This is what led to the acquisition talks and, eventually, folding

MLG into a division that I ran and what led to the Overwatch League and Call of Duty League.”

It didn’t take long at all for Sepso to dive head-first into this new venture, quickly devising an area he would address for the foreseeable future. On his very first day of work at Activision Blizzard, he was tasked by Kotick to create an NFL system and ESPN system for video games.

“I didn’t create the Overwatch League, I helped create the blueprint for what it was going to be and helped introduce the concept into the entire company and then brought in the people that could execute it,” Sepso explained.

“Having that launch and being successful was great, but I didn’t want to keep doing that,” he said. “That’s what I went there to do and I still had half my contract left. Bobby told me to prove it works by building the commercial team. It was wildly successful right out of the gate before a match was played purely because of the structure.

“The franchise system worked, we sold a ton of sponsorships and made it commercially successful, and we thought all of the other game publishers would do the same - Riot Games produced the LCS and LEC not long after,” he concluded. “This is where the idea of Vindex came from.”

Vindex was introduced to the world in the latter half of 2019, defined with somewhat-vague terms that weren’t thoroughly explained to those inhabiting the esports landscape. Upon speaking with Sepso, it became suddenly apparent as to the gap he and DiGiovanni are looking to fill with the company - and

it does indeed link back to MLG and its eventual sale to Activision Blizzard.

“If all intentions are on pro leagues and publishers are pursuing them, we can provide creative services, strategic services, technology, and broadcast capability; it requires having one partner that can execute globally,” he explained.

“We can solve a lot of the complex problems but it’s going to require a lot of capital,” Sepso added. “I had a background thesis of starting by building and aggregating the best production studios. Being able to invest in Adam [Apicella] when he pulled his team out of Activision Blizzard [to create Esports Engine] and acquiring Next Generation Esports were the foundational elements that set off the Vindex strategy and allowed us to raise $80 million.”

Now that Vindex has laid its foundation by bringing on much of the original MLG team, as well as other experienced individuals in the production space, it’s time to move onto the next phase of Sepso and DiGiovanni’s master plan.

“Now we’re in the midst of getting into the second part of the strategy,” Sepso explained. “We’re continuing to grow the solutions business and now we’re investing capital and operation expertise in helping to organise and make sense of amateur esports systems.

“That’s the next step for us.”

AUTHOR Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

Ambitious growth and competitive success - G2’s past 12 months

Lindsey Eckhouse

Director

Commercial

G2 Esports

rom competing in the League of Legends World Championship grand finals to hoisting the trophy at Rainbow Six Siege’s Six Invitational championship, G2 Esports experienced competitive success across multiple games in 2019.

Fuelled by in-game triumphs, the European organisation experienced considerable growth during the year, as well, signing new partners such as Red Bull and MasterCard and raising more than £21 million in investment. A large chunk of that funding came near the end of the year, as G2 announced a $10 million (£8.07 million) investment from Alibaba Group co-founder and Brooklyn Nets owner Joseph Tsai, which would help fuel the organisation’s plans for global expansion - particularly in New York.

Although tempered by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, G2’s success has continued into the early months of 2020, sayd Lindsey Eckhouse, the team’s Commercial Director. The Esports Journal spoke with Eckhouse - who joined G2 from the NFL at the start of 2019 - about the team’s 2019 growth, New York plans, and their ambitious vision for the future of the organisation.

ESJ: How has your first year-plus in esports lived up to your expectations coming into the industry?

Lindsey Eckhouse: I’m not sure I had any expectations, but I would say in general, the industry has been much more welcoming; people have really embraced me coming in as an “outsider” from traditional sports.

I think one of the best things about G2 is how many endemic esports or gaming people we have in the business, and still how open they were to working with me and bringing me up to speed,

and helping me learn while also taking onboard some of my different points of view. That has been really surprising.

Beyond that, I would say the overall professionalism in the industry. When I was coming in, everything seemed so “Wild Wild West” and this blank space. While that can be true in certain esports, in a lot of what G2 competes within and with a lot of the teams we field, the level of professionalism is actually a lot higher than I anticipated - in terms of everything from league structure to production of major events and tournaments to how G2 itself has structured itself as a business. I think it is a real testament to the ecosystem and where it is in terms of development.

ESJ: Commercially, can you talk a bit about the growth that G2 Esports experienced last year and so far in 2020?

LE: We had a really, really strong 2019. We certainly benefited from a ton of momentum through competitive success that we were able to realise, which was great, and we were able to transform that into out-of-arena/out-ofgame results.

We welcomed MasterCard, Red Bull, Dominos, and Hdac Technology as new partners. We renewed all of the partnerships that we wanted to renew, and saw 100% renewal rate across the board from where we were looking to renew. From a partnership and sponsorship standpoint, it was really successful. And even beyond that, how we’ve taken that forward into this year - coronavirus tragedy aside - we’ve continued to see success in most of our partnerships. While there’s a lot of businesses being massively affected by everything going on with the pandemic, we’re still seeing our partners really step up with us and activate with us, which is great.

And then from a consumer products or merchandising standpoint, we’ve actually revamped our approach to the landscape and mirrored what you would truly see in traditional sports. We’ve restructured how we deliver our products to the fans and how we structure more of a licensee-style business around that consumer products program. You’ll see much more of that as we go into this year.

ESJ: Did G2’s League of Legends success in 2019 have a noticeable impact on that growth?

LE: We certainly benefited from taking advantage of their success from a merchandise and consumer products point of view. We sold Worlds jerseys; unfortunately, we weren’t able to release our “G2 wins Worlds” items, but we were ready to take advantage of that should it have happened. We continue to see momentum and more fans-to-site from a webshop perspective, thanks a lot to that success in November last year.

And then from a partnerships perspective, a lot of our partners definitely benefited massively from the visibility and everything that we saw through the League team. Beyond that, it has propelled us forward. We are having more conversations and are able to talk with a lot more strength to different brands around, frankly, the visibility and activations that they could see through our League team, thanks a lot to their success last year.

Now it’s really about just trying to parlay that into getting the right brand partners involved, which obviously is a little bit more challenging in this current pandemic situation. Fortunately, we’re still seeing a lot of interest.

ESJ: Can you talk about bringing on Joseph Tsai as an investor and what it is that he brings to the organisation?

LE: Blue Pool Capital, which is his personal fund - they invested with us last year. I think from our standpoint, it was a really strategic move for us to work with him for two reasons.

Because at G2, we definitely aspire and are trying to be about more than just Europe. We want to be the top club in the

world, and the most entertaining and iconic esports brand in the world. What Joseph Tsai’s business brings to us is massive penetration and reach within China, and then additionally because he owns the Brooklyn Nets, we have this anchor point and potential collaboration opportunity in New York and in the US. For us strategically, from a market expansion perspective, he adds a ton of value as we continue down that trajectory.

ESJ: What kinds of plans does G2 have for New York?

LE: Right now, we have our Rocket League team based in New York in a gaming house there. I’m sure you’ve read some of the articles out there about our CEO Carlos [Rodriguez] potentially moving to New York towards maybe the end of this year. The timeline might have been affected due to coronavirus, but that’s still certainly in discussion. Additionally, we are looking at doubling down on the creator side of the business. We’re looking to engage with different variety streamers and creators

focused in the US to really propagate our business and accelerate our fan growth there.

We continue to be very focused on the competitive side of what we’re doing. If there’s another team that makes sense for us to invest in, we’ll continue to look for that if that potentially becomes a US-based asset. But we’re also looking more at the creators side and opening up our office in New York in the coming months. I would’ve said “weeks” prior to being homebound, but I think months is probably the right call now.

ESJ: How else has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted G2? How have you responded as an organisation and how has it affected your plans for the year?

LE: It’s certainly an interesting time and an interesting thing to navigate around. I think we are in a fortunate business in esports, more generally, to be a very online-first, digital-first product. A lot of our tournaments, while they might have been postponed or shifted to online-only

Photo by Karina Ziminaite

LEC Spring 2019

formats, we are still getting the value out of those versus traditional sports seeing so much cancelled.

From a business perspective, we’re just kind of adapting. It’s a lot of conversations with partners and a lot of increased activity to get our players and our talent in front of our fans in a more consistent way, to continue to entertain them during this time. If anything, I’d say it’s pushed back some different projects that we wanted to start, just in this uncertain climate, but again we’re fortunate from being so digital or online-first.

ESJ: What is the future vision for G2 Esports and what it is that you’re all building towards?

LE: Our ultimate goal is that we want to be the ultimate esports and entertainment brand in the world, and very much look at ourselves as a media entity.

Competitive success and operating competitively successful esports teams will continue to be at the heart of what we do, and then it’s really about how we create different touchpoints in the entertainment space to continue to take our brand forward.

You’ll see more around entertainment formats from a content perspective, more lifestyle apparel, and more touchpoints that really lean further into that entertainment territory.

An unexpected opportunity for esports

AUTHOR

Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

Moritz Maurer, Founder and CEO of GRID Esports, sits in the office of his Berlin apartment. It has become the temporary HQ of his GRID operations amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place orders. “It’s an unfortunate time globally, and certainly a strange time for us to see such a surge in business,” he remarked.

GRID is a data-as-a-platform company that partners with game

publishers and tournament organisers to monetise official operators’ data feeds to a wider audience, including media outlets and regulated bookmakers. Maurer is a successful two-time entrepreneur, creating and selling his first company GGWins in 2015, and founding GRID with his CTO/co-founder Chris King and COO/ co-founder Thomas Warburton in 2018, as well as VP of Business Development/cofounder Mikael Westerling.

Over the past year, the data company has seen a spike in customers and partners looking to enhance its esports efforts. The new normal of today brings a new set of companies knocking at their door. “The pandemic has put us in a position as a life preserver for our partners and potential partners, both esports and traditional sports-focused,” said Maurer. “A spotlight has been forced on the business we have been building for the last three years, and all of a sudden, we are in the center of the stage.”

The spotlight is not a foreign position for GRID, which has been the exclusive data partner for the StarLadder

Berlin Major in 2019 and FACEIT

London Major in 2018, each with

staggering $1M prize pools and each also having more than one million concurrent viewers throughout each respective tournament.

This year, GRID is earmarked as the official partner for FLASHPOINT, which will be hosting two leagues throughout 2020 with a total prize pool of $2M. GRID is also making its way into the US with its GameCo partnership for sportsbook distribution. With this pedigree of success, and with empty schedules across physical sports, new opportunities are arising for the German data company.

In the time of social distancing, it seems the only fresh competition can be found on Twitch, DouYu TV, and other streaming platforms, and the viewership has never been higher. CS:GO events have posted higher-than-average concurrent viewers, up as much as 27% from last year, while Riot Games’ new competitive shooter Valorant pulled a whopping 1.73M concurrent viewers on its beta launch day, rivaling the publisher’s success with the League of Legends World Championship. The time for esports in the mainstream has arrived in the most unexpected way possible.

Esports has not gone completely unscathed in the current climate. Large

Moritz Maurer

CEO GRID

events traditionally held in stadiums, packed with rowdy fans elbow to elbow, have been placed in temporary stasis as tournament organisers search for solutions. Companies like GRID, which typically rely on major tournament organisers as a source for data, were also initially reeling from the news of cancellations.

“It felt like every hour we were hearing of a new cancellation, and with each cancellation a phone call from a concerned client. We had about a week to put a plan into action,” said Maurer. “We have assembled an incredibly talented team with diverse backgrounds across the entire esports ecosystem, including working on producing tournaments. After hours of running through different options and scenarios, we decided we were in a proper position to create and run an online tournament of our own, #HomeSweetHome.”

A week after that initial meeting, #HomeSweetHome was announced with 16 teams and a $320,000 prize pool. As an online tournament, #HomeSweetHome allows competitors to maintain social distancing while continuing to compete at a high level in front of tens of thousands of fans, while casters and broadcast teams work together from their respective homes to highlight clutch plays and cut to commercials.

“We all rallied behind the tournament,” Maurer affirmed. “Our designers were dropping logos and designs in Slack, our operations were signing up teams and talent, our commercial team was pitching sponsorship packages, and our tech team was producing the official watch page. It’s the kind of work we expect out of each other, but we still get a sense of pride to see everyone grinding together to make this tournament a reality”

GRID’s story of fast adaptation to the new normal is recognisable across all competitive vertices. The traditional leagues airing reruns of historical games are pushing into the esports landscape to capture the same audience. The NBA aired an NBA 2K Players Tournament on ESPN,

and NASCAR ran the iRacing league on FOX Sports receiving over 900,000 live viewers. Seemingly overnight, the virtual products of physical sports became a top initiative for temporarily-shuttered leagues.

“The growth of esports overtime has always been apparent to those involved in this ecosystem, but I have now heard stories of senior citizens in the US keeping their NASCAR routine and tuning in to watch iRacing,” said Maurer. “It is certainly a new demographic that we never thought would be adapting so quickly.”

Esports has become the lifeblood feeding multiple industries, all of which require live programming to be relevant. “We have been approached by media publications to support them throughout this period. Some are well equipped to move on the data and services we supply and we have been working tirelessly to fill needs as they arise,” said Maurer,

when asked about the current trend. “I think they will like the feedback they get. Esports fans can be fickle, but with the right approach they are an incredibly supportive group.”

Esports will be hyper-focused over the next few months, but the real question is the staying power of what has normally been a niche product. Maurer doesn’t seem worried about that prospect.

“Will we see that same grandparent tuning in to iRacing when NASCAR is back in full force? Who can say? But those who may have dismissed esports as not a truly competitive experience will get to know a new side of the game by tuning in for themselves,” he said. “I am optimistic that lifelong fans are currently being created and will join us in supporting favourite teams and players from their region. Regardless of what the landscape looks like a year from now, I am happy we can be part of someone’s day and provide relief during undoubtedly tough times.”

One API. All Esports.

Bayes launching Esports Directory

On its first birthday, Bayes Esports Solutions can celebrate twice. Firstly, because the Berlin-based, high-tech startup has announced that its creation BEDEX, the world’s first independent esports data marketplace for in-game data, can confirm 10,000 matches for this year alone.

With this achievement, BEDEX covers the largest number of professional esports matches with official, licensed in-game data. For Bayes, which has grown to 40 employees just a year after its foundation, this is a milestone on the way to becoming the “backbone of the esports data industry” as Martin Dachselt, CEO, emphasises.

Secondly, Bayes releases the production version of its Esports Directory in April. Dachselt explains Bayes’ latest coup in The Esports Journal.

The Esports Journal: Martin, we would love to hear more about The Esports Directory. Could you explain it to our readers?

Martin Dachselt: Let’s assume that you are a fan of a specific team like G2, and you want to know when G2 is playing next time. Assume this game is being played at an event abroad. You need to inform your job and your family; you need to take vacation; you need to book your hotel and travel.

This situation is very common in traditional sports such as soccer, but in esports, it is not common at all.

If you look at the communication of the tournament organisers, it is often a big mess. Even the webpages are sometimes outdated, and updates only published on Twitter.

There is no real central place at the moment where you see all matches and participating players and teams. This lack of accurate information is not only very difficult for fans and media, but also for the whole industry, as they rely on the data. The betting industry, media, and fans are all looking for reliable information.

This is where The Esports Directory comes in. It provides a central repository for metadata or, as we call it, fixture data. Our vision for the Directory is to be the central hub for all game

Juana Bischoff

Mark Balch

Sven Lund

Wolfgang Siebert

Martin Dachselt

titles, series, and tournaments. Every company that is developing esports apps or websites and every search engine will be accessing our data. Thus, this will create visibility for every esports match or tournament. This allows the demand site to focus on their business idea and not to waste time on scraping web pages. Everybody is doing the same work multiple times, which is a redundant use of time.

For the game publishers and organisers, The Esports Directory increases the visibility of their tournaments. With more than 30,000 fixture data points a year, we already have a large data set that provides a good starting point.

ESJ: What is the vision you pursue with your latest invention?

MD: The Directory will virtually cover all professional esport tournaments and matches. And the best part: it’s free. Everybody who is working with esports information will use The Esports Directory as a central data source. It is contained, maintained, and curated by Bayes and fed directly by the tournament organisers.

ESJ: Why is it free?

MD: Bayes needs fixture data to power our other products, i.e. the live data on our platform BEDEX. We decided that this may be a great way to give something back to the community and industry by making our work - that we have to do anyway - publicly available.

This means that currently, The Esports Directory is being financed through other products and services that Bayes Esports Solutions is providing. If we expand our offer beyond what we need internally - for example, by adding team and player statistics - we will consider a way of monetising.

ESJ: What is the biggest challenge?

MD: If you want to bring different data sources together, the nominator is not

common. “Team Liquid” or “TL”; each team has a lot of different spellings and varying abbreviation conventions. It’s very difficult to merge them together to provide consistent information. One of the big advantages of The Esports Directory is that it unifies all of these terms: What is the match, the game, the name of the tournament, stage, and how is the team name spelled?

We always use the official spelling for a team, but provide alternatives for each team. They are mapped to the same team. So, it’s not only an Esports Directory but an esports dictionary. We call this process mapping.

ESJ: Can you tell us something about the target group of the Esports Directory?

MD: The Esports Directory is targeting everybody who wants to work and display game metadata. Of course, it also supports the organisers so that their tournaments get the maximum amount of attention.

ESJ: Martin, we would like to know what made you found Bayes Esports Solutions

MD: The opportunity came when I was working as CTO for DOJO Madness, now

called Bayes Holding. Since 2015, we have had cooperation with Sportradar, the world’s largest sports data service provider. In 2018, both companies decided to create a joint venture. We wanted to bundle all esports data services.

I decided to take this huge opportunity and build Bayes Esports Solutions, because I was very enthusiastic about the esports sector and really wanted to help solve the urgent industry problems. In March last year, we started the company and by September, we were able to launch the first part of my vision; BEDEX, the world’s first independent esports data marketplace for in-game data.

ESJ: Why did you choose Berlin as the base for your company?

MD: Berlin is a great place to attract talent from all over the world. It’s a very spacious city, and offers a lot of attractions which are loved by young people. And even if prices are increasing, Berlin is still on a moderate level compared to London. And what I like best about it is that the capital is very open-minded.

The details behind the data

AUTHOR

Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

ounded in 2013, Stockholmbased Abios has spent seven years establishing itself as one of the leading data services in esports. Its versatile API provides data and statistics across 19 games and growing, with a wide array of potential uses in play - from betting to media and plenty in between.

The Esports Journal caught up with founder and CEO Oskar Fröberg to discuss the increasing value of data in esports, the impact of COVID-19 on business, and the types of features and services they provide across the esports industry.

The Esports Journal: Can you tell us a bit about what Abios can offer to esports companies?

Oskar Fröberg: The core product is the Abios Esports API which contains everything from play-by-play granularity to match data and statistics. We currently offer live updated data in 19 games, with the top consideration for the near future being Valorant.

Abios offers clients a range of different products in addition to the API including Widgets, Odds, Trading Dashboard, and

Official Server Data. The Abios Widgets have become extremely popular among traditional sportsbooks looking to enhance the esports experience, drive more engagement, and increase audience retention. The Abios Odds is a statistically driven and traded feed of probabilities.

Abios also works with the leading rights holders and game publishers to offer products based on Official Server Data, feeding back revenue to the industry. One way of accessing this

data is through our Trading Dashboard which contains low-delay video feeds paired with relevant data, statistics, and probabilities in order to simplify and enable live trading of matches. The Abios products are distributed to roughly 100 clients in more than 20 countries enabling community sites, news, media, apps, and others to make their brands stand out.

ESJ: What advantages does the Abios API offer over other esports data options?

OF: Abios is the first and only actor proven to deliver complete data solutions consistently and reliably over seven years. The established business and technical platform, in combination with a large customer network across many different industries, is unique to the industry. If clients are looking to integrate a single provider with the full range of esports products, then Abios is the go-to choice.

Abios combines many different ways of collecting data, ensuring that there is always full availability of top-tier data for any tournament or game. The preferred method is to directly gather data from the servers on which matches are being

Oskar Fröberg CEO Abios

played. In order to complement this, due to unforeseeable events and sometimes lack of availability, Abios has its staff communicating and talking to every single tournament organiser 24/7. Abios also uses computer vision technology and machine learning to keep track of data. This tool is able to understand and track important events and data points live from the stream, providing us with a second set of data - which, in turn, allows us to provide live data for all matches.

ESJ: What has the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic been on Abios?

OF: While I am afraid to jinx our luck, COVID-19 has so far only modestly impacted esports in comparison to other industries. Given the fact that regular sports are completely on hold, many traditional sports companies have truly understood the importance of esports, allowing Abios the opportunity to thrive. It has now become clear that esports is not only a tremendous source of revenue and growth, but also provides risk mitigation through diversification for the sports industry.

Many have previously been too busy with regular sports to make the time for implementing esports. That has now changed and I believe that we have seen a secular shift upwards in terms of recognition and acceptance for esports.

As for structural changes to how we operate, we have been minimally affected. Approximately one-third of our employees are already working abroad or from home which means that we have a fully cloud-based working culture.

ESJ: Do you expect to be affected by COVID-19 going forward?

OF: Abios is carefully positioned to weather any future storms that may

come from second or third order disruptions to the esports industry. One of the largest potential setbacks is that many esports companies are still startups and dependent on raising venture capital. If the liquidity in markets continues to dry up and people are unwilling to invest, many esports businesses will be threatened.

ESJ: How has the esports data rights business evolved in the last few years?

OF: The ongoing development of official esports data rights is exciting to be part of. The main use of official server data is currently for live betting products, which are becoming a lot richer than for traditional sports since there is more granular data available to the industry. The question still remains of precisely how much value the official server data adds in comparison to other sources.

Additionally, there are different views on either following traditional sports and selling/buying the rights exclusively or instead staying true to the open and

free nature of esports where everything is available non-exclusively. While many of the data deals at Abios are made exclusively, since we are following suit with other rights purchasers, it is our contrarian view that data could be provided non-exclusively. This would be far better for our clients given the fact that they could choose providers based on reliability of product offerings and avoid having to implement different feeds for every tournament or game.

While the argument could be made from the rights holder perspective that pricing power is higher through exclusivity, we think that increased distribution and availability would be beneficial to the whole esports industry in the longer term.

ESI Gambling Report: Esports betting, a global lifeline for operators

Note:- This piece is an amended version of a piece originally written for Esports Insider in early April

AUTHOR Cody Luongo  @Luongo_Pro

The COVID-19 pandemic has spared few industries. Mandatory stay-at-home orders worldwide have forced people, schools, and businesses indoors to work within a new digital framework. Although for some, there’s simply no alternative.

Casino floors from Vegas to Macau are eerily quiet in the wake of the crisis. Traditional sports leagues and events have been brought to a grinding halt near globally to avoid large gatherings of people, and to attempt to stop the spread. While many favourite sporting pastimes have evaporated, so has that of many sportsbooks’ revenue generation.

Both bookmakers and bettors alike are hungry for wagering opportunities, and esports are close to the only show left in town. Previously sitting in the

peripherals of most major sportsbooks, esports markets are now being viewed as an antidote to the deficiency of sports betting options.

Esports betting has more than just a buzz around it; indeed it has been done for a while, but now there are more eyes on it than ever before. Whilst CS:GO and Rocket League have broken concurrent player records, and streaming platforms

Twitch and YouTube have witnessed sizable increases in viewership, this is a market which is no longer an accessory for gambling operators, but a necessity. With this massive underlying opportunity at hand, the ESI Gambling Report (in Partnership with EveryMatrix) has made its return, emerging from the shadows, to evaluate the current scope of esports betting.

Field of play

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on the world as we know it - the gambling industry entirely unspared. A lack of sports betting markets and the closing of physical casinos has left operators desperate for a solution to bandage bleeding revenue streams.

Esports, although having experienced similar blows of its own dealt by the pandemic, has served as somewhat of an anomaly to all this. The digital nature of gaming has allowed for a smoother pivot to be made from arenas of impassioned fans to an entirely online structure. As we’re seeing, it’s not tampering too much with the product, either.

Despite being equally as vulnerable to live event cancellations, most esports tournaments and leagues have made a seemingly seamless transition to

this new online framework. It’s a case of back to their roots as it were, for some of the more hardened industry veterans at least. Impressively fast turnarounds have seen a quick, digital revival of major tournaments and event series such as the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), ESL Pro League, and the ESL Ones in Los Angeles and Birmingham respectively, to put esports back on the fast track without too much of a hitch.

All things considered, the esports agenda has remained relatively unchanged. With plenty of upcoming events, sportsbooks are developing a serious appetite for esports. On the other hand, bettors are expanding their own horizons by having a flutter on these new markets. Together, it’s a perfect storm - and we’ve done the work to find out just what’s happening in between the lines.

A slice of the esports betting market

Betting on esports is by no means a new concept. The handle has grown alongside proliferation of the sport itself, with the global esports betting market forecast to reach $17.2b by the end of 2020, according to Wholesale Investor. Bubblings of esports in the gambling world have grown to overflow the chalice of conversation; and as we’ve learned, the current rise of esports betting is more than just talk.

Bookmakers are starting to explore the competitive gaming category, while established esports books are seeing massive surges in activity. On March 18th, esports betting platform Luckbox reported a 54% upswing in new player registrants following cancellation of the English Premier League. In conversation with Luckbox CEO Quentin Martin, told Esports Insider:

“The uptick is across the board and globally. As well as an increase in registrations, we’ve noticed an increase

in average bet size - almost double since February. Almost every KPI is up during the past fortnight,” Quentin added. “This coronavirus outbreak is clearly going to make things challenging for many companies and those of us in esports are very fortunate that, in the main, business is able to continue pretty much as usual.”

Key crossovers between esports and traditional sports such as the iRacing NASCAR Pro Invitational are being brought to life with tremendous success and to great fanfare to boot. These collaborations are putting esports in the public eye, and its betting precinct is beginning to see the benefit. According to Rivalry’s Chief Marketing Officer, Kevin Wimer, these activations are unlocking the “immense potential of esports.”

“Mainstream media is putting out headlines on esports being the only sport now, and on our end we have seen traditional sportsbooks that previously were not too active marketing in esports coming downstream and looking to get involved,” Wimer told Esports Insider “Opening up the immense potential of

esports to a whole new market, who is almost forced to pay attention with no traditional sports going on, is certainly a bit of a catalyst for the entire industry.”

Where’s the movement?

The trio typically referred to as the ‘big three’ - CS:GO, League of Legends, and Dota 2 - combined accounts for 85% of the esports betting handle, according to Narus Advisors and Eilers & Krejcik Gaming. But to those foreign to esports, more attractive betting opportunities lie within secondary competitive titles as esport betting aggregate platform SickOdds CEO and Founder Tom Wade explained.

“Second-tier esports titles such as Rocket League, FIFA, F1 Esports and Call of Duty

Quentin

Martin

CEO Luckbox

have all seen traffic increases of over 200% throughout the platform over the past two weeks.” Wade said. “This acts as a great catalyst and ‘gateway drug’ into esports and the betting that comes with it.”

Malte Hegeler, Head of Product Development for OddsMatrix noted seeing a similar trend. “In the past weeks, we have witnessed incredible growth of these titles (FIFA & NBA 2K), making up 80% of all bets we’ve seen in esports. This is mainly because crossover from traditional sports is excellent and bettors can easily understand that the offered betting markets and formats are the same as in the real sports. Esports now adds 45% turnover on top of the traditional offering, and it’s growing. For bookmakers, the adoption rate of FIFA and NBA 2K among traditional bettors is a blessing during this crisis. We actually see players betting more often as FIFA matches only take between 8-15 minutes while a football match lasts close to 2 hours.”

Traditional punters may have not been averse to the idea of wagering on esports as much as the current absence of sports has pushed them across the bet slip finish line. The United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC) licensed esports bookmaker Midnite for example told Esports Insider it has experienced its “strongest month yet.”

“All the attention has shifted to esports with sports being postponed. Even the heavyweight sportsbooks are pushing FIFA, ESL Pro League, and other esports,” said Midnite’s Founder Nicholas Wright “With more fans at home and watching esports, we have seen our strongest month yet. There is no tunneled focus on specific esports titles, but we’ve seen a lot of interest in CS:GO, League of Legends, Rocket League and Call of Duty when matches started to operate again. Now that we have launched our public

beta we have seen a rise in accumulators and Match Winner markets, which are more appealing to our casual users.”

Clutching onto the opportunity

It would be wrong to say operators are capitalising on the current crisis situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic; in the same breath, operators with online offerings are attempting to strike while the iron is hot. The UKGC has reported a rush of activity over the last several weeks, prompting them to issue a pair of warnings to its licensees to act responsibly and nurture their consumers.

Though a number of operators are struggling to survive the times, findings show bettors are risking more frequently while staying indoors at their homes. Given the situation at hand, the time is ripe for esports betting; and for a few, the stars have aligned perfectly.

Esports data platform GRID and Las Vegas-based gambling company GameCo formed a powerful partnership on March 25th to bring esports betting products to North American casinos. The collaboration will see GRID’s esports data and streaming solution integrated into GameCo’s Video Game Gambling Machine offerings and partner casino destinations, both land-based and

The framework is said to allow the pair to “establish the landscape” for esports betting products in North America. More impressively, GRID founder and CEO Moritz Maurer believes the current surge in interest and demand will “be a brilliant driver for esports as a whole.”

“I think betting done the right way can be a brilliant driver for esports as a whole. It has proven already as a massive factor for sustainability,” Maurer said. “The ecosystems thriving the most - they all have a flourishing betting segment and if it’s the right balance between oversight, control, and regulation but also the ability for brands to properly enter, I think it’s a very positive thing as a whole.”

In February, betting media group Better Collective made a big splash with its acquisition of Counter-Strike news hub HLTV.org in a deal said to be worth £29.7 million. Sporting an impressive portfolio of iGaming brands under its umbrella, HLTV.org would arrive at Better Collective at a time when esports is on the cusp of explosive growth. Affirming its current prosperity, Better Collective CEO & Co-founder Jesper Søgaard told Esports Insider he expects the market will accelerate during this time.

“Esports is a sport that is growing in interest and already has an underlying strong growth. We expect this growth will continue, also in a long-term perspective. When traditional sports across the world are cancelled due to the pandemic, bettors to some extent turn to other sports and events to place bets. In the short term, we therefore expect betting on esports will grow faster than otherwise would have been the case.”

Moritz Maurer CEO GRID

“Before the acquisition of HLTV.org, Better Collective had a limited exposure towards esports. However, here we could already see a growing interest in our esports content. Data and research show that esports in general is growing rapidly

in interest and the same goes for betting on esports.”

By some measure, this extension is already visible. In the United States, the Nevada Gaming Control Board has approved the state’s licensed sportsbooks to wager on ESL Pro League Season 11: North America and ESL Meisterschaft across three wager types. Sports betting company William Hill has already notified the Control Board of its intention to accept bets on the events. Soon enough, a majority of gambling stakeholders will follow.

United States regulatory guidelines position esports in a way which makes approving wagers a toilsome endeavour to navigate. Under the current framework, each esports event requires separate licenses and approval processes to accept bets. While historically, these one-off exemptions have been few and far between in the US, the aforementioned two arrived within one week of each other. Rahul Sood, Co-founder and CEO of esports platform Unikrn explained “regulators are willing to move quickly right now,” in a Legal Sports Report interview. Sood is

well aware, because as he told Esports Insider, his “phone has been ringing off the hook since it started.”

“I think you’re going to see states like New Jersey kind of adopt it and then other states will follow. It will become a snowball effect eventually,” Sood said. “With all these operators pushing on it, they’re doing a lot of the leg work to get [esports] where we need to go. So, I think it starts in New Jersey and then the dominoes will fall from there.”

For better, or for worse?

It’d be impossibly naive to predict where exactly esports betting is heading from here. For better or for worse, the gambling industry is, as Sood explained, moving very fast to advance esports betting into a working position.

One shared sentiment is that this market should be approached carefully.

In speaking with Esports Integrity Commission’s Ian Smith, on the subject of integrity and player protection, similar undertones of caution and vigilance were present.

“We’re at the beginning of an exploration of what works and what doesn’t. But the key question is: what events, what leagues, what tournaments, what games are safely presented in a way that makes them a reasonable risk for a betting operator or regulator,” Smith told Esports Insider “The issue of integrity within that competition will be a hell of a long way down [the operator’s] list of priorities. And while some will address it, others won’t because there’s so much urgency. And when you put urgency alongside ignorance, you don’t generally get a good result.”

At the traditional sportsbook and casino level, a multibillion dollar business has been stripped of its primary product. With the volume of operators posting diminishing revenues on a weekly basis, we don’t have to assume they are feeling the heat - they have been thrown right into the fire.

During a critical time where betting operators are gasping for air, esports is, for some, one of the last products left to grab a hold of. The opportunity shouldn’t blind those at the helm, though. Smith for one, acknowledges the proliferation of esports betting places a “heavy responsibility” on ESIC

Having already grown at a lightning pace over the last several years, the esports industry has just taken a double espresso and a Red Bull. But is the industry’s betting district moving too fast for its own good?

Ian Smith Integrity Commissioner ESIC

The lines between esports and traditional sports continue to blur. Storied clubs such as FC Barcelona and the Golden State Warriors have dedicated esports divisions, NBA and F1 teams have esports players representing them in official leagues, and the ownership groups behind the likes of the New England Patriots and New York Mets have splashed out tens of millions of dollars on franchise slots in the Overwatch League.

With the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing measures putting traditional sports leagues on pause for the time being, there’s even more crossoversuch as NASCAR drivers competing in iRacing, NBA players facing off in NBA 2K20, and hockey legends Wayne Gretzky and Alexander Ovechkin competing in NHL 20 for coronavirus relief.

Charging hard into Irish esports

Amidst all this, another legendary traditional sports entity has entered the esports world, albeit on a more regional scale. In mid-April, Irish team Munster Rugby announced that it had partnered with Phelan Gaming, which would be rebranded Munster Rugby Gaming Phelan has been arguably the only significant esports organisation to date in Ireland, and now will go forward with the backing of The Red Army.

“Our TV audience is gradually getting older, and that’s the same across all audiences. That’s not a negative thing in its own right; our TV numbers are still very strong,” Enda Lynch, Munster Rugby’s Head of Enterprise, explained to The Esports Journal “We saw an opportunity to bring our brand to an age profile and an audience that knows… in an Irish context, they’ll know who we are, but they’re not engaging with us day-to-day.”

Lynch’s role with the team is to look for new business opportunities outside of on-the-pitch competition and everything tied into that. Previously, the team established a High Performance Leadership Programme - an executive training initiative - in collaboration with the University of Limerick, where its rugby team trains. Esports, on the other hand, targets a much different and broader kind of audience.

“This is just another brand extension for us, and a way of creating potential revenue opportunities that are not aligned directly with our core product and on-pitch results,” said Lynch. “More and more sports teams are beginning to look towards that. They have a brand that is loved and admired by their own fan base and maybe people around the country or even around the world in some places, yet they rely entirely on on-pitch performance for those results. You’ve got to wean

AUTHOR

Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

Enda Lynch

Head of Enterprise Munster Rugby

yourself off of that, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Esports has been on Lynch’s radar for some time, and at a Munster Rugbyhosted event in New York City in 2018, he had a chance to speak with other team owners who had invested considerable amounts of money to secure esports franchises. The rugby world’s tighter margins made that sort of approach impossible for Munster

“I realised that there was a quantum of money required at the top end which we were never going to have,” said Lynch. “What we did have was a great brand that could help a team that was upand-coming become more attractive to supporters and sponsors alike… a team that didn’t necessarily want to just hand over the lock and keys to somebody, but wanted to grow with the brand.”

“We started talking to Phelan—they’re the only Irish esports team of note that has competed at any decent level across any of the leagues and any of the formats,” he continued. “They were doing quite well, but they wanted to scale up in terms of their ability to attract sponsors

and appeal to more people in Ireland, and bring the gaming message to more people in Ireland. We have the capacity to do that with them.”

Discussions began at the start of the year, and they were about to put pen to paper and finalise the agreement when the COVID-19 pandemic struck Ireland. According to Lynch, having that brief pause and seeing the greater mainstream media focus on esports led them to reassess some aspects of the partnership, ensuring that it was ideal for both parties.

“It gave my legal team and I an opportunity to really think of the structure of the deal we wanted, what was best for Phelan, and what was best for us, rather than rush into something just to get it out before the end of the rugby season. It gave us a couple of extra weeks to really look at what was best for all of us in the new climate,” he said. “The relationship has come to fruition at a really challenging time, but a time that allowed us to just get it right.”

Munster Rugby Gaming will compete in Riot Games’ new Northern League of

Legends Championship league, operated by DreamHack, which features teams from the UK, Ireland, and Scandinavian countries. Longer-term, Munster Rugby will work to bring its extensive expertise with sponsorships to the esports brand.

“Nobody’s going to gain value out of this, and we’re not going to gain the right numbers of eyeballs that we want to be in front of, if we’re not helping them to grow their commercial program,” said Lynch of Munster Rugby Gaming

Beyond that, Lynch sees an opportunity for the esports team to benefit from the club’s experience with and access to high-performance training - physical, mental, and emotional. Ultimately, Lynch concluded, this is a first step into a compelling but unfamiliar space for Munster Rugby, although he sees plenty of potential within Ireland.

“This is a toe in the market. There aren’t many teams out there yet who have turned enormous profits, so nobody’s in it for that right now,” he said. “We just want to make sure that we can play a part in growing the esports environment in Ireland and see where we get to.”

A conversation on branding

AUTHOR Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

As the world’s largest esports merchandising company, We Are Nations has worked with a wide number of team brands, including G2 Esports, OpTic Gaming, Origen, and more. Over time, collaborating with so many major esports brands sparked Nations to begin its own internal brand strategy and licensing direction.

We Are Nations is currently working on an initiative to help organisations hone their brand voice and strategy - and while the team isn’t quite ready to spill all of the beans, they did share some insights on their philosophy on branding with The Esports Journal. Here’s what Nations’ Trenton Pierson, and Philip Bartko, who make up the company’s brand strategy group, had to say on the topic.

Pierson: Ever since we started with Nations, we’ve always been this voice of making sure that there is an actual brand direction. What are your core principles to what your brand is? Even when we went over to Riot for the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), it got reinforced by working with a lot of different esports organisations about the importance of what a brand strategy can actually do. There’s examples all over the place of how brands, big or small, can get lost in the shuffle if there’s nothing to cling to. That thing is the brand voice or brand strategy.

Here’s a great example of what we’re looking at here. You can compare other organisations to a team like 100 Thieves. They get brought up all the time, like: “We want to do what 100 Thieves does.” So we ask these teams: What do you see 100 Thieves doing that makes them so successful?

A lot of the time, what they lack in that response is really the fundamental idea that 100 Thieves has defined its brand, given itself brand guidelines, and have followed those brand guidelines from the minute they started. They’ve followed the same exact pattern about how they interact with everything, and they’ve really pushed their core principles on all of the projects that they do.

Bartko: Last year, the most in-depth experience I had was working with the LCS. I got to go into all of their houses, see what they were working with, and work directly with their brand guidelines. Without throwing anyone under the bus or anything like that, the brand guidelines across the board were either nonexistent or not terribly hashed out.

By no means am I saying that Trenton and I are trying to create a branding agency. But one of the things that I wrote in a general assessment about the LCS teams is where they needed help. They needed to go to an outside agency or bring in a professional with experience to help them identify what

Trenton Pierson Senior Vice President of Strategy

their brand is and to help them establish core values.

We’ll use 100 Thieves again as a good example. 100 Thieves is always pointed at as “streetwear” or something like that, but ultimately it’s really, really good merchandise with a really, really strong and direct brand voice behind it. It supports marketing and the merchandise is supported by marketing. Watching and paying attention to who’s doing it right, and finding out how, we can (to a degree) help teams establish what they need to support them in that brand vision - what is going to help them overall to promote their vision and experience.

One of the companies that was working on a brand voice and vision that I liked, and they recognised this in the throes of working with us, was FlyQuest. They might not be the biggest example, but they have a vision and they have core values, and they created a deck that really showed how you would promote and perpetuate that.

That has to be assisted by a lot of other factors, like marketing and a team that can really put that out there and push it, but it was good to see certain brands recognise that and start to develop

something more substantial that fans could really latch onto that was unique in esports. Not just that we play esports or that we’re gamers – something more holistic. Something that targeted us as individuals outside of us just liking video games or esports.

Pierson: FlyQuest targeting and doing the campaign around the tree support - as they get kills and complete certain objectives in the LCS, they donate to help plant trees. What they’ve done with it isn’t just that campaign, but they’ve integrated that idea into everything that they’re doing. Even the jersey feel and look represents their campaign idea. The point that we’ve been trying to push as we meet with different organisations is: you can find what makes you excited as a team or organisation. Find that one thing that people can really stand behind as a banner and push it. UYU is a team that has done this very well. They chose a theme and voice early on and have used it as their guide in everything creative.

Sometimes when an organisation attempts that, they’ll try it for a week and see that they’re not getting the most attraction to it right away, and so they’ll just stop doing it - or they’ll go onto something new and it changes. It’s like you’re attempting to throw something

at the wall and it just keeps falling off. Instead of picking up that same thing and driving it deeper, or re-educating your market and really standing behind a certain idea, you start to see that flip-flop back and forth. Now your fans, followers, and community don’t have that solid banner to stand behind.

An example of good brand strategy is Complexity. When they teamed up with the ownership of the Dallas Cowboys, they made the decision to interlock the two brands through color scheme and logo design. When we talk to the non-esport world, it’s so easy to show the Complexity logo and have people just get it. People recognise them and immediately correlate it to a sports team. It didn’t happen overnight, and to be honest a lot of longtime fans of the team were fairly negative about the changes. They created a strong approach to what they wanted to show the world, and pushed it in every direction. Now I would say they have one of the strongest brand voices in the market.

Bartko: It seemed to me that a lot of brands really had trouble wholly believing that their own brand was cool. It showed every time we did merchandise. It’s always like, “We want merch like this other team.” What you don’t recognise is that the other team is making good merch because they have a really good brand behind it.

I get told all day to create streetwear. What a lot of people don’t understand is that streetwear isn’t something that you create. It’s something that is adopted by cultures. I can copy streetwear, I can look at fashion trends and copy what’s big right now, but it’s really not unique. It might sell a little more or be a little more flashy, but most of the time what they’re asking me to do is break their brand to emulate something that isn’t holistically even them.

Branding isn’t only important for merchandise. It’s part of your

foundation, to bring people back and to provide a unique experience to a fanbase.

Pierson: In esports, you see so much knee-jerk reaction to stuff. Because everything is so very new and it’s a young industry, you see a knee-jerk reaction… and then when that doesn’t go the way that they want, there’s another knee-jerk reaction to respond to the last kneejerk reaction. And it just keeps going. Where it really shows its head is you have these organisations that just have a whitewashed approach to branding: “Give me an interesting logo and we’ll just throw it up all over the place.”

Bartko: It’s hard to say that you want to target esports, because the demographic of people who watch esports and love esports is so diversethe only thing that brings them together is esports. You have so many different kinds of people that watch esports. It’s pretty dramatically diverse, and I think that’s where a lot of companies go wrong. They try to make something that’s “gamer-y.” They pick these adjectives to simplify the demographic, and it’s just not that simple.

Pierson: We are currently working on a soon-to-come project that will hyper-target supporting organisations working in the esports industry. If you’re an outside organisation who wants to come in and collaborate with an internal esports organisation, be that through a marketing campaign, merchandise, activations, or things like that, we’re working on putting together a program that will help streamline that process.

We are under the impression that no one banner covers everybody, but pretty much everybody in the esports space can define their banner and work with other organisations to come together and create cool collaborations across the board. Part of what we’ll be doing is helping these organisations define what that means: What is their banner and where are they going with it?

Philip Bartko Director of Franchise League Operations

AUTHOR Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

3D Trophy Factory

A new vision for innovative, bespoke esports trophies

It’s only natural that esports takes cues from traditional sports, building off of established processes and norms while adapting elements to this modern, electronic world. However, esports need not be tethered to traditional methods when there are exciting and innovative new methods and options, which can better represent the dynamic nature of competitive gaming.

One such example is trophies. While many esports tournaments have riffed off of the classic glossy metal cups and saucers seen in traditional sports, we’re seeing a greater push to award more charismatic and original designs -- ones that better represent the game in question, the publisher, the sponsor(s), or all of the above.

Belgian company 3D Trophy Factory is one of the companies leading the charge on that front, embracing techniques such as 3D printing and laser cutting to bring fresh designs to life. Formed in 2012, 3D Trophy Factory has worked across a number of industries, creating bespoke trophies for competitions, companies, and employee recognition purposes--but its esports work has significantly ramped up of late.

The company’s work has been seen in a number of high-profile events. One key example is for the most recent ESL Pro League season for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. While previous ESL Pro League seasons featured a more traditional-looking cup design, ESL sought to present a trophy that better aligned with its recent rebranding effort. The result strikes a distinctive silhouette, a swirl of gold and black adorned with the league branding.

Another standout example is for the GLL Grand Slam: PUBG Classic for PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, which spotlights the potential to utilise in-game assets to produce a trophy unlike

Riot Games Premier Tour

any other. The large, golden trophy is built in part from actual in-game assets from the battle royale shooter, with four of the familiar soldiers hoisting up a large supply crate. FaZe Clan, for their part, then hoisted the trophy onstage following their decisive win at last summer’s tournament.

“You have more freedom to actually capture the shapes that you see in the game,” asserted 3D Trophy Factory’s Business Development Manager, Zorko Huljic. “This can be captured easily in our trophies thanks to the freedom of design with 3D printing.”

Whether a client already has a vision for a trophy or needs some design guidance, 3D Trophy Factory works closely with tournament organisers to develop a bespoke award. Following an initial briefing, the company produces sketches and renders as the two parties collaborate on a shared vision. Following design approval, Huljic says that it takes between three and four weeks to deliver the final product, depending on the complexity and chosen materials.

“In terms of lead time, by using 3D printing, it’s faster than traditional metal forging or injection molding,” he explained. “Those are some of the benefits we offer in our product, but it’s really custom work. That’s really important.”

In addition to a faster turnaround than traditional methods for large-scale trophies, there’s also potential for cost savings in the process. Additionally, 3D printing is an eco-friendlier, additive process, as it builds up from nothing rather than carving away material -plus unused material can be reused in another run. And materials are made from castor oil, a biological source that can be renewed as fast as it is used. 3D Trophy Factory delivers a level of polish far beyond what hobbyist 3D printers can manage.

“It’s reasonably priced, but it’s a premium product,” said Huljic of the company’s work. “It’s printed with industrialgrade printers with SLS laser sintering technology.”

The distinctive results have also been seen in Riot Games’ League of Legends Premier Tour in Germany, including a

trophy with a golden scepter surrounded by flames. 3D Trophy Factory also produced trophies for Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege French League, for Red Bull’s Untapped tournament for Magic: The Gathering, and Game Insights’ Guns of Boom tournaments.

Even with such a broad array of tournament trophies in its repertoire, 3D Trophy Factory aims to expand into even more games in the future. The company can provide custom engravings, deliver variations for different tournament placements, and embed branding within any design. Huljic says the company has the experience and knowhow to handle the entire process from concept to execution, including packaging and flight cases, making it a one-stop shop for bold, modern esports trophies.

“We can challenge the classical trophies,” he affirmed, “and produce something really original and unique.”

Live events might be postponed or cancelled in the short term due to COVID-19, but esports tournaments still rage online. 3D Trophy Factory remains operational, providing trophies that can be shipped directly to winners. While the stage is not currently available to players, the company envisions an opportunity to highlight remote winners on streams and honor top leaderboard competitors with physical rewards for their skills.

Photo by Bart Oerbekke

GGL Grandslam PUBG

Image by GLOOT

Are you sitting comfortably? Herman Miller sets its sights on esports

Picture a typical gaming chair. Tall, flared seats, flashy colours, a couple of pillows for support and a logo behind the head. The brand could be DXRacer, Secretlab, or a variety of other companies, but generally, the design stays similar. The chairs are ubiquitous across esports stages, Twitch streams, and team facilities.

But despite their ubiquity, many gamers don’t feel like these chairs are the best for their posture, and doctors agree. “You can sit in an IKEA kitchen chair and not have back pain if you have proper posture,” said Dr. Lindsey Migliore, a licensed doctor who provides health tips for gamers, when speaking with The Esports Journal “But for most of us, it’s hard to remember to have good posture. Chairs that set you up with

incorrect posture like racing chairs can lead to bad ergonomics. So, while the most important part is self-awareness and correcting posture yourself, chairs definitely play a part.”

The racing chair is a common name given to gaming chairs as they share similarities with the chairs often found in race cars. However, those same characteristics that make chairs great for race cars don’t translate over to gaming.

“Racing chairs were designed for race cars,” Dr. Migliore explained. “You sink into them so when you make a sharp left turn, the seat keeps you in place. The goal was to keep the driver safe and secure. That’s the opposite of what you want when you are sitting at your desk. You want to be able to readjust your posture,

you want to be able to sit up straight. Something as simple as the hip height and knee height can have long-lasting effects.”

So, if other chairs promote better posture, why does seemingly every Twitch streamer have a gaming chair? “Chairs are objectively one of the most boring [products] on the planet,” Erik “DoA” Lonnquist, a freelance esports

AUTHOR Mitch Reames  @Mitch_Reames

Dr. Lindsey Migliore

commentator (ex-Overwatch League), told The Esports Journal “So a chair company tried to figure out how to open up the gaming demographic and the answer was to just make the chairs look cool. And they succeeded. It looks cool to be sitting in a race car style seat, the aesthetics are really cool.”

But every year, gaming pushes further into mainstream culture and the gaming generation gets a little bit older. For a 16-year-old Call of Duty player, posture may not cause any backaches. Now, for the gamers who have been grinding into their late 20s, suddenly posture and health become more important.

“Ultimately, health is more important than coolness,” Lonnquist continued. “I’m in my late 30s, and suddenly a chair that looks cool isn’t quite as awesome as a chair that doesn’t make you end each day in horrible pain.”

Esports companies in the last few years have focused more on player health. Every new training facility touts how it will help players train longer. In Complexity Gaming’s GameStop Performance Center, player health was a crucial aspect of the new facility. CEO Jason Lake first founded Complexity Gaming in 2003, now it’s one of the longest-running esports organisations in the world.

“I break down esports history into three segments,” Lake told The Esports Journal. “Esports 1.0, gamers lived in their moms’ basements and saw teammates at a few tournaments a year. Esports 2.0 was the dawn of the gamer

house era, where we started taking things more seriously. But the problem was, it just wasn’t healthy living with coworkers all the time.

“Now we are entering Esports 3.0. Our gamers live in luxury apartments near the headquarters, they get nutritious food at the Dallas Cowboys training table, and we get medical services done by the sports hospital across the street.”

Jason Lake Founder Complexity Gaming

suited towards the average gamer’s price point.”

Beyond just the price, there’s also the marketing to consider.

“Gamers have been sold a false narrative. They’ve been deceived,” Lake said. “A clever marketer had a lot of these extra racing chairs and decided, ‘Hey, if I call these gaming chairs, everyone will start buying them.”

The steps being taken at Complexity Gaming are also happening at other esports organisations, but Lake took the focus on player health a step further by partnering with Herman Miller. A legacy furniture brand, Herman Miller has been supplying offices with chairs for decades before esports ever existed.

Now, that experience doesn’t come cheap. The lowest price for any Herman Miller office chair is $495 (£400). The “Embody” chair that Lake was sitting in during this interview retails for $1,595 (£1,288). That’s just slightly out of the average gamer’s budget. For comparison, the most expensive chairs on DXRacer and Secretlab are about $800 (£646), but most gamers are sitting in the $300 (£242) models.

“Some of the Herman Miller products are obviously more than the average gamer will want to spend,” Lake said. “We are doing some research with Herman Miller to design an ergonomic chair that’s more

Gaming chairs were first to the scene and carved out a lucrative niche. The chairs generally look sleek. Add in partnerships with major esports companies and further customisation and the appeal to gamers is obvious. Secretlab has chairs branded with everything from G2 Esports to Game of Thrones and Overwatch.

The marketing tactics show how to connect with gamers. For office chair brands to truly take over some of the gaming chair market share, they will have to focus on tailoring the products for gamers.

In early 2020, Herman Miller partnered with Logitech G, the company’s second esports move. Herman Miller’s entrance into esports is part of a larger battle of endemics vs. non-endemics, although that’s a topic for another time. One thing’s for sure, though: Herman Miller has a huge task at hand, but it’s picked the right sector to really make an impact.

Erik “DoA” Lonnquist

Embody Chair, by Herman Miller

ESI Connect sits in-between the current esports rights holders (from teams, to tournament organisers) and those on the outside looking in from brands, to suppliers and investors.

Acting as a bridge between these; ESI Connect will evaluate what you seek to do, propose the best fit, initiate the right contacts and support you in the delivery of your plans.

For more information reach out to info@esportsinsider.com

A healthier Counter-Strike scene for all

After an incredible 2018 for Astralis in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, I interviewed Kasper Hvidt, Sports Director of the oft-dominant Danish team. Hearing him describe how he brought elements from traditional sports to esports was mind-blowing.

Hvidt played for his National Handball Team in more than 200 matches and also played for top handball clubs around Europe, such as Barcelona from Spain, Lemgo from Germany, and Copenhagen from Denmark, amongst others. He told me that esports needed to copy traditional sports in terms of improving players’ performance by adding healthy activities - and removing the unhealthy ones.

He introduced limited times of training and playing on the computer, and complemented that with physical

training and yoga classes. He also brought in a team composed of a physiotherapist, nutritionist, sports psychologist, and others. But what impacted me the most was what he thought about players’ performance and the importance of eating well… and even more importantly, resting well.

Indeed, rest is something of a rarity for top CS:GO professionals. The CounterStrike Professional Players’ Association (CSPPA) spoke out loudly against the huge amount of tournaments, and how players spent the whole year travelling without much rest. Last year, the CSPPA released a statement in which they wrote: “There is a need to create stability and sustainability in the CS:GO ecosystem to the benefit of all stakeholders. We require an agreement that strikes a fair balance with respect to exclusivity, scheduling of

tournaments, financial sharing amongst the stakeholders, event standards and contract standards, and other fundamental terms.”

Both ESL and BLAST understood that stance and modified their formats and schedules accordingly to help better organise the CS:GO landscape. ESL joined efforts with sister company DreamHack (through shared parent company MTG) and presented the combined ESL Pro Tour. Meanwhile, BLAST moved to a circuit format with BLAST Premier.

The same weekend that news was announced, pro players shared their thoughts with me. Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski, who has played as rifler of Team Liquid since 2015 and won many tournaments in 2019, said: “There are no storylines that come from going to events

AUTHOR Pablo Monti  @PabloMMonti

back to back to back to back to back... so the storylines become, ‘Oh, they won two in a row’ or ‘They won three in a row.’ There are no rivalries, and I don’t like it.”

One step further, Astralis player Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz stated: “It has been quite unhealthy to be a pro CounterStrike player, in my opinion. There’s no one that can travel that much, perform at a top level, and be healthy both mentally and physically. You just don’t have the energy for that if you go to all tournaments.”

Changes had to be made, and they were. For 2020, the CS:GO landscape shows the ESL Pro Tour, BLAST Premier, plus a new player in the conversation: FLASHPOINT. Besides the health discussion, a new topic of conversation entered the scene since FLASHPOINT has a different model in which teams own and run the competition.

Once, Astralis’ Andreas “Xyp9x” Højsleth - also a CSPPA member - told me, “All tournaments compete for the same dates, they all compete for the same players, and they all want more and more.” However, Flashpoint sees a higher revenue share for players than other tournaments.

So the main topic in professional CS:GO has evolved into which model of tournament will prevail or which will be most sustainable. The ESL Pro Tour is different from BLAST Premier, and both are different from FLASHPOINT. While the sale of broadcasting rights changes constantly around esports, teams and players seem to be searching for the right model.

ESL Pro Tour is the historically familiar model, in which almost any team can participate through qualifiers and their ranking. ESL Co-CEO and Co-founder Ralf Reichert noted at Esports BAR Cannes in February 2020: “We wanted to do this in a way that everyone can become a star.”

BLAST Premier has 12 partnered teams and was well described by Nicolas Maurer, CEO of Team Vitality: “We believe the BLAST approach of producing best-in-class entertainment will continue to attract large new audiences as a global series in cool locations, with an innovative format and unique experiences”. Finally, FLASHPOINT brings the team-owned approach, with teams paying a franchise fee to chase a larger revenue share. “Everyone benefits, and I think that is going to be the way of the future,” said Gen.G Co-founder Kent Wakeford

The CS:GO landscape is changing. We have transitioned from numerous disorganised tournaments to three major competitions that themselves compete for the best teams, players, the brands, and the broadcasting rights deals, as well as the goal of being the best and most sustainable and loved format. Time will tell on that front, but in the meantime, players should be at least a little bit more healthy both mentally and physically. And that can only be a good thing for CS:GO in general.

AUTHOR Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

Bo Shen VP of International Expansion and Innovation

Royal Never Give Up

Not giving up on the West

Given how many popular esports teams already exist in Western countries, what chance does a Chinese team have of breaking through and going truly international in appeal? That’s the challenge ahead of Royal Never Give Up (RNG), best known for its successful League of Legends and Dota 2 squads. It’s also a meaningful personal challenge for Bo Shen, the team’s Vice President of International Expansion and Innovation.

“The ultimate goal is also my personal goal,” Shen told The Esports Journal “We want to, through esports, really connect the cultures between the East and West.”

Shen joined RNG in Shanghai in 2018, but previously worked in Los Angeles for Riot Games from 2013 to 15 as a Mandarin Translator/Culture Ambassador. At the time, he worked with the all-Chinese League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) team LMQ to help promote them in the West. He looks back on that experience with mixed feelings.

“That was an experiment that was kind of a failure, because it was a full-Chinese roster at the beginning of the league and the cultural barrier was very tough to break through,” said Shen “Also, I thought there were a lot of different opinions and even prejudice among different groups.”

Ultimately, however, Shen said that they were able to build some traction for LMQ in the LCS, and endear popular players to that audience. Now he’s trying to execute that same sort of philosophy on a much larger scale, with several teams across multiple games.

“Through esports, we can really reach out to different communities, because we play the same game, we have the same values, and we value the same story,” he explained. “That’s a very good way to actually connect people across particular cultures, and invent this universal value to make people of different cultures actually appreciate and respect each other.

“That is also RNG’s goal. We don’t want just to be a very good esports team,” he continued. “We also want to be a cultural powerhouse, and actually connect and make our fans in different countries proud of RNG and proud of what we believe in - and have this universal value that can actually affect and make people’s lives better. That’s our goal.”

RNG’s increasing Western focus has been explored via a number of strategies. The organisation employs an American-raised social media staff made up of people originally born in Asian countries, with a level of multicultural understanding that helps them bridge the gap. Shen said that RNG has also interacted closely with its online community and pushed its marketing budget towards giveaways to reward fans.

The team also frequently interacts with other esports teams, including through social media. RNG has worked with Western teams such as G2 Esports and Team Liquid to help them better appeal to the Chinese audience (and vice versa), and also hosted Team Vitality for a boot camp in China. The meeting was heavily promoted and included a League of Legends show match.

“We prepared a lot of social media posts to make people think that something big was about to happen between Vitality and RNG,” recalled Shen. “When they actually came to China, we had a production team follow them and constantly push out content on social media.”

RNG has major Western ambitions on the horizon, although like the rest of the esports industry, the organisation has been dealing with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shen said that RNG had to lay off some operations employees due to the lack of events ahead, and has implemented additional precautions with its current staff and players - including working in separate shifts and splitting training across disparate time slots.

The pandemic has also impacted some of RNG’s sponsorship deals, which Shen said “were hit pretty bad” by the effects of the pandemic. The organisation has been working with sponsors to figure out other ways to promote their brands in this unexpected situation. “Because we couldn’t do any live events, it’s difficult for them to hit their KPI. We’ve tried to work with them more on the social media

side, because we couldn’t do a lot of live events,” he said. “A lot of our business was cut, so we can use that kind of resource and manpower to help our sponsors and our partners.”

Shen teased something big on the horizon for RNG’s Western plans, however: a collaboration with a yetunannounced Tier 1 organisation, which he called “one of the most competitive and influential clubs.” That’s due to be revealed soon, and it’s possible that RNG could also establish a physical presence in the West at some point down the line.

“Through that collaboration, I think we can be even more active,” said Shen. “Also, probably in the future, we will have RNG teams in a Western country as well. It’s kind of a longshot, though - we are still considering it.”

More than just esports Isurus

AUTHOR Pablo Monti  @PabloMMonti

Esports organisations typically do more than just compete, whether that’s generating content, selling merchandise, or employing a fleet of streamers and influencers. In the case of Argentinian team Isurus, the club also helps nonprofit organisations, holds its own amateur competitions, and, to top it all off, publishes its own comic book.

Isurus just turned nine years old and already is one of the most important and recognised esports organisations in

Latin America, with a presence across League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, and fighting games.

Nearly a decade after getting started, not only has the team’s owner Facundo Calabró grown up, but so has his organisation. Isurus has well-established teams both in Liga Latinoamérica of League of Legends and in the Latin American CS:GO landscape, but nowadays the organisation is much more

multi-purpose outside of solely competing.

The inclusion of Juan Cyterszpiler as Sports Director brought fresh ideas in terms of marketing actions. Last year, the organisation signed a deal with streaming platform Nimo.TV in order to generate content about its League of Legends team, which is now based in Mexico. The team holds events with its audience, who sometimes get the opportunity to play with the pro players. Also, they interact with the team’s

sponsors, such as HyperX, AMD, and OMEN by HP, for example, who host giveaways for fans.

More often than not esports teams are also their own media organisations, and producing content is vital to generate and maintain a fan base in a competitive land grab. One weekly content series that Isurus produces is ‘Swim to Win’, hosted on YouTube. The name is derived from the team’s logo, a shark. ‘Swim to Win’ shows how the League of Legends team lives day to day in Mexico as well as covering its competitive performance.

For almost two years, Isurus had a female CS:GO team that achieved great results in Latin America, making a strong statement about the fight for equal rights for women in esports. Isurus’ commitment to this topic was reaffirmed in early April with the announcement of its female League of Legends team. Two of the players had been involved with the local League male team, and one of them had played in LVP’s Argentina tournament.

Regarding the addition of a female team, Cyterszpiler stated: “I believe that in the near future, there won’t be separated male and female teams, and mixed teams will prevail.” Camila “Epika” Paludi is the team’s mid-laner and has already played for the local male team. Regarding the

creation of the female team, she said: “I’ve never believed that such a big team as Isurus would give me a chance. This is a huge motivation to keep improving and be more professional to face each match.”

Putting esports to one side for a moment, Isurus is evolving the scope of its mission with two other activities. The organisation is hosting a project called Co-Op that aims to help three non-profit organisations. Fans can buy tickets for raffles online, and the money raised is equally divided between each organisation.

‘Alianza x el clima’ works on environmental care, ‘Chicas en tecnología’ seeks to improve technological education opportunities

for women, and ‘FUDE’ seeks to improve the social inclusion of youth through football. The team’s sponsors provide products for the raffles, and even Renault is involved in the project. On December 30th, the campaign will end with a huge stream with the team’s players, casters, influencers, and others.

The Isurus Series is another major activity that the team has been promoting. It’s commonplace to see a team compete, but it’s not quite so common to see a team organise tournaments for other people. Together with GamersClub, Isurus organises a monthly tournament for amateur teams that qualifies the winner for GamersClub’s Liga Amadora. Also, the Isurus Masters will take place every three months with the last three winners and five invited teams.

Isurus CEO Facundo Calabró called it “a big opportunity to see more players that are working seriously, besides growing our brand awareness. Innovation and creativity have always been a part of our team and of the persons that carry on this dream.”

Isurus showcases the growing professionalism of esports organisations in Latin America, expanding its ambitions, and all the while, and ever so importantly, continuing to compete and entertain.

n 2019, Empire International marked a century in the entertainment industry, currently serving as the exclusive distributor of films from Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Fox Bollywood in the Middle East/North African (MENA) region. To celebrate the momentous occasion, Empire made a move that could help set its course for the next 100 years, establishing esports and gaming division Empire Play.

Dedicated to delivering esports and gaming content in the Arabic language, Empire Play uses its broadcast studio to both produce events and localise content from international competitions. Currently, Empire’s key focus is Hearthstone, working closely with Blizzard Entertainment to produce Arabic streams of international events and having its regional events serve as a direct qualifier for the Hearthstone Masters Tour.

“It’s a big thing, because it’s the first time ever in the region in which any full-year esports calendar is covered in Arabic as an official broadcasting studio,” Empire International Esports Executive Edward Kondrat told The Esports Journal. “We hope that it gives a push towards the whole industry, maybe, and other studios appear and other game titles get covered in Arabic.”

Empire Play also handled the Arabic broadcasts for March’s WePlay WeSave! Charity Play Dota 2 tournament, put on in the wake of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) spread. The company is now eyeing a number of other esports games and opportunities as it attempts to increase both the flow and quality of esports events and production in the MENA region.

Kondrat points to a number of factors that could lead to greater esports momentum in the region, including a large population of people playing games

Bringing MENA esports into the limelight

AUTHOR

Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

and the immense number of Arabicspeaking people in the world, as well as prominent pro players in games such as FIFA, Tekken 7, and Dota 2.

However, Kondrat suggests that while there is a lot of pro player talent in the MENA region, it isn’t currently being nurtured. “There are only a few team organizations that are trying to scout that talent and build teams around it,” he noted. It’s one of the challenges that the region faces as it tries to catch up with other parts in the world in terms of esports events, talent, and opportunities. Another issue is a lack of local servers to enable peak performance in some esports games.

“There are definitely multiple challenges that maybe other regions worked through at their initial stage,” said Kondrat “Here in Dubai, we often have B2B conferences where multiple companies and organisations that are involved around esports are voicing out the challenges that are here. There’s lots of them, starting from the servers: only a few gaming titles have MENA region servers.”

It’s still early days for esports in the MENA region, Kondrat suggests, so it’s also unsurprising that brands still aren’t hip to the benefits and opportunities of appealing to the esports audience. That will come with education, he says, not to mention time and proof of local success and strategies.

Edward Kondrat Esports Executive Empire Play

“There’s not yet a well-developed understanding from brands. They’re not yet educated on the aspect of esports, some don’t yet understand the importance or the efficiency of reaching the young audience through esports, thus there’s not enough budgets allocated yet for online or physical events,” he explained. “Also, there are not many experts who can clearly understand their business strategy here in the region. For example, we don’t see a success story of any company that would work here for several years and show success, and show that they know exactly what they need to do to succeed in this industry and in the region.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown another wrench in Empire’s plans, much like the rest of the esports industry around the world, cancelling plans for live events and forcing their team to adapt to the changing short-term landscape. Increased internet usage throughout the region has also put a strain on networks.

“In some countries such as Lebanon and Egypt, there’s a significant overload of internet networks,” Kondrat detailed. “For example, when we recently did the livestream of the WePlay tournament,

we had lots of feedback from players in that region that they cannot really watch the livestream on Twitch, and the maximum quality that their internet is currently able to pull out is 144p. That’s a huge challenge, because a significant portion of our audience cannot actually reach the platform where we’re trying to broadcast.”

Empire Play has responded by shifting tournaments online, having its broadcast talent work from home, and taking part in bringing charity initiatives to the MENA audience. The short term

will undoubtedly bring more obstacles as the world adapts to and overcomes the COVID-19 pandemic, and as Kondrat explained, there are larger regional challenges to work through in the coming years.

Still, he is optimistic that Empire Play is well-positioned to capitalise on the potential for esports in the MENA region, and bring Empire International’s centuryplus of entertainment experience and knowhow to this budding global industry.

“We’re trying to be one of the leaders in terms of Arabic content, whether it’s live broadcast or certain VOD content,” Kondrat affirmed. “We believe that we’ve found our niche and are trying to progress in it.”

Why is paying gamers so hard? Paying your players is made easy with Edge

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As the esports industry expands and evolves, it is gradually becoming more and more professional -- but it still lives up to the disparaging “Wild West” moniker at times. Every so often, an organisation seemingly disappears into thin air with a trail of players claiming unpaid winnings or salaries, or players visibly run afoul of contract stipulations.

That’s where Edge aims to fill a void. The esports startup employs automated smart contracts to ensure that all parties meet their obligations and receive their stakes, and that the whole process is as transparent and effortless as possible.

“Edge is a data-driven payments platform,” explained co-founder and CEO Adam Whyte. “What we do is we make sure that every single gamer gets paid the prize money, salaries, and sponsorship fees they’re promised by tournament organisers and teams, and we help tournament organisers, publishers, and teams manage their contracts, payments, and data in one platform.”

Whyte worked as a sports lawyer between 2009 and 2015, with football clubs such as AS Roma, Manchester City and Sevilla FC, on matters such as contract negotiations, transfer agreements, and sponsorship

agreements. He also argued about 25 total cases before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, FIFA’s Dispute Resolution Chamber, and the UEFA Disciplinary Committee.

He then moved to London and completed a Master’s degree in business and got deep into Blizzard Entertainment’s Hearthstone, logging some 30,000 matches and entering pro tournaments. However, he quickly realised that competing wasn’t his true calling in esports.

“I got tired of losing to people half my age and twice as good as me,” Whyte recalled, so he started helping

Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

professional players instead. “I assisted a UK Hearthstone player in his contract negotiations. I realised that the contract he was going to sign was not a great one. As I onboarded more clients and more customers, I saw that across the entire industry, contractual stability and commercial certainty were nice-tohaves, not par for the course.”

Whyte’s initial efforts ultimately gave way to Edge, which he co-founded with chairman David Yarnton. As prize pools swell and more major brands sponsor events and teams, there will be less and less room for esports organisations to be lax about payments and contracts. That’s why Whyte believes that a platform like Edge is essential for esports going forward.

“When you have new industries, you always have volatility. Volatility results in commercial uncertainty and instability, and dilution of brand equity,” he said. “Brands right now want to know that the tournaments that they back and the players that they sponsor are ones that observe their contracts.”

“I think that the industry is not going to stop growing, especially in a postCOVID-19 era,” Whyte continued. “Relying on analogue processes is no longer a viable option because everyone is going digital. Even sending things via post in the mail is more difficult, so we believe that having a digital, data-driven solution for a digital, data-driven industry is the future of it, and there’s no reason that Edge can’t be applied to more industries in the future.”

That’s one side of what the Edge platform offers. The other is data. Edge works with publisher and social media APIs to present key, actionable insights, including aggregate statistics about tournament participants, as well as broadcast data directly from platforms like Twitch and TikTok. It can also

monitor such platforms to ensure that contract obligations are being fulfilled.

Edge’s data storage platform uses immutable technology akin to blockchain, which means that all contract data is logged and permanent. That’s ideal for transparency’s sake, so when a prospective new partner comes calling for contract data, performance metrics, income and expenses, and more, a company on the Edge platform doesn’t have to scramble to pull all of that together.

“It’s an opportunity for a team to say: I’ve got all my shit together. I’ve got my documents in order,” Whyte said bluntly.

After rolling out a rebranding at the start of the year, Edge has big plans ahead.

The company has been onboarding first customers, and in June will begin working with publishers and tournament organisers to manage player and talent contracts, and distribute prize money. And once things start rolling with esports clients, Whyte envisions the platform being useful across other industries, as well.

“After we help to end the Wild West of esports, we’ll be looking to other industries that want to optimise their payments infrastructure and collect more meaningful data on their users,” he concluded. “What Edge is really excited for in the future is being the interface between digital events and fiat payments.”

Critical Force Building grassroots mobile momentum

While mobile esports has a significant presence in Asian countries, it has continued to be a tough nut to crack in the West. We’ve seen companies pour considerable resources behind mobile esports efforts in Western countries, such as Tencent with Arena of Valor and Super Evil Megacorp with Vainglory, without enduring or expansive success. Only Supercell has continued investing on a large scale for titles such as Clash Royale and Clash of Clans.

Critical Force is trying out a different kind of path. After inconsistent esports efforts in the past, the Finnish developer is building towards an esports future for mobile first-person shooter Critical Ops by starting small. While a future of splashy events and professional leagues is certainly a possibility, it’s a far-off one. For now, Critical Force hopes to nurture its competitive scene by empowering community groups and tournament organisers.

The mobile Android and iOS shooter has previously held officially-sanctioned online tournaments, and had an offline competition as part of an Amazon Mobile Masters event. After that, Critical Force partnered with Battlefy to operate its tournaments.

Watkins Lam Esports Manager Critical Force

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“Battlefy was able to really help us manage a lot more things, and at the same time, it was great because they were able to give us more data about how often the users would host and players would play,” explained Watkins “WattieX” Lam, Esports Manager and Senior Community Manager for Critical Force.

After about a year and a half without an esports push, due to the studio refocusing its efforts on in-game improvements, Lam has taken on the Esports Manager role to help guide the future of Critical Ops esports and better communicate the studio’s plans to the community. “Although Battlefy was great to have for our players, I believe that it’s more important for us to be even more connected with our players,” he added.

Right now, Critical Force is purely focused on building grassroots support before considering grander competitive ambitions. A new tournament organiser program will allow community TOs to host online tournaments promoted by Critical Force and backed by in-game credit prizing. Various improvements to

Critical Ops’ competitive infrastructure will also help create smoother and more engaging tournament experiences, Lam said.

“We believe that these organisers are really the foundation of the competitive scene,” he affirmed. “I really feel that this is the first step of the foundation of making sure everything is going well, and that we can make sure to help them grow.”

Following that first step, Critical Force will launch a Critical Ops circuit composed of official tournaments that players can participate in. Lam said that the studio currently has plans to host two seasons of tournaments, each lasting a few months, and then will evaluate next steps after that. He said that the circuit won’t be considered a professional league, but that such a competitive structure could follow if there’s enough interest.

It’s quite a different approach compared to Supercell, which hosts multiple leagues with million-dollar prize pools

and lavish events. However, Lam - who came out of the Critical Ops community as a fan himself - has witnessed the fates of past mobile esports games that have attempted big moves in the West and then faded away. He hopes that a small, centralised, and more gradual approach will help grow Critical Ops esports over time and eventually cement it as a sustainable competitive game.

“Not many people have done it and been able to grow esports to a certain level in mobile,” Lam recalled. “We’ve seen some other titles try, and they don’t have esports anymore, which is really unfortunate. There’s no right path yet on how esports will grow in the West, but I believe the things that we’re doing - very organic, grassroots kinds of things - really help to get players playing.”

“I don’t think anybody has the complete right format yet, but I think the steps that we’re taking are some good steps towards the development of mobile esports,” he added. “There’s just so much potential.”