We’re just about a month away from our Esports Rising event, to be held virtually on May 4. You can check out the agenda now. You won’t want to miss this. — Jenn Azara
The Valorant Champions Tour begins this Saturday in the U.S., and Riot Games has brought aboard several high-profile sponsors for the debut broadcast on Twitch. Seven brands will see their marks woven into the telecast for the event around the Riot-created title: Heineken 0.0, SecretLab, Verizon, Aim Lab, Prime Gaming, Red Bull and Zowie.
It’s the culmination of one of the most anticipated esports league launches in years. From the moment Riot Games announced that it was organizing around a quasi-franchised model with a direct stipend to teams, organizations flocked to throw their names into the hat.
Riot has several key selling points for partners, including Valorant’s brand-friendly style (compared to Valve and its Counter-Strike: Global Offensive scene) and a groundswell of excitement. Riot also handling production in-house provides for unique sponsorship opportunities.
With VCT Americas, Riot can sell a more in-depth “anchor” (like a sponsor in the game) to the fanbase, Riot Americas Head of Commercial Partnerships Matt Archambault said. In Valorant, broadcast sponsorships are centered around in-game “moments,” he noted.
As one example, Amazon-owned Prime Gaming is integrated into “flawless” rounds, where one team eliminates the other without losing a single member, while Heineken 0.0 serves as the title partner of the map “Icebox,” which is set in snowy Russia.
Like many stick-and-ball sports, the esports industry was hit by the crypto crash of late 2022. The high-profile cratering of FTX affected Riot’s other flagship circuit in America, the League of Legends Championship Series (FTX was a major backer). Archambault isn’t ruling out crypto sponsors in the future, and like many properties, notes Riot will “learn” and become more “mature” from the experience. — Hunter Cooke
Esports organizations for a number of years have brought on popular streamers to boost revenue streams, but now some of those popular streamers are flipping the script and starting their own teams with streaming as the backbone.
Exhibit A may be Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang, a gaming and esports influencer and content creator with around 5 million followers across his Twitter, Twitch and Instagram accounts (as well as a team playing in the new Valorant Challengers Tour). While some streamers with massive followings like Ninja, SapNap and TimtheTatman have joined up with esports-based orgs like Gamesquare, NRG and Complexity, respectively, Wang chose a different path and started his own team, opting to build around influencer streaming as its centerpiece vs. competitive play.
“They want to be able to sell these content creator numbers to advertisers, to Twitch, to sponsors, to investors,” Wang said of other organizations. “Clearly they felt like the esports side of things weren’t cutting it and that they have to bolster the numbers with influencers”
Wang has a track record of creating sticky content that resonates with viewers, as his videos garner anywhere between 400,000 and 1 million views. Wang also feels his org can do it a more economically efficient manner than many esports organizations, some of which have been bleeding money recently. “The [Stan Kroenke-owned] Guard, who recently laid off about every employee, I look at their YouTube channel, and while it’s well-edited, it took them five full-time employees to make one video that has 5,000 views,” explains Wang. “A video with 5,000 views might get you $20, and that’s impossible to sustain five full-time employees.”
Another appealing aspect of launching his own team was to run an organization without VC money or an ownership group. “If I’m spending someone else’s money, I should be able to guarantee a certain amount of returns or guarantee, and I just don’t feel comfortable with that.” But without a big-money backer, will Wang be able to compete? “One of the downsides is not being able to pay my players a super-high salary,” he said.
Wang pointed to Overwatch League as an example of an esports effort missing the mark on ROI. “Blizzard asked all these billion-dollar investors to spend millions to buy in,” he said. “It’s just a financial failure for Blizzard as well as all the investors.” — Kevin Hitt
SBJ recently ranked Dallas as the No. 1 city in the U.S. for sports business, citing the Jones family, owners of the Cowboys and an investor in Texas-based GameSquare, as part of the reason why the market is so influential. The Metroplex’s esports bona fides include the presence of the GameSquare-owned Complexity team, OpTic Gaming, content creator collective One True King and Esports Stadium Arlington, which hosts events for a number of high-profile leagues.
“One of the biggest question marks around the Complexity transaction when I was looking at it was … how involved is Jerry, and do the Joneses really care?” GameSquare CEO Justin Kenna tells SBJ. “Twenty-one months later, they’ve absolutely blown away [expectations].”
Kenna says he speaks to Cowboys COO Stephen Jones, “regularly,” and chats with Complexity board member Travis Goff daily – with both execs directly involved with Gamesquare’s success. The Cowboys’ influence was key in bringing some high-profile names to Dallas, Kenna tells SBJ, helping the company recruit Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Tim “TimtheTatman” Betar to Complexity. Cowboys CB Trevon Diggs also is a member of Complexity’s stream team.
Part of Dallas’ appeal within esports is its growing relevance as a tech hub. “It’s not just the actual gamers, it’s the production, it’s the technology, it’s all the different roles,” said Jasmin Brand, the Frisco Economic Development Corp. director of innovation. “When the region wins, Frisco wins.” — Hunter Cooke
- Valve announced that May’s Paris Major, organized by Blast, will be the last one to use the current version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Counter-Strike 2, a massive overhaul to the original, comes out this summer. The first Counter-Strike 2 Major will take place in March 2024, organized by the PGL.
- Gamesquare, the parent company of Complexity Gaming, is set to ring the NASDAQ bell on April 11 following the closing of its merger with Engine Gaming and Media. GameSquare is also anticipating that it’ll be listed on NASDAQ shortly after.
- Blast partnered with betting platform unikrn across its CS:GO offerings, which include the Blast Premier League and the Paris Major.
- The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the biggest video game industry trade show in the U.S., has been canceled for 2023, IGN reports.