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NEW YORK — The Overwatch League has planted its flag atop the esports mountain. But just like its twitchy-thumbed superstars, the premier circuit can’t afford to sit still.

Not as long as Fortnite commands the rest of the gaming universe.

The Fortnite phenomenon has put Overwatch in a strange position. The Overwatch League’s inaugural season has been a barrier-breaking achievement, but Blizzard Entertainment’s 6-on-6 first-person shooter isn’t nearly the world’s most popular video game. That would be Fortnite, a battle royale that has transcended gaming and smashed into the mainstream unlike any title in years. Overwatch executives say they aren’t nearly panicked because of one grand gamble: their deep pockets and impressive infrastructure can keep Fortnite from making a successful charge for the crown.

THE LEAGUE

A top-selling game doesn’t necessarily make an elite esport — the latter requires a professional circuit, loyal fans and a product that’s just as enjoyable to watch as to play.

The Overwatch League has set the standard for esports in its first season. Ten million fans watched its opening weekend, and 100-150 thousand tuned in for every second of the regular season. The league’s two-night championship sold out Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, and the opening night aired live on ESPN, the network’s first live broadcast of esports in prime time. The league has a fierce and sizable stable of fans, big-name investors like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the momentum of a monumental first season.

FORMIDABLE FORTNITE

Yet video gamers are clearly more ravenous for Fortnite. The breakout title from Epic Games has 125 million global players, compared to 40 million for Overwatch. Perhaps more jarring, Google searches for “Fortnite” outpaced “Overwatch” 14-to-1 in the week leading up to the Overwatch League Grand Finals.

Fortnite’s crossover appeal is unrivaled, a fact most recently on display when France’s Antoine Griezmann celebrated a goal in the World Cup Final with a dance move popularized by the game .

How could Overwatch not be terrified of a competitor with that kind of organic reach?

Simple: it doesn’t see Fortnite as competition — yet.

“Fortnite right now is 99 per cent a game and not an esport,” said Ari Segal, president of Immortals Gaming, which runs Overwatch’s Los Angeles Valiant. “But I think obviously there’s a path for it to become an esport.”

The distinction is key. Structured, competitive Fortnite events are still in their infancy, and Epic has a ways to go to match the professional experience provided to Overwatch League fans. Epic began that effort by promising in May to offer $100 million in Fortnite esports prize pools — an enormous sum for the industry.

Yet early returns have been shaky, like when the Fortnite Summer Skirmish Series was cancelled mid-play due to technical issues. The tournament has also been hindered by conservative game play, with players waiting until the last possible moment to engage. In a statement, Epic said that it “under delivered” in what was supposed to be its first marquee esports event while laying out plans to improve the viewing experience.

Epic did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

“It takes a lot more than a press release to build an esport,” Overwatch League Commissioner Nate Nanzer said. “I think I can speak as well as most that there’s a ton of investment and planning and infrastructure that you need to build in order to do professional esports at a high quality bar.”

THE GRAND FINALS

Overwatch’s Grand Finals have been a showcase for that. All it takes is one look at the 165-foot-wide, 36-foot-tall LED screen behind the Barclays Center stage — players and fans alike have been in awe of the massive display this weekend.

But it runs deeper than flashy tech. The league’s broadcasts on Twitch have been nearly flawless technologically all season. Its teams have impressive support staffs including chefs, physical trainers and PR managers. Even the in-event entertainment is first-rate: DJ Khaled will perform at Saturday’s championship finale.

Which isn’t to say Overnight is a finished product. There’s work to be done packaging its events, especially for casual fans. Blizzard plans to experiment with its broadcast structure to better serve diehards and newbies alike. Those adjustments began with more explanatory segments on the ESPN show for uninitiated viewers, and the league will use feedback from that to shape coverage for next season.

“What I saw on Twitter was fun,” said Pete Vlastelica, President and CEO of Activision Blizzard Esports Leagues. “I liked seeing the healthy debate between the old-school, old-guard sports audience who wondered what they were watching and then a lot of young sports fans who were very excited by what they were seeing.”

Even as it experiments, everything about the league has the look and feel of a top-notch pro sports organization, and that’s been a matter of investment and expertise for Blizzard and its team owners — a group that includes Kraft, New York Mets COO Jeff Wilpon and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke.

Esports organizations, like Segal’s Immortals, are keeping a close eye on Fortnite.

“Do you have the access to capital and the human resource capacity and the organizational bandwidth to be nimble and flexible to evaluate whatever that next thing is?” Segal asked. “With respect to Fortnite, it’s an ongoing evaluation.”

BUILT TO LAST

At some point, it seems likely that Fortnite — or perhaps another battle royale, like PlayerUnknown’s Battleground — will get there. When it does, Overwatch thinks it’s poised to survive.

For starters, Overwatch the game was built to endure. Blizzard Entertainment specializes in titles with staying power. Its Warcraft franchise launched in 1994 and has remained a hit. Same with series like Diablo (1996) and StarCraft (1998).

That’s the key to Overwatch’s ongoing relevance, according to Jurre Pannekeet, head of esports at market research firm Newzoo. It’s a difficult thing to perpetually innovate and improve a game, but Blizzard might do it better than anyone.

“They have really long-standing franchise with big fans that have played these games for several years,” Pannekeet said.

It’s also possible — some think likely — that the esports landscape can accommodate more than one superleague.

“Certainly, Fortnite is stealing share from everybody, to some degree,” Segal said. “But it’s not just zero-sum. The pie is growing.”

The hope is that players hooked into gaming by the Fortnite experience might shop around for other titles once they’re exposed to esports.

“I think we welcome more investment in the space,” Nanzer said. “And I think esports as an industry is definitely still in the ‘rising tides lift all boats’ phase of our growth.”

Source: https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/fending-off-fortnite-can-overwatch-stay-atop-esports-world

 

• On Tuesday, TSM’s parent company, Swift, announced it received $37 million in Series A funding
• Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Venture Partners leads a group of investors that include three-time NBA champion Stephen Curry and AME Cloud Ventures, a fund started by Yahoo cofounder and billionaire Jerry Yang

TSM’s founder and CEO, Andy DinhCredit: Jamel Toppin for Forbes

Andy Dinh, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of the esports organization TSM, has always been fiercely self-reliant. Since TSM’s founding in 2009, Dinh has worn just about every hat there is in the industry: player, coach, manager, salesman, public relations. But now he’s getting help in a big way.

On Tuesday, TSM’s parent company, Swift, announced it received $37 million in Series A funding. Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Venture Partners leads a group of investors that include three-time NBA champion Stephen Curry and AME Cloud Ventures, a fund started by Yahoo cofounder and billionaire Jerry Yang. The investment also covers Swift’s other business segments, including its influencer content network and its analytic web services like FortniteMaster and ProBuilds.

Dinh, who remains the majority owner and head of the company, started TSM when he was 17 years old using the cash he earned from offering online guides for League of Legends. Wanting to compete in the game, he built a team and put on invitational tournaments of his own. In 2013, as esports became more formalized and the League of Legends creator began running its own official league, Dinh stepped down as a player to focus more on management. His ability to monetize the organization as it began winning championships at sold-out arenas like the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto nabbed him a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Games 2017 list.

The investment is a move long delayed but necessary given the rapid evolution of esports. Last year, when the creators of League of Legends announced its groundbreaking plans to franchise its North American league, it was clear that TSM would be among the initial ten permanent teams. Dinh’s club is the winningest in the region with six championships. But as other esports teams raised venture capital to cover the $10 million buy-in, accepted buyouts or were pushed out by billionaire owners looking to get in on the ground floor of the burgeoning industry, it also became clear Dinh would be the last old-school owner in the league to be independent.

“TSM has always run a very lean operation, so we haven’t set ourselves up to take advantage of the fast growth that this market is experiencing, so that’s what we’re trying to prepare ourselves to do,” Dinh told Forbes. “We’ve got a really good group of investors … it’s going to help us accomplish what we want for TSM.” 

Other investors in the Series A include:

• Telstra, Australian telecommunications
• Steve Simon, owner of Simon Property and son of Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon
• Andre Iguodala, three-time NBA champion for the Golden State Warriors
• Steve Young, Hall of Fame NFL player
• Yifang Ventures, led by Eric Xu, cofounder of Baidu
• Colin Carrier, former chief strategy officer of Twitch
• Walter Wang, CEO of JM Eagle

The capital will enable rapid growth endeavors as well as flexibility to make early bets in the industry as opportunities emerge. The company will use $10 million of the fund for acquisitions and investments in the gaming space, while $20 million will be allocated for both franchising fees and a new 15,000-to-20,000-square-foot esports facility in Los Angeles. It will function as a training place for the organization’s esports teams, a studio for its multimedia content and a way to directly engage with fans. Dinh hopes the facility unites its players across various games to compete at a higher level and to help collectively build the company’s signature brand.

“It’s really important to have one single base where we can build up that TSM culture,” Dinh said.

It’s an especially important aspect of esports. Market researcher Newzoo predicts industry revenue will hit $905 million this year, with 40% of it coming from sponsors. With hazy ROI metrics, brands look to social reach, and TSM is adept at building personalities and communities, with 1.8 million fans following on Twitter, nearly a million on Instagram and 1.4 million on YouTube. Its early bid this year into the billion-dollar game Fortnite about doubled fan engagement. Sponsors include non-endemic companies like Geico, Gillette, Dr. Pepper and Chipotle.

That kind of fan passion and corporate support was especially appealing to lead investor Ethan Kurzweil, who said Bessemer spent a year looking at the esports scene, talking to more people than any other funding roadmap it had before. “It was just really clear Andy was operating at the highest level,” Kurzweil said. “What he had done without any capital at all was two or three times as much as people who had raised a lot of money.”

Another aspect of TSM Kurzweil loved? Its founder’s competitiveness. As Dinh put it, “Second doesn’t feel great to me.”

Update: This story has been updated to clarify Jerry Yang’s connection to AME Cloud Ventures.

Hey. You can follow me on Twitter here.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2018/07/24/tsm-raises-37-million-investors-include-stephen-curry-jerry-yang/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

• In a nutshell, competitors play video games, while being watched by a live audience.
• Millions more watch the games online

This sport will soon be a 1 billion dollar business with a global audience of over 300 million fans. But it doesn’t involve a ball, stadiums or grass pitches.

Welcome to the world of eSports.

E-WHAT?

eSports (short for Electronic Sports) is the name given to professional competitive gaming. In a nutshell, competitors play video games, while being watched by a live audience. Millions more watch the games online.

One major tournament, the 2016 League of Legends World Championship finals, attracted 43 million viewers.

League of Legends is a hugely popular fast-paced action strategy game. Gamers battle to be crowned the best in the world, competing to earn $1 million in prize money.

In fact, winning eSports tournaments can net participants up to $25 million when winnings, sponsorship and appearance fees are taken into account.

The highest earning player, German Kuro Takhasomi, has earned almost $3.5 million to date.

GROWING FANBASE

Fans watch on YouTube’s gaming channel or on Twitch, a dedicated gaming channel on the web. eSports viewers spent 17.9 million hours watching their gaming heroes on those channels in the first quarter of 2018. The most popular game to watch is Dota 2, followed by League of Legends and Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

The global eSports audience will reach 380 million this year, made up of 165 million dedicated eSports fans and 215 million occasional viewers.

In 2018, the eSports industry is projected to generate $905 million in revenue, reaching over $1 billion over the next two years.

China and North America will generate over half of that sum.

Fans buying tickets and merchandise will contribute $96 million.

IS IT SPORT?

Just like traditional sport, eSports has its fair share of professionals, commentators and celebrities.

Prize money is certainly comparable to more traditional sports. The National Basketball Association prize pool is $13 million, the Golf Masters is $11 million and the Confederations Cup is $20 million. eSports exceeds each of them with a total prize pool of $24.7 million.

In fact, Fifa has its own eWorld Cup, where the 32 best Fifa18 Xbox and PlayStation players will compete for the title of Fifa eWorld Cup Champion.

eSports has become so popular, that even the International Olympic committee is trying to understand it better. The IOC and the Global Association of International Sports Federations are jointly hosting an eSports Forum at the Olympic Museum in France.

“The aim of the Forum is to explore synergies, build joint understanding and set a platform for future engagement between the eSports and gaming industries and the Olympic Movement,” they say.

The IOC isn’t the only organisation taking eSports seriously.

The US government has recognised full-time League of Legends players as professional athletes.

But detractors scoff at the idea of calling gaming a real sport. After all, gamers sit still in a chair for hours on end showing only agility and dexterity in their hands, they argue.

But those who play eSports would counter argue that it takes a great deal of skill and strategy to win games. They also point out that they practice for hours a day just like any other sports player, and that physical exertion isn’t the marker of sport. Darts players and snooker players don’t have to move much either.

It may be a moot point. An industry that is projected to make $1.4 billion by 2020 is unlikely to require the approval of naysayers.

Written by Alex Gray, Formative Content.

This article was republished courtesy of the World Economic Forum.

Source: http://ewn.co.za/2018/07/04/the-explosive-growth-of-esports