November 3, 2021 • 39 mins
Esports, the industry of competitive, entertainment-style video game play, is rapidly growing and redefining the gaming industry. Its popularity also raises questions about the future of sports entertainment more broadly. Nicole LaPointe Jameson, CEO of the esports company Evil Geniuses, explains the industry and its potential.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
I'm Noah Feldman Dan Deep Background. Something a little bit different.
I have been watching very closely the debates about the
(00:39):
future of virtual reality and augmented reality. Since the beginning
of COVID, all of us have had to explore making
human connections, having conversations, learning and engaging with others from
our desks, staring at our screens in ways we did
not do previously. That entire process has led me to
(01:02):
think increasingly about what kinds of human engagement can happen
in virtual space. One direction this might take us, and
I hope to discuss this in a future episode, is
the question of virtual reality, augmented reality, and the new
modes and platforms of engagement that will take place in
our lives. Another is to think about activities that increasingly
(01:25):
take place not only in the real world but also
almost exclusively online. Gaming is one such activity. We hear
a lot about the gamification of trading, a topic that
we've done an episode on, and about the gamification of
a wider range of human interactive activities, including coding. But
what about the gamification of gaming itself. What I'm referring
(01:48):
to is the esports industry, in which it turns out
millions and millions of people watch others playing games, either
at an extraordinarily high competitive level for rewards and for money,
or alternatively in an entertainment mode, as gamers who are
particularly clever or sophisticated or knowledge of stream their own
(02:10):
games for the edification and entertainment of their fans. This
is an emergent industry whose participants tend to be young,
and so perhaps it's not surprising that leading figures in
this industry are young themselves. Case in point, our guests
today Nicole La Pointe Jamison, who's the CEO of a
(02:31):
North American esports organization called Evil Geniuses or EG, which
is one of the oldest and most recognizable brands in
professional gaming, or so I'm told, going back all the
way to nineteen ninety nine. Nicole, for her part, barely
goes back to nineteen ninety nine herself. She was born
in nineteen ninety four, which makes her an unusual person
(02:53):
to be running a large and growing organization as a CEO.
To top it all off, she's a woman at an
African American in an industry that tends to be stereotyped
as one for men, primarily for white and perhaps for
Asian men. As you're about to hear, Nicole is an
extraordinary person, and she sat down with me to explain
(03:14):
her industry and what she does in it. Nicole, thank
you so much for joining me. This is one of
those episodes on Deep Background where instead of talking about
some well fummed area where I and the listeners all
think we're big experts, were instead exploring a whole field
(03:38):
of human endeavor that is not actually all that new,
but is new to many of us as observers, and
that's esports as an industry and as a concept. So
I wonder if you would start by just assuming that
we don't understand exactly what esports are, we don't understand
why it is that other people would want to watch
people playing video games, and begin by just explaining to
(04:01):
us what this industry is and why we should start
caring about it. Of course, and first of all, Noah,
thank you for having me. Always glad to bring others
on board to the surprisingly vast and deep world of esports. So,
if you're coming from zero esports is competitive gaming where
we bridge industries that resemble a lot of traditional sports
(04:24):
but also resemble modern day entertainment. And so the best
way to think about my universe I run an esports
organization called Evil Geniuses, is think of us like the
University of Michigan, like UM's athletics department, where they have
basketball and football and soccer that have distinct players on
distinct schedules, and a very robust back office that bridges
(04:48):
athletics to sponsorships, to brand, to health and wellness, all
to support the different players in their seasons. But instead
of University of Michigan, I am Evil Geniuses, and I
have Counterstrike and DODA and League of Legends, distinct player
athletes with distinct schedules, and all of the same back
office needs to support and make sure we are competitively viable,
(05:11):
financially viable, and culturally viable. And it is often surprising
people to hear the level of play for these athletes.
Isn't someone that could just mosey on and say, oh,
you know, I'm pretty good at Mario Kart, Let me
show up one day and be a esports pro. These
are athletes that have typically been playing at the best
(05:33):
level that exists in the world from a long time,
at a young age, and when they come into an
esports organization, it looks like traditional sports. You have training time,
you have physical fitness health wellness time, you have scrimming
and review, and the infrastructure around these athletes and players
is robust and deep, and we heavily invest in these games.
(05:55):
And so a lot of this mirrors traditional sports. Where
I think the analogy falls off, and I don't have
a really good way to paint that picture yet, is
we also have what I mentioned earlier, this entertainment side,
where unlike traditional sports where fans tend to be geo
affiliated or inherited, we are digital and global. Our players
(06:18):
come from all over the world. We're not locked into
a region. I'm not even though we're Seattle based, I
am not the Seattle something. The Seattle eg our fans
are truly global. So many questions immediately come into my mind.
Let's start with what maybe is a silly question, which
is there's a movement from we all play sports outdoors
(06:40):
to we watch sports on television. And you know, a
whole generation, an older generation even than mine, was skeptical
of that saying why don't you go out and play
the sport? Why do you want to sit at home
and watch the sport? And now that objection seems hopelessly
dated because of course as possible to do both, and
televised sports became a vast multi billion, maybe even trillion
(07:01):
dollar industry over the course of fifty years. Are there
similar objections? There must be similar objections to esports saying
that somehow, why are you watching people do something that
they're in fact doing technologically? And is the answer just
sort of grow up? You know, Like that's the same
objection that people made to watching basketball on television and
(07:22):
didn't make any sense really, and it makes even less
sense in this context. I actually think the analogy transfers
really well. Like the beauty of esports, both the athletes
and the fan is that we're young, digital and very diverse,
but the altitude of play and competence at the pro level,
because then these are oftentimes six figure to seven figure
(07:46):
based salaries of athletes. These aren't the run of a
mill picked up off a street corner players. They are
the top thirty in the world. So similarly to why
you want to watch NBA, the depth of prestige and
ability to perform in some of these games is unparalleled,
and so that's exciting to watch. The esports athletes also
(08:06):
play for the same reasons. They just do it so well.
The answer is, they just do it so well, and
the specific skills that they have are some combination of
hand eye coordination, conceptual ability, strategic ability. It's a full
range of skills. Presumably yes, probabilistic thinking, quick communication, similar
to an options trader or a sports athlete. Right, let's
(08:29):
talk for a second about this non locality that you mentioned.
So one of the fascinating things about sports, both at
the university level but also at the professional level, is
that over time it came to be one of the
leading factors in a lot of countries in unifying people
within a geographic area. Right. Originally, the reason you had
(08:49):
local teams is that people had strong local identities, and
people who were starting teams wanted to make money, and
they said, well, if we identified the team with a
place or with a university, then there will be attachment
to it. But then things flipped and as our identities
as members of a neighborhood or a region weakened, the
sports teams became the glue that held us together. In
that sense, what your industry is is about cosmopolitanism in
(09:11):
the deepest sense, right. It's about a world where we
no longer think, oh, I'm from New England, so I'm
a member of Red Sox Nation by default, or you know,
I have to be a Patriots fan and there's nothing
I can do about that because I was born that way.
It's like my religion in your world. I can pick
and choose my affiliations no matter where they are in
the world. So how do people choose whom they're going
(09:33):
to root for and root against? I love this question
because it's surprisingly contentious in the space, especially when talking
to people that come from traditional sports into the esports area.
Is the lack of geo affiliation is puzzling, but I
find it exciting for us because we have a bigger
pie to play from. And that's again where the entertainment
(09:54):
sprinkle comes in. More like WWE than even you know,
the Lakers or the Yankees. The brand identity of the
organization matters, and how an organization presents itself beyond just
what games they compete in, because not every sport team
or organization plays the same games, So there's some fan
stratification by what game are they in. If you're a
(10:16):
Rocket League fan, you tend to not be a fan
of League of Legends per se. And then it's how
does the org represent themselves and some of that, just
like in traditional sports, is a win loss ratio. People
like to follow the winners or they like to follow
the underdogs, So there's that bimodal distribution. But then how
do we and how do organizations represent themselves in the
culture and engage with fans in unique ways. That's the
(10:39):
big why for creating a compelling esports organization with a
distinct set of fandom. One of the things that stunned
me and preparing for our conversation was just the size
of the industry. If someone had asked me to guess,
I would have been off by orders of magnitude. Yes,
it is a huge industry, whatever way you slice the pie.
(11:00):
If it's active viewers on different distribution platforms, because you
can watch esports in a variety of ways, especially if
you have an Internet connection. If you count gamers as
part of the esports industry, people who game, there's more
of those than people who don't game, especially under the
age of thirty, and if you consider the global reach,
(11:22):
especially in the APAC region, the millions of concurrent viewers
you could have at a time in a day is
unparalleled to many other traditional sports. We can sometimes reach
on our peak seasons on social media more viewers in
a day than certain hockey teams get in a season.
And though the fandom the eyeballs are large, what I
(11:44):
find more as a businessperson compelling and exciting is the
dollars are starting to pace and grow to reflect a
lot of the magnitude of sponsorship and spend in traditional sports.
In the esports space, as people start to understand the
true volume of fans that are hard to advertise, too
hard to reach organically in other ways, and where they
(12:04):
are and who they watch. Finding brands, finding distribution platforms,
and even finding linear distribution platforms like TV try to
reach and understand how can they have E sports showcased
is unbelievable, and so I believe there's a new Zoo
study out that shows E sports industries valued a little
less than a billion targeted for next year in terms
(12:24):
of spend and revenue in the space. So it's it's
exciting how quickly. It's growing. From even five ten years ago,
it was relatively grassroots and not well established or defined.
We'll be right back Nicole. Your Wikipedia entry, assuming that
(12:51):
it's accurate, has you as twenty seven years old. Is
that true? First of all, it is true. So how
does a twenty seven year old end up as CEO
of a major company in this developing space? A lot
of stumbling up. It can't have been that much. There's
that's not enough time. So I have a very nonlinear
(13:13):
path into esports, and I would say my age is
maybe surprising for the space, but not completely unprecedented, as
historically leaders and esports either were in esports veterans for
a while, who typically were players and kind of worked
their way up, or traditional sports executives who were plopped in.
That's changed a bit. Prior to this, I actually worked
(13:35):
for an investment firm in Chicago. I focused on distressed
asset turnarounds, which is maybe not a great signal for
those that are more financially savvy understanding my entry into esports,
but EG came to me actually as an investment opportunity.
I was all jazzed for a board seat, but at
the time the company resembled a distressed asset or a
(13:57):
true startup. That being said that, what was interesting about
EG is, despite me coming in a little less than
three years ago, it had been a brand that it
is actually one of the oldest esports organizations in the world.
And that's not super interest in general, but I would
say it's quite insightful for EG and that to exist
from nineteen ninety nine as a then niche gaming club
(14:19):
and survive and bring in sponsorships and keep your brand
and build and grow and build that long term fandom
and survive tech changes, game changes, and still say culturally
relevant was exciting. So from an investment conversion into operating position,
it wasn't that different from things I had done before,
but definitely the coolest operating company I've been able to
(14:41):
get my hands on in my history of ensure tech
and SaaS businesses and hardware technology. But I've always loved
gaming from a personal passion point, so I understood the space.
I was familiar with the space, and I was excited
to help carve out what ought to be in esports
as I wasn't seeing voices or perspectives like mine and
(15:02):
our firm represented in this space. So I'm wondering whether
the sort of stereotypical picture of the industry, which may
not be accurate as heavily male, heavily white, and Asian,
as an African American woman, is that a plus for
you that you come in and say, hey, I have
a different perspective, or is it altogether irrelevant in an
(15:23):
enterprise that ultimately is about avatars on screens much more
than it's about who you are on the other side
of the console. It was a bit of an interesting
challenge more from a personal perspective, as I think you
were quite polite with it. Gaming has stereotypes of who
is a gamer and what do they act like that
are not good? Are not positive? Rife with toxicity and
(15:49):
juvenile behavior, to call it nicely, and coming into a
space where I was different industry background, different in how
I appeared. I was a newcomer into a relatively gate
kept community of who's any esports and who's not, had
personal and professional challenges. But I think that actually has
becomes war cry and how we have been able to
(16:12):
thrive in the past two years and differentiate our brand
and I can't underline that it can't undermine really that
it was easy, because it wasn't. It's truly carving a
path that hadn't been carved. And the anonymity of the
Internet can be difficult to navigate as people love to
(16:33):
use that to their advantage to be toxic. But like
tends to attract like, and I've been able to I'm
lucky that I've had mentorship and leadership, a strong advisory board,
and friends in the space that are excited and compelled
by why and what we do to make sure the
space is safer. So, Nicole, when you talk about toxicity,
(16:53):
is toxicity an existential threat to the esports industry or
to the gaming industry? And alternatively, is the perception of
toxicity also a kind of existential threats separate from the
underlying reality. Oh I love that you've broken it up
(17:13):
into two. So for the former, there is a threat
of toxicity because just like how people tend to make
bad decisions in group think, people tend to make bad
decisions under the cover of anonymity. And we actually we
did a study on this. We partnered with you gov,
a data and survey company, and looked to understand toxic
behaviors and we found that a lot in gaming, whether
(17:36):
it's through harassment or rude language, etc. Is learned doesn't
appear until later in life. But if you know, if
parents don't understand what their kids are doing, if there's
no checks and balances either by the game in the
system itself, that perpetuates and becomes an acceptable standard, which
(17:56):
really isn't acceptable. You can't act like you might in
a Call of duty game in the workplace or in
a group project in college. And that needs to be addressed.
And there's a lot of moving pieces in terms of
who is the address of this problem. Is it parents,
is it developers, is it the content creators? But it's
(18:17):
something that creates tangible and what we found in our
study is we actually it does create tangible negative results
and that people either don't want to, for example, have
their mic on in game and talk, which impedes communication
for certain games and impedes results, which for me from
a team side, impedes potential future talent from developing and
(18:38):
coming into the pipeline. So we care about this because
it has long term material impacts into who is represented
in the space, especially if toxicity is aimed at certain
groups or demographics of people. The perception of toxicity. However,
is also damaging because in a lot of spaces this
has gotten much better. I would say gaming is probably
(19:01):
more inclusive now than it even was five years ago.
Is people are becoming aware and understand that what is
culturally accepted as shifting, but the negative, sometimes misunderstanding of
what the gaming industry represents hurts us from becoming mainstream,
financially viable and supported. If someone is like, oh, gaming's bad,
(19:23):
I'm not even going to listen to what these people
have to say. That closes off the potential for both
us to develop and grow, but that person from developing
and growing, and whether that person is potential parent of
a talent that we'd want to recruit, a sponsorship partner,
a university that is trying to understand if esports curriculum
should be supported, and so breaking down both the perception
(19:45):
and the reality is something that we try to take
a decent stab at as it relates to our wheelhouse
and our expertise, but is a multifaceted problem that I'm
hopeful more and more people as we continue to talk about,
address and try to tackle and solve in their own way,
because what we have found is again the learned behavior
not inherent. I've been very influenced by writing by a
(20:08):
scholar at Dartmouth called Will Chang, who's actually in the
music department. Believe it or not, but he wrote a
book called sound Play, one of his great books, which
is specifically about the use of sound in major online
gaming platforms and experiences. And as part of that account,
he also talks about the whole range of behaviors, whether
(20:29):
they're supportive or abusive, that come an association with difference
with gender, with sexuality, with disability status in the online space.
And one of the things that emerges from his work,
and I'm oversimplifying it a little bit just for our purposes,
is that there's both a lot of the toxicity you're
talking about and a lot of tools for capturing and
(20:53):
pushing back at that toxicity and reshaping and reforming it.
And I wonder, when you think about that from the
standpoint of esports teams and franchises, what are the strategies
that are available to you to say, we're going to
make sure that our organized and our teams are contributing
in the positive way to this stuff rather than to
(21:15):
the negative. How do you make those two things work together.
It's been interesting for us as I've been a pretty
big stickler, and so I can give good examples of
how One of the problems we faced is finding good
talent that want to come into esports because I need
a head of finance. It's really hard to convince the
(21:37):
forty five year old controller at EUY to come on
over to an esports organization that I've never heard of
the space. They don't really understand it. And when you
google gaming and esports, not wonderful things came up about
the stability, the perception inclusion, and so we've been tackling
this through a couple of different ways, some of that
are less sexy than others, but maybe forever all the
(21:57):
listeners rolling their eyes. But the first thing we pushed
was really a suite of back office benefits and support
that emulate what you would find at a lot of
our local peers in Seattle. Benefits, maternity leave, paternity leave,
full suite of healthcare, a lot of the mental wellness
and physical wellness support first of its kind in esports.
(22:18):
And people were surprised, why are you spending on this
esports as sexy? There's so much young people that want
to come in. But if I can't attract the full
multigenerational audience of experience workers, I've already failed in inclusivity
and that hurts our bottom line results. So there's a
lot of programming we put there to ensure we were
getting a wide net of talent. On the competitive side, though,
(22:44):
the esports space has been plagued despite being digitally native,
plagued by lack of good data use in scouting. It's
a lot of who you know who the coach knows,
which becomes an incestuous, self fulfilling pool of the same
fifty people are becoming pro players, which is crazy because
we have such opportunity for talent elsewhere, and so we
(23:06):
are claimed to fame, especially in one of our games,
League of Legends, was we've been using data and analytics
to scout and recruit unknown quantities unknown talent and bring
in and develop up over time talent that we wouldn't
have found otherwise because they weren't already in network. That
also led that same method led to us being able
to start one of the only mixed gender rosters in esports.
(23:29):
So between the back office infrastructure, the empirical methods for
scouting and then of course showcasing where we have wins.
In the education space, we do a lot of K
through twelve programming, do a lot of university partnership around curriculum,
anti toxicity, anti bullying, how to create a good personal
brand for yourself on social media. If the gaming or
(23:51):
entertainment space is important, that investment of time and labor,
which is authentic to ourselves but also helps us build
long term returns in people that think positively about what
we've done in the space, is critically important. So it's interesting.
One weird nuance with esports that is cult is unlike
(24:11):
an NBA team, like you know the game you're going
to play, the game is there forever, like basketball is
probably not going to go anywhere, and you kind of
know the rules aren't going to all of a sudden change.
We in esports are beholden to a series of developers.
Riot does not act like Valve, does not act like Epic,
and they can do whatever they kind of want. Some
of that gives us perks. We own more ip We
(24:33):
own more rights than traditional sports teams might own of
their athletes or their gameplay. On the flip side, eg
used to be one of the best teams in the
world at a game called Halo. Halo is no longer
a competitive game that exists. So we have to be
careful and always thoughtful of what games do we invest
in because it's expensive to run an esports organization, and
but also be good at the predictive nature of what
(24:57):
games will resonate with certain audiences, certain fans, certain sponsor needs.
And that's an art of esports leadership. That was probably
my biggest learning curve as there's no playbook for that,
and that's the how you pick your winning jockey, and
esports leadership is finding good leaders who are really attuned
to the developers and changes of fan interest in games.
(25:18):
And so why that's relevant to your question is those
factors of what game do we invest in? And why
the in game avatars and what they represent is actually
a meaningful metric in understanding do people play a game?
And I don't want to use names so I don't
want to get angry phone calls later. But there's this
one game it's very popular right now. It's a first
(25:39):
person shooter game. It's having a hard time proliferating certain
region in Asia that is known for being very popular
in gaming, and it's a huge region from a financial standpoint,
huge region culturally, and there's a lot of theses as
of why, but when we use in some of our
derived stats around, we call it the matrix, like how
we evaluate game titles to be in competitively, when we
(26:03):
look at style of game, like first person shooters do
well in certain regions and they don't, that impacts our
decision as well as when a game has characters that
look like people of that region, conversion tends to be higher,
and we noticed this region didn't have any characters that
looked like them. It's kind of why Overwatch was so popular.
(26:23):
It's one of the first games that had a variety
of characters and personas of different body weights, different skin colors,
different nationalities that really brought in new fandoms and audiences
that weren't there before, Versus a game that trying to
not be offensive, but like Counterstrike where it's just terrorists
versus counter terrorists, army looking white dude versus terrorist. You know,
(26:46):
that doesn't attract certain people, and so it's actually really
important and something that we think about deeply in terms
of what games do we enter into. Because there are
some games if you look at how they're structured, how
the avatars are represented. Are you a human or are
you a car or are you an animal? That really
can dictate what fans are attracted and where viewers come from,
(27:09):
as well as what sponsors feel comfortable sponsoring that title.
But it's critically important for us to be aware of
to understand where we invest our time and money and focus.
It's really fascinating to imagine. It's as though James Naismith,
you know, the guy who invented basketball, owned the NBA,
the NCAA, Basketball, International Basketball, and every basketball league in
(27:32):
the world, and could just say I'm changing basketball now.
I mean, so you know, they're obviously there are evolutions
within those games. The game looks really different than it
did when Nasmith created or when my great grandfather, who
was about five foot four was the semi professional basketball
player for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team, and you know,
he would talk to us when we were kids about
what basketball was like in those days, and it was
(27:53):
you know, it was even then hard to conceive how
he could have been one of the handful of best
basketball players on the East Coast. So things evolve, but
they evolve more slowly and in a more decentralized way.
I think to some degree here, as you were saying
the games are wholly owned, what is to stop the
developers from trying to own the universe of esports entirely?
(28:20):
From saying, you know, like, we want to create our
own teams and franchises and have those operate within our universes.
In other words, from a sort of business organization standpoint,
why is it efficient for something like EG to have
to field teams across a range of different platforms or
games rather than having everything consolidated in the platform owners Well,
(28:43):
this answer will vary by region because how this is
reflected in China is very different than how it's reflected
in the US. As you probably could guess, there's more
end to end ownership in especially the APAC region than
you'd find here. But I don't even claim to be
an expert in APAC region, so I can speak to
North America. Part of it is the beautiful limitations of capitalism, right.
(29:07):
Making a game is very high level of effort, like
company initiative, huge vast upfront in investment exactly, and it's
rife with problems, rife with human component risk. It's just
it's an incredible undertaking. Adding a league that is hard
to do. I know, I just pose a logistics problem.
(29:30):
A developer could do that, but I don't know if
it's always financially viable to own all components at the
scale or without heavy future planning. That being said, there
are certain developers that are a higher touch, especially in
the franchise leagues. The leagues that we have to pay
to be a part of, and the incentive to us
is league guaranteed revenue. But we have provisions and controls
(29:51):
and rules that we must abide by versus some developers
that are very hands off LEAs a fair but there
aren't many rights of provisions protecting us besides the logistics
and the time. So what might happen in ten years
could be different than what's happening today, But current state
(30:11):
gamed we're probably protected just by the fact that game
development is such a big undertaking to support as an individual.
It probably doesn't make as much sense or is the
smartest vertical integration to jump from game development all the
way to esports team big picture question assume that esports
sort of continue on this trajectory towards greater and greater growth.
(30:33):
How will they How will esports as an industry change
the way we broadly think about sports and its relationship
to human experience. I mean, what do you see as
the biggest impacts. You've already mentioned the geographically localized versus
the non There's the on screen versus off screen. There's
the do you attend matches in a big urban you
(30:56):
know dome or do you do it at home? There's
probably television versus streaming. I mean, there are a range
of different ways that you're involved in something that's going
to disrupt a very big industry with a lot of
capital in it and a lot of power and a
lot of social importance. So when you think about the
bigger social impact that growth in esports is likely to have,
(31:17):
how do you imagine that that going well? I could
share a hope around and what we try to help
bridge the big gap we have, especially if you continue
to like in the strictional sports. So we haven't figured
out partially due to the maturity and age of our
space as well as the accessibility to understanding, we haven't
figured out the multigenerational or inherited audience type pathway, you know,
(31:40):
traditional sports. You know, if your dad's a Patriots fan,
you're probably going to have to watch some Patriots at
some point in your life. I mean, I was just
at a family funeral of my great uncle who died
at ninety two, who was a lifelong fan of the
Washington sports team. He was sixty plus year season ticket
holder and the Washington football team, and that was a
central theme of the funeral because he was a central
(32:02):
theme of his life, and it was a way that
he bridged family connections and generations, and it was central.
So it really was generationally exactly the way that you're describing.
And we haven't seen that play out yet because I
would say probably the first generation of die hard esports
as we know today fans are the older millennials at
this at this stage, um, but seeing how we bridge
(32:25):
esports to a younger audience continue to be multigenerational be
important because and I don't want to sound pessimistic, but
why I love having these conversations is it is hard
to convince. You know, even my parents. If you ask
my parents, would what does your daughter do? She's like, ah,
she works in tech. Like they don't really understand what
I do. And I don't know if they sat. They're
(32:49):
proud of me, but they don't really get it. I
don't think they know how I get a paycheck. But um,
it's harder to bridge those that older audience, and I
hope younger audiences are able to carry some of that
heavy lifting to help this continue to be multigenerational, to
be sticky, fascinating. So transgenerational connection would be a desirable
(33:12):
thing for sure, And if it did, it might supplement
or even displace some of the other kinds of identity
based features of sports, and that might have some impact
on the way we identify around place, around country. You know,
in the Olympics, we're always thinking about country identity, right,
and yet that's a very seems like a very dated
(33:33):
way to think about. You know, athletes at the greatest
level internationally, right, I mean, on some level, who really
cares what countries they represent? And when they play in
professional leagues, they come from all over the world typically
to wherever they go, and that's pretty cosmopolitan. What you're
working in, what your industry represents is an even further
globalization or cosmopolitanization of sport. But I also wonder if
there might be some loss of some of the familial
(33:56):
or identity based features that are more generationally bound. It's
a tough thought to ponder because part of what I
see esports as is quite beautiful. That you can be
someone who loves you sports and find community with people
countries and time zones far away you don't even speak
(34:17):
the same language of you. But I'm hopeful for this
because I think it is a natural progression of the
attitudes and behaviors of our youngest generation right now, how
they engage in the digital world and how they consume content.
It is much less where am I physically allocated to
who has values, beliefs, and ideas like me in a
(34:40):
broader scale. So I'm optimistic, a little bit biased, but optimistic. Nicole.
Thank you for educating me and our listeners. And I'm
very confident that we're going to be hearing a lot
from you in the future, whether it's in this space
or other spaces that you find yourself in. And I
really want to extend my appreciation to you for spending
some time with me. Thank you, Thank you so much. Noah,
(35:04):
We'll be right back. What I learned from Nicole is
genuinely fascinating, with serious implications for society, for our future,
and for how we interact with each other in the
(35:25):
spaces of entertainment and sports in the world. Listening to Nicole,
I felt like a whole world was opening up to me.
And it's a world in which I think certain elements
are familiar, but others actually seem to be extraordinarily different.
I confess that for me, and I'm someone who loves
to watch sports, the idea of watching somebody play a
(35:45):
video game is still new and novel. Listening to Nicole,
I was able to see that the mere excellence of
the people performing it is actually reminiscent of the joy
that we take in watching people perform any activity to
an excellent degree, and we all experienced that during the Olympics,
when we watch some sports that we don't ordinarily watch
(36:05):
and are nevertheless gripped to see it done the highest
possible level. Furthermore, as Nicole pointed out, there's an entertainment component,
especially with regard to streaming, that is actually more laid
back and fun than a lot of the watching of
sports that we do, because we're not just observing competition,
we're also observing fun being had, and that invites us
(36:27):
as viewers to tap into that experience of fun much
more so than we do when we watch professional athletes,
who to a certain degree are having fun, but to
a much greater degree are all business. Another takeaway that
really struck me was the idea that in the world
of esports, where you're from has nothing to do with
what teams you root for. I don't think it's possible
(36:49):
to overstate how transformative and effect expanded esports would therefore
have on cultures in North America, in Europe, and elsewhere
around the world where local and national identities are bound
up in sports teams, whether those sports teams are university based,
regionally based, city based, or even now nationally based. In
(37:10):
our world of fading national and local identity associations, sports
have become important glue for holding us together. On the
other hand, sports also have the capacity, via those local identities,
to bring out the worst in US and to make
us polarized and regionalized. In contrast, esports both hold out
(37:33):
the hope of true cosmopothanism, where you could root for
anyone from anywhere, and also of potentially weakening some of
the local ties that are in fact of some value
to us. In living in civic communities. Last, but not least,
I walked away from this conversation with Nicole with a
sense of being extraordinarily impressed to hear a young person
(37:56):
so dynamically committed to the growth of an industry so
deeply steeped in its details. And based on this conversation,
I'm pretty confident that we should be all watching her
career going forward alongside career of evil geniuses. Until the
next time I speak to you. Breathe deep, think deep thoughts,
(38:17):
and have a little fun, maybe watching esports. If you're
a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you
here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication
to run both ways. I want to know what you
think are the most important stories of the moment, and
what kinds of guests you think you would be useful
(38:37):
to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel
of communication. To access it, just go to my website
Noa Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my
newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind,
something that would be really valuable to me and I
hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you
(38:59):
by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our
engineer is Benaliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon.
Editorial support from no Osband. Theme music by Luis Guerra
at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jean Cott,
Heather Faine, Carl mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg.
(39:22):
You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you
can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover
Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com
slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today,
please write a review or tell a friend. This is
(39:42):
deep background
Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
I'm Noah Feldman Dan Deep Background. Something a little bit different.
I have been watching very closely the debates about the
(00:39):
future of virtual reality and augmented reality. Since the beginning
of COVID, all of us have had to explore making
human connections, having conversations, learning and engaging with others from
our desks, staring at our screens in ways we did
not do previously. That entire process has led me to
(01:02):
think increasingly about what kinds of human engagement can happen
in virtual space. One direction this might take us, and
I hope to discuss this in a future episode, is
the question of virtual reality, augmented reality, and the new
modes and platforms of engagement that will take place in
our lives. Another is to think about activities that increasingly
(01:25):
take place not only in the real world but also
almost exclusively online. Gaming is one such activity. We hear
a lot about the gamification of trading, a topic that
we've done an episode on, and about the gamification of
a wider range of human interactive activities, including coding. But
what about the gamification of gaming itself. What I'm referring
(01:48):
to is the esports industry, in which it turns out
millions and millions of people watch others playing games, either
at an extraordinarily high competitive level for rewards and for money,
or alternatively in an entertainment mode, as gamers who are
particularly clever or sophisticated or knowledge of stream their own
(02:10):
games for the edification and entertainment of their fans. This
is an emergent industry whose participants tend to be young,
and so perhaps it's not surprising that leading figures in
this industry are young themselves. Case in point, our guests
today Nicole La Pointe Jamison, who's the CEO of a
(02:31):
North American esports organization called Evil Geniuses or EG, which
is one of the oldest and most recognizable brands in
professional gaming, or so I'm told, going back all the
way to nineteen ninety nine. Nicole, for her part, barely
goes back to nineteen ninety nine herself. She was born
in nineteen ninety four, which makes her an unusual person
(02:53):
to be running a large and growing organization as a CEO.
To top it all off, she's a woman at an
African American in an industry that tends to be stereotyped
as one for men, primarily for white and perhaps for
Asian men. As you're about to hear, Nicole is an
extraordinary person, and she sat down with me to explain
(03:14):
her industry and what she does in it. Nicole, thank
you so much for joining me. This is one of
those episodes on Deep Background where instead of talking about
some well fummed area where I and the listeners all
think we're big experts, were instead exploring a whole field
(03:38):
of human endeavor that is not actually all that new,
but is new to many of us as observers, and
that's esports as an industry and as a concept. So
I wonder if you would start by just assuming that
we don't understand exactly what esports are, we don't understand
why it is that other people would want to watch
people playing video games, and begin by just explaining to
(04:01):
us what this industry is and why we should start
caring about it. Of course, and first of all, Noah,
thank you for having me. Always glad to bring others
on board to the surprisingly vast and deep world of esports. So,
if you're coming from zero esports is competitive gaming where
we bridge industries that resemble a lot of traditional sports
(04:24):
but also resemble modern day entertainment. And so the best
way to think about my universe I run an esports
organization called Evil Geniuses, is think of us like the
University of Michigan, like UM's athletics department, where they have
basketball and football and soccer that have distinct players on
distinct schedules, and a very robust back office that bridges
(04:48):
athletics to sponsorships, to brand, to health and wellness, all
to support the different players in their seasons. But instead
of University of Michigan, I am Evil Geniuses, and I
have Counterstrike and DODA and League of Legends, distinct player
athletes with distinct schedules, and all of the same back
office needs to support and make sure we are competitively viable,
(05:11):
financially viable, and culturally viable. And it is often surprising
people to hear the level of play for these athletes.
Isn't someone that could just mosey on and say, oh,
you know, I'm pretty good at Mario Kart, Let me
show up one day and be a esports pro. These
are athletes that have typically been playing at the best
(05:33):
level that exists in the world from a long time,
at a young age, and when they come into an
esports organization, it looks like traditional sports. You have training time,
you have physical fitness health wellness time, you have scrimming
and review, and the infrastructure around these athletes and players
is robust and deep, and we heavily invest in these games.
(05:55):
And so a lot of this mirrors traditional sports. Where
I think the analogy falls off, and I don't have
a really good way to paint that picture yet, is
we also have what I mentioned earlier, this entertainment side,
where unlike traditional sports where fans tend to be geo
affiliated or inherited, we are digital and global. Our players
(06:18):
come from all over the world. We're not locked into
a region. I'm not even though we're Seattle based, I
am not the Seattle something. The Seattle eg our fans
are truly global. So many questions immediately come into my mind.
Let's start with what maybe is a silly question, which
is there's a movement from we all play sports outdoors
(06:40):
to we watch sports on television. And you know, a
whole generation, an older generation even than mine, was skeptical
of that saying why don't you go out and play
the sport? Why do you want to sit at home
and watch the sport? And now that objection seems hopelessly
dated because of course as possible to do both, and
televised sports became a vast multi billion, maybe even trillion
(07:01):
dollar industry over the course of fifty years. Are there
similar objections? There must be similar objections to esports saying
that somehow, why are you watching people do something that
they're in fact doing technologically? And is the answer just
sort of grow up? You know, Like that's the same
objection that people made to watching basketball on television and
(07:22):
didn't make any sense really, and it makes even less
sense in this context. I actually think the analogy transfers
really well. Like the beauty of esports, both the athletes
and the fan is that we're young, digital and very diverse,
but the altitude of play and competence at the pro level,
because then these are oftentimes six figure to seven figure
(07:46):
based salaries of athletes. These aren't the run of a
mill picked up off a street corner players. They are
the top thirty in the world. So similarly to why
you want to watch NBA, the depth of prestige and
ability to perform in some of these games is unparalleled,
and so that's exciting to watch. The esports athletes also
(08:06):
play for the same reasons. They just do it so well.
The answer is, they just do it so well, and
the specific skills that they have are some combination of
hand eye coordination, conceptual ability, strategic ability. It's a full
range of skills. Presumably yes, probabilistic thinking, quick communication, similar
to an options trader or a sports athlete. Right, let's
(08:29):
talk for a second about this non locality that you mentioned.
So one of the fascinating things about sports, both at
the university level but also at the professional level, is
that over time it came to be one of the
leading factors in a lot of countries in unifying people
within a geographic area. Right. Originally, the reason you had
(08:49):
local teams is that people had strong local identities, and
people who were starting teams wanted to make money, and
they said, well, if we identified the team with a
place or with a university, then there will be attachment
to it. But then things flipped and as our identities
as members of a neighborhood or a region weakened, the
sports teams became the glue that held us together. In
that sense, what your industry is is about cosmopolitanism in
(09:11):
the deepest sense, right. It's about a world where we
no longer think, oh, I'm from New England, so I'm
a member of Red Sox Nation by default, or you know,
I have to be a Patriots fan and there's nothing
I can do about that because I was born that way.
It's like my religion in your world. I can pick
and choose my affiliations no matter where they are in
the world. So how do people choose whom they're going
(09:33):
to root for and root against? I love this question
because it's surprisingly contentious in the space, especially when talking
to people that come from traditional sports into the esports area.
Is the lack of geo affiliation is puzzling, but I
find it exciting for us because we have a bigger
pie to play from. And that's again where the entertainment
(09:54):
sprinkle comes in. More like WWE than even you know,
the Lakers or the Yankees. The brand identity of the
organization matters, and how an organization presents itself beyond just
what games they compete in, because not every sport team
or organization plays the same games, So there's some fan
stratification by what game are they in. If you're a
(10:16):
Rocket League fan, you tend to not be a fan
of League of Legends per se. And then it's how
does the org represent themselves and some of that, just
like in traditional sports, is a win loss ratio. People
like to follow the winners or they like to follow
the underdogs, So there's that bimodal distribution. But then how
do we and how do organizations represent themselves in the
culture and engage with fans in unique ways. That's the
(10:39):
big why for creating a compelling esports organization with a
distinct set of fandom. One of the things that stunned
me and preparing for our conversation was just the size
of the industry. If someone had asked me to guess,
I would have been off by orders of magnitude. Yes,
it is a huge industry, whatever way you slice the pie.
(11:00):
If it's active viewers on different distribution platforms, because you
can watch esports in a variety of ways, especially if
you have an Internet connection. If you count gamers as
part of the esports industry, people who game, there's more
of those than people who don't game, especially under the
age of thirty, and if you consider the global reach,
(11:22):
especially in the APAC region, the millions of concurrent viewers
you could have at a time in a day is
unparalleled to many other traditional sports. We can sometimes reach
on our peak seasons on social media more viewers in
a day than certain hockey teams get in a season.
And though the fandom the eyeballs are large, what I
(11:44):
find more as a businessperson compelling and exciting is the
dollars are starting to pace and grow to reflect a
lot of the magnitude of sponsorship and spend in traditional sports.
In the esports space, as people start to understand the
true volume of fans that are hard to advertise, too
hard to reach organically in other ways, and where they
(12:04):
are and who they watch. Finding brands, finding distribution platforms,
and even finding linear distribution platforms like TV try to
reach and understand how can they have E sports showcased
is unbelievable, and so I believe there's a new Zoo
study out that shows E sports industries valued a little
less than a billion targeted for next year in terms
(12:24):
of spend and revenue in the space. So it's it's
exciting how quickly. It's growing. From even five ten years ago,
it was relatively grassroots and not well established or defined.
We'll be right back Nicole. Your Wikipedia entry, assuming that
(12:51):
it's accurate, has you as twenty seven years old. Is
that true? First of all, it is true. So how
does a twenty seven year old end up as CEO
of a major company in this developing space? A lot
of stumbling up. It can't have been that much. There's
that's not enough time. So I have a very nonlinear
(13:13):
path into esports, and I would say my age is
maybe surprising for the space, but not completely unprecedented, as
historically leaders and esports either were in esports veterans for
a while, who typically were players and kind of worked
their way up, or traditional sports executives who were plopped in.
That's changed a bit. Prior to this, I actually worked
(13:35):
for an investment firm in Chicago. I focused on distressed
asset turnarounds, which is maybe not a great signal for
those that are more financially savvy understanding my entry into esports,
but EG came to me actually as an investment opportunity.
I was all jazzed for a board seat, but at
the time the company resembled a distressed asset or a
(13:57):
true startup. That being said that, what was interesting about
EG is, despite me coming in a little less than
three years ago, it had been a brand that it
is actually one of the oldest esports organizations in the world.
And that's not super interest in general, but I would
say it's quite insightful for EG and that to exist
from nineteen ninety nine as a then niche gaming club
(14:19):
and survive and bring in sponsorships and keep your brand
and build and grow and build that long term fandom
and survive tech changes, game changes, and still say culturally
relevant was exciting. So from an investment conversion into operating position,
it wasn't that different from things I had done before,
but definitely the coolest operating company I've been able to
(14:41):
get my hands on in my history of ensure tech
and SaaS businesses and hardware technology. But I've always loved
gaming from a personal passion point, so I understood the space.
I was familiar with the space, and I was excited
to help carve out what ought to be in esports
as I wasn't seeing voices or perspectives like mine and
(15:02):
our firm represented in this space. So I'm wondering whether
the sort of stereotypical picture of the industry, which may
not be accurate as heavily male, heavily white, and Asian,
as an African American woman, is that a plus for
you that you come in and say, hey, I have
a different perspective, or is it altogether irrelevant in an
(15:23):
enterprise that ultimately is about avatars on screens much more
than it's about who you are on the other side
of the console. It was a bit of an interesting
challenge more from a personal perspective, as I think you
were quite polite with it. Gaming has stereotypes of who
is a gamer and what do they act like that
are not good? Are not positive? Rife with toxicity and
(15:49):
juvenile behavior, to call it nicely, and coming into a
space where I was different industry background, different in how
I appeared. I was a newcomer into a relatively gate
kept community of who's any esports and who's not, had
personal and professional challenges. But I think that actually has
becomes war cry and how we have been able to
(16:12):
thrive in the past two years and differentiate our brand
and I can't underline that it can't undermine really that
it was easy, because it wasn't. It's truly carving a
path that hadn't been carved. And the anonymity of the
Internet can be difficult to navigate as people love to
(16:33):
use that to their advantage to be toxic. But like
tends to attract like, and I've been able to I'm
lucky that I've had mentorship and leadership, a strong advisory board,
and friends in the space that are excited and compelled
by why and what we do to make sure the
space is safer. So, Nicole, when you talk about toxicity,
(16:53):
is toxicity an existential threat to the esports industry or
to the gaming industry? And alternatively, is the perception of
toxicity also a kind of existential threats separate from the
underlying reality. Oh I love that you've broken it up
(17:13):
into two. So for the former, there is a threat
of toxicity because just like how people tend to make
bad decisions in group think, people tend to make bad
decisions under the cover of anonymity. And we actually we
did a study on this. We partnered with you gov,
a data and survey company, and looked to understand toxic
behaviors and we found that a lot in gaming, whether
(17:36):
it's through harassment or rude language, etc. Is learned doesn't
appear until later in life. But if you know, if
parents don't understand what their kids are doing, if there's
no checks and balances either by the game in the
system itself, that perpetuates and becomes an acceptable standard, which
(17:56):
really isn't acceptable. You can't act like you might in
a Call of duty game in the workplace or in
a group project in college. And that needs to be addressed.
And there's a lot of moving pieces in terms of
who is the address of this problem. Is it parents,
is it developers, is it the content creators? But it's
(18:17):
something that creates tangible and what we found in our
study is we actually it does create tangible negative results
and that people either don't want to, for example, have
their mic on in game and talk, which impedes communication
for certain games and impedes results, which for me from
a team side, impedes potential future talent from developing and
(18:38):
coming into the pipeline. So we care about this because
it has long term material impacts into who is represented
in the space, especially if toxicity is aimed at certain
groups or demographics of people. The perception of toxicity. However,
is also damaging because in a lot of spaces this
has gotten much better. I would say gaming is probably
(19:01):
more inclusive now than it even was five years ago.
Is people are becoming aware and understand that what is
culturally accepted as shifting, but the negative, sometimes misunderstanding of
what the gaming industry represents hurts us from becoming mainstream,
financially viable and supported. If someone is like, oh, gaming's bad,
(19:23):
I'm not even going to listen to what these people
have to say. That closes off the potential for both
us to develop and grow, but that person from developing
and growing, and whether that person is potential parent of
a talent that we'd want to recruit, a sponsorship partner,
a university that is trying to understand if esports curriculum
should be supported, and so breaking down both the perception
(19:45):
and the reality is something that we try to take
a decent stab at as it relates to our wheelhouse
and our expertise, but is a multifaceted problem that I'm
hopeful more and more people as we continue to talk about,
address and try to tackle and solve in their own way,
because what we have found is again the learned behavior
not inherent. I've been very influenced by writing by a
(20:08):
scholar at Dartmouth called Will Chang, who's actually in the
music department. Believe it or not, but he wrote a
book called sound Play, one of his great books, which
is specifically about the use of sound in major online
gaming platforms and experiences. And as part of that account,
he also talks about the whole range of behaviors, whether
(20:29):
they're supportive or abusive, that come an association with difference
with gender, with sexuality, with disability status in the online space.
And one of the things that emerges from his work,
and I'm oversimplifying it a little bit just for our purposes,
is that there's both a lot of the toxicity you're
talking about and a lot of tools for capturing and
(20:53):
pushing back at that toxicity and reshaping and reforming it.
And I wonder, when you think about that from the
standpoint of esports teams and franchises, what are the strategies
that are available to you to say, we're going to
make sure that our organized and our teams are contributing
in the positive way to this stuff rather than to
(21:15):
the negative. How do you make those two things work together.
It's been interesting for us as I've been a pretty
big stickler, and so I can give good examples of
how One of the problems we faced is finding good
talent that want to come into esports because I need
a head of finance. It's really hard to convince the
(21:37):
forty five year old controller at EUY to come on
over to an esports organization that I've never heard of
the space. They don't really understand it. And when you
google gaming and esports, not wonderful things came up about
the stability, the perception inclusion, and so we've been tackling
this through a couple of different ways, some of that
are less sexy than others, but maybe forever all the
(21:57):
listeners rolling their eyes. But the first thing we pushed
was really a suite of back office benefits and support
that emulate what you would find at a lot of
our local peers in Seattle. Benefits, maternity leave, paternity leave,
full suite of healthcare, a lot of the mental wellness
and physical wellness support first of its kind in esports.
(22:18):
And people were surprised, why are you spending on this
esports as sexy? There's so much young people that want
to come in. But if I can't attract the full
multigenerational audience of experience workers, I've already failed in inclusivity
and that hurts our bottom line results. So there's a
lot of programming we put there to ensure we were
getting a wide net of talent. On the competitive side, though,
(22:44):
the esports space has been plagued despite being digitally native,
plagued by lack of good data use in scouting. It's
a lot of who you know who the coach knows,
which becomes an incestuous, self fulfilling pool of the same
fifty people are becoming pro players, which is crazy because
we have such opportunity for talent elsewhere, and so we
(23:06):
are claimed to fame, especially in one of our games,
League of Legends, was we've been using data and analytics
to scout and recruit unknown quantities unknown talent and bring
in and develop up over time talent that we wouldn't
have found otherwise because they weren't already in network. That
also led that same method led to us being able
to start one of the only mixed gender rosters in esports.
(23:29):
So between the back office infrastructure, the empirical methods for
scouting and then of course showcasing where we have wins.
In the education space, we do a lot of K
through twelve programming, do a lot of university partnership around curriculum,
anti toxicity, anti bullying, how to create a good personal
brand for yourself on social media. If the gaming or
(23:51):
entertainment space is important, that investment of time and labor,
which is authentic to ourselves but also helps us build
long term returns in people that think positively about what
we've done in the space, is critically important. So it's interesting.
One weird nuance with esports that is cult is unlike
(24:11):
an NBA team, like you know the game you're going
to play, the game is there forever, like basketball is
probably not going to go anywhere, and you kind of
know the rules aren't going to all of a sudden change.
We in esports are beholden to a series of developers.
Riot does not act like Valve, does not act like Epic,
and they can do whatever they kind of want. Some
of that gives us perks. We own more ip We
(24:33):
own more rights than traditional sports teams might own of
their athletes or their gameplay. On the flip side, eg
used to be one of the best teams in the
world at a game called Halo. Halo is no longer
a competitive game that exists. So we have to be
careful and always thoughtful of what games do we invest
in because it's expensive to run an esports organization, and
but also be good at the predictive nature of what
(24:57):
games will resonate with certain audiences, certain fans, certain sponsor needs.
And that's an art of esports leadership. That was probably
my biggest learning curve as there's no playbook for that,
and that's the how you pick your winning jockey, and
esports leadership is finding good leaders who are really attuned
to the developers and changes of fan interest in games.
(25:18):
And so why that's relevant to your question is those
factors of what game do we invest in? And why
the in game avatars and what they represent is actually
a meaningful metric in understanding do people play a game?
And I don't want to use names so I don't
want to get angry phone calls later. But there's this
one game it's very popular right now. It's a first
(25:39):
person shooter game. It's having a hard time proliferating certain
region in Asia that is known for being very popular
in gaming, and it's a huge region from a financial standpoint,
huge region culturally, and there's a lot of theses as
of why, but when we use in some of our
derived stats around, we call it the matrix, like how
we evaluate game titles to be in competitively, when we
(26:03):
look at style of game, like first person shooters do
well in certain regions and they don't, that impacts our
decision as well as when a game has characters that
look like people of that region, conversion tends to be higher,
and we noticed this region didn't have any characters that
looked like them. It's kind of why Overwatch was so popular.
(26:23):
It's one of the first games that had a variety
of characters and personas of different body weights, different skin colors,
different nationalities that really brought in new fandoms and audiences
that weren't there before, Versus a game that trying to
not be offensive, but like Counterstrike where it's just terrorists
versus counter terrorists, army looking white dude versus terrorist. You know,
(26:46):
that doesn't attract certain people, and so it's actually really
important and something that we think about deeply in terms
of what games do we enter into. Because there are
some games if you look at how they're structured, how
the avatars are represented. Are you a human or are
you a car or are you an animal? That really
can dictate what fans are attracted and where viewers come from,
(27:09):
as well as what sponsors feel comfortable sponsoring that title.
But it's critically important for us to be aware of
to understand where we invest our time and money and focus.
It's really fascinating to imagine. It's as though James Naismith,
you know, the guy who invented basketball, owned the NBA,
the NCAA, Basketball, International Basketball, and every basketball league in
(27:32):
the world, and could just say I'm changing basketball now.
I mean, so you know, they're obviously there are evolutions
within those games. The game looks really different than it
did when Nasmith created or when my great grandfather, who
was about five foot four was the semi professional basketball
player for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team, and you know,
he would talk to us when we were kids about
what basketball was like in those days, and it was
(27:53):
you know, it was even then hard to conceive how
he could have been one of the handful of best
basketball players on the East Coast. So things evolve, but
they evolve more slowly and in a more decentralized way.
I think to some degree here, as you were saying
the games are wholly owned, what is to stop the
developers from trying to own the universe of esports entirely?
(28:20):
From saying, you know, like, we want to create our
own teams and franchises and have those operate within our universes.
In other words, from a sort of business organization standpoint,
why is it efficient for something like EG to have
to field teams across a range of different platforms or
games rather than having everything consolidated in the platform owners Well,
(28:43):
this answer will vary by region because how this is
reflected in China is very different than how it's reflected
in the US. As you probably could guess, there's more
end to end ownership in especially the APAC region than
you'd find here. But I don't even claim to be
an expert in APAC region, so I can speak to
North America. Part of it is the beautiful limitations of capitalism, right.
(29:07):
Making a game is very high level of effort, like
company initiative, huge vast upfront in investment exactly, and it's
rife with problems, rife with human component risk. It's just
it's an incredible undertaking. Adding a league that is hard
to do. I know, I just pose a logistics problem.
(29:30):
A developer could do that, but I don't know if
it's always financially viable to own all components at the
scale or without heavy future planning. That being said, there
are certain developers that are a higher touch, especially in
the franchise leagues. The leagues that we have to pay
to be a part of, and the incentive to us
is league guaranteed revenue. But we have provisions and controls
(29:51):
and rules that we must abide by versus some developers
that are very hands off LEAs a fair but there
aren't many rights of provisions protecting us besides the logistics
and the time. So what might happen in ten years
could be different than what's happening today, But current state
(30:11):
gamed we're probably protected just by the fact that game
development is such a big undertaking to support as an individual.
It probably doesn't make as much sense or is the
smartest vertical integration to jump from game development all the
way to esports team big picture question assume that esports
sort of continue on this trajectory towards greater and greater growth.
(30:33):
How will they How will esports as an industry change
the way we broadly think about sports and its relationship
to human experience. I mean, what do you see as
the biggest impacts. You've already mentioned the geographically localized versus
the non There's the on screen versus off screen. There's
the do you attend matches in a big urban you
(30:56):
know dome or do you do it at home? There's
probably television versus streaming. I mean, there are a range
of different ways that you're involved in something that's going
to disrupt a very big industry with a lot of
capital in it and a lot of power and a
lot of social importance. So when you think about the
bigger social impact that growth in esports is likely to have,
(31:17):
how do you imagine that that going well? I could
share a hope around and what we try to help
bridge the big gap we have, especially if you continue
to like in the strictional sports. So we haven't figured
out partially due to the maturity and age of our
space as well as the accessibility to understanding, we haven't
figured out the multigenerational or inherited audience type pathway, you know,
(31:40):
traditional sports. You know, if your dad's a Patriots fan,
you're probably going to have to watch some Patriots at
some point in your life. I mean, I was just
at a family funeral of my great uncle who died
at ninety two, who was a lifelong fan of the
Washington sports team. He was sixty plus year season ticket
holder and the Washington football team, and that was a
central theme of the funeral because he was a central
(32:02):
theme of his life, and it was a way that
he bridged family connections and generations, and it was central.
So it really was generationally exactly the way that you're describing.
And we haven't seen that play out yet because I
would say probably the first generation of die hard esports
as we know today fans are the older millennials at
this at this stage, um, but seeing how we bridge
(32:25):
esports to a younger audience continue to be multigenerational be
important because and I don't want to sound pessimistic, but
why I love having these conversations is it is hard
to convince. You know, even my parents. If you ask
my parents, would what does your daughter do? She's like, ah,
she works in tech. Like they don't really understand what
I do. And I don't know if they sat. They're
(32:49):
proud of me, but they don't really get it. I
don't think they know how I get a paycheck. But um,
it's harder to bridge those that older audience, and I
hope younger audiences are able to carry some of that
heavy lifting to help this continue to be multigenerational, to
be sticky, fascinating. So transgenerational connection would be a desirable
(33:12):
thing for sure, And if it did, it might supplement
or even displace some of the other kinds of identity
based features of sports, and that might have some impact
on the way we identify around place, around country. You know,
in the Olympics, we're always thinking about country identity, right,
and yet that's a very seems like a very dated
(33:33):
way to think about. You know, athletes at the greatest
level internationally, right, I mean, on some level, who really
cares what countries they represent? And when they play in
professional leagues, they come from all over the world typically
to wherever they go, and that's pretty cosmopolitan. What you're
working in, what your industry represents is an even further
globalization or cosmopolitanization of sport. But I also wonder if
there might be some loss of some of the familial
(33:56):
or identity based features that are more generationally bound. It's
a tough thought to ponder because part of what I
see esports as is quite beautiful. That you can be
someone who loves you sports and find community with people
countries and time zones far away you don't even speak
(34:17):
the same language of you. But I'm hopeful for this
because I think it is a natural progression of the
attitudes and behaviors of our youngest generation right now, how
they engage in the digital world and how they consume content.
It is much less where am I physically allocated to
who has values, beliefs, and ideas like me in a
(34:40):
broader scale. So I'm optimistic, a little bit biased, but optimistic. Nicole.
Thank you for educating me and our listeners. And I'm
very confident that we're going to be hearing a lot
from you in the future, whether it's in this space
or other spaces that you find yourself in. And I
really want to extend my appreciation to you for spending
some time with me. Thank you, Thank you so much. Noah,
(35:04):
We'll be right back. What I learned from Nicole is
genuinely fascinating, with serious implications for society, for our future,
and for how we interact with each other in the
(35:25):
spaces of entertainment and sports in the world. Listening to Nicole,
I felt like a whole world was opening up to me.
And it's a world in which I think certain elements
are familiar, but others actually seem to be extraordinarily different.
I confess that for me, and I'm someone who loves
to watch sports, the idea of watching somebody play a
(35:45):
video game is still new and novel. Listening to Nicole,
I was able to see that the mere excellence of
the people performing it is actually reminiscent of the joy
that we take in watching people perform any activity to
an excellent degree, and we all experienced that during the Olympics,
when we watch some sports that we don't ordinarily watch
(36:05):
and are nevertheless gripped to see it done the highest
possible level. Furthermore, as Nicole pointed out, there's an entertainment component,
especially with regard to streaming, that is actually more laid
back and fun than a lot of the watching of
sports that we do, because we're not just observing competition,
we're also observing fun being had, and that invites us
(36:27):
as viewers to tap into that experience of fun much
more so than we do when we watch professional athletes,
who to a certain degree are having fun, but to
a much greater degree are all business. Another takeaway that
really struck me was the idea that in the world
of esports, where you're from has nothing to do with
what teams you root for. I don't think it's possible
(36:49):
to overstate how transformative and effect expanded esports would therefore
have on cultures in North America, in Europe, and elsewhere
around the world where local and national identities are bound
up in sports teams, whether those sports teams are university based,
regionally based, city based, or even now nationally based. In
(37:10):
our world of fading national and local identity associations, sports
have become important glue for holding us together. On the
other hand, sports also have the capacity, via those local identities,
to bring out the worst in US and to make
us polarized and regionalized. In contrast, esports both hold out
(37:33):
the hope of true cosmopothanism, where you could root for
anyone from anywhere, and also of potentially weakening some of
the local ties that are in fact of some value
to us. In living in civic communities. Last, but not least,
I walked away from this conversation with Nicole with a
sense of being extraordinarily impressed to hear a young person
(37:56):
so dynamically committed to the growth of an industry so
deeply steeped in its details. And based on this conversation,
I'm pretty confident that we should be all watching her
career going forward alongside career of evil geniuses. Until the
next time I speak to you. Breathe deep, think deep thoughts,
(38:17):
and have a little fun, maybe watching esports. If you're
a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you
here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication
to run both ways. I want to know what you
think are the most important stories of the moment, and
what kinds of guests you think you would be useful
(38:37):
to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel
of communication. To access it, just go to my website
Noa Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my
newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind,
something that would be really valuable to me and I
hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you
(38:59):
by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our
engineer is Benaliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon.
Editorial support from no Osband. Theme music by Luis Guerra
at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jean Cott,
Heather Faine, Carl mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg.
(39:22):
You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you
can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover
Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com
slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today,
please write a review or tell a friend. This is
(39:42):
deep background
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