Hey guys. Today we're talking about hot topics in the esports industry. Today with me I have Riley Jamison, the Creative Director at LA Gladiators and Phoenix1, and Sharon Coone, the editor in chief at Blitz Esports. How're you guys doing today? Good. Good to be here. So, franchising and League of Legends and Overwatch seems to be a pretty popular topic right now. For those of you that don't know, League of Legends and Overwatch recently got two franchised leagues. Overwatch League is appropriately titled OWL, and League of Legends League is further LCS League. Basically, franchising means that once these teams get in, they're in for pretty much good. You can't get kicked out, you don't lose your investment. There's a big bias and we can talk about that. So, what do you guys think about franchising? I'm pretty happy about it. Having been on the side of it where we saw like living in an e-sports world where there wasn't a franchising and you're worried about getting relegated every single split, I think. Can you talk about what relegation is. So, relegation means that if you're in the bottom of the league, if you're like number nine or 10 out of 10, you have to play an a promotion tournament to sort of re-earn your e-sport, and all the people below you in the challenger scene can compete against. If they beat you, you are out. The challenge you're seeing being like a minor league. Minor league teams trying to get in and the Major league teams at risk of dropping out, and at the end of each season, they compete to see who gets the real sports. So, relegation means that you can effectively get kicked out even though you've invested millions of dollars into the league? Yes and that's the problem. Understandably terrifying for organizations and for sponsors. I really think it was sort of a chilling effect on people investing in the scene. So, from my perspective at least I'm extremely happy to have this franchise, because now I feel like a lot of people have a lot more confidence in really investing and knowing that they're buying into the long-term, and they can watch the scene grow now. Yeah. Marketing wise and player wise. So, you're building a team of players and you want to make sure you don't get relegated so you just buy like the best mercenaries you can, but if you're going to have a team that's going to last 5-10 years like league we see in sports teams, you invest in rookies or you invest in players who like each other, but maybe don't play the best right now. From a marketing angle, most of these teams want to sign long investment deals or sponsorship deals with companies like Ullman HP1 to put their names on these teams, but they can't sign anything longer than a year because the team could be gone in a year, and that really caps off how deep you can get business wise. Okay. So, do you think they will see longer contracts for both players and sponsors them because there's a little bit more reliability? Absolute. Definitely. Yeah, for the part, you're more on team side. So, I think from my side and maybe this is kind of a more marketing side, I think we can do things that are a lot more long-form like you're talking about, like I can start to think about what the identity of our brand or our team is over multiple seasons where what I've seen in the past is a lot of times there's such a fixation on winning right now, and that really sort of hurts your long-term goals because you might be bringing in new players, foreign players who were just talented right now trying to win and avoid relegation, and we've seen times where maybe we like started out well and put some plans into place, and then as the team starts slipping, you can feel the management everybody, all the eyes just sort of change to like all the goals are on winning and avoiding relegation, and that sort of stops what we want to do from a brand perspective. Okay. So, let's talk about the cost of franchising, and we'll start with the League of Legends league. Roughly, how much are these teams paying to get into a franchise slot? So, for League of Legends, if you are an existing team, you're paying around $10 million, and there's some stipulations on that. A light 10 million. A light 10 million. If you're a new team to league, you're paying $13 million and that's just basically like, your dues for this opportunity to be here permanently and like money for the coffers for the League. So, Overwatch League or the OWL league, how much are we paying to be franchised and that? Reportedly, somewhere in the 20 million range for the good spots. So, just a cool $20 million at the end of that line are. Casually. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, but you have to also think like the people investing in these teams a lot of them are big sports names like Kroenke, he's got a net worth up in the billion like. She's referencing the owner of the Los Angeles gladiators is Stan Kroenke who also owns the LA Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Arsenal. The Avalanche. The avalanche. Yeah, so a lot of teams. So, I think what we're seeing with franchising and these numbers seem crazy. Like again these multiple tens of millions of dollars, but if you compare it to other established sports that have been around longer, these numbers are very understandable. It's a really small investment for something that could be permanent, and how investment works with people with this much money it's already but, you can put $20 million into 10 different things and only one of them has to succeed. So, for us it's monumental and for them it's not a huge deal. So, let's talk about the other side of things. Franchising doesn't work for every e-sport. There's a lot of money involved, and there's a lot of things where maybe doesn't work for a certain e-sport because of the league that they're in, or maybe because you're playing as an individual player instead of a team. So, what are some of the arguments against franchising especially maybe even for League of Legends and Overwatch when franchising was becoming a popular topic? The biggest thing that we saw with community when League of Legends announce franchising is, people were upset that we were losing the relegation system. One because there was a narrative of excitement to it to minor teams getting promoted, and also people were worried that if you do have a permanent partnership, what motivation do these teams have to be competitive and to try to win or would they just like hire whatever players and collect their paychecks every season so that was a big concern. I almost wonder if it's sort of the natural progression because we see some other leagues, like I guess you can take Europe's EU LCS, and we see not quite as much financial commitment from teams over on that side and they almost need a relegation system. So, if a team starts underperforming or isn't doing as well it isn't carrying their weight, did they almost need to be knocked out by a hungrier team that might do a better job to use the delegations to improve the league over months and years until they get that financial backing where they can consider franchising. But on the other hand, so why it doesn't work for a lot of reasons is the money. So, like it why it doesn't work for the EU LCS, and for some games like maybe smash or CS go is just like, there's not investors interested in putting $10 million into those spaces because it doesn't reach viewers in a clean and large way as well as Overwatch League could or League of Legends does, like you're you're basically paying to reach people with your brand and not every sport is going to reach enough people. Okay. That make sense. So, let's talk about trash talking in e-sports. It's a pretty popular thing to talk about because there's a lot of different avenues that we didn't talk, but it is trash talking good for e-sport? Is trash talking bad for e-sports? Is it universal for all e-sports? Let's get into this. So, what do you think Riley? Personally, okay from the marketing side from the brand side I love it. I'm trying to encourage it all the time. I think what it kind of comes back to it as it comes back to confidence in sports, and I think that's sort of like, that's a really watchable, likable aspect of a person and you really have to be confident in your play to make these sort of social wagers as I think a lot of trash talking is. I'm saying like I'm going to bury you on the stage, like there's already, it's already a high stakes game because you've got your organizations pride on the line, you've got the individual players dignity but now you're putting your own social capital on the line as well. Because if you come out and you say some big trash talk thing, and then you get dumpster, you're going to look ridiculous. We'd like but you're just up in the steaks. Like you're putting your own personal dignity on the line, I love watching, I think it makes it more interesting for everybody. Sharon how do you feel about it? We talk a lot about e-sports in comparison to wrestling. Okay, so wrestling does this they have heels which are the bad guys, and it's how they set up their narratives and, it's how they keep characters interesting, it's how they keep relationships between different performers going like everyone loves a good heel and there is a lot of psychological reasons behind that. But yeah, I absolutely wish more players would "trash talk". If you look at one of the most popular League of Legends players and history is double lift, and his slogan is literally everyone else's trash. He became famous off of NO. He is very good, he's extremely talented, but nobody wants a league of 50 talents and nice players, it's not interesting. I think what people need to understand and what's been so hard about this in e-sport, maybe it's because you're so new is that, like when double lift with talk trash and then get beat by somebody like when when TSM would be COG in double lift was on we loved watching him fail a little bit, and we didn't like him less because of it. We liked him more because it made it so interesting watch it was great to root against him, and he's done a great job of using that and building it into his character. I think we see a lot of people that are very confident at first and then they get their first defeat and they shrink away and they get scared of it, and I think you have that's when, that's the moment when someone has to push on and keep up that fight. You can build a whole career and a whole identity around the guy that's always confident that's always trash talking. I don't think people are going to remember every win or a loss you had around it but they're going to remember that you always brought that confidence into every game. It's hard to build a good villain, but the reason like every movie has a villain is because just like humans naturally love them if they're at the right end. Part of that, I think we talked about this a lot with player branding is charisma. So, if your trash talk comes from a place of like insecurity, people will sense it on you and that's the bad trash talk. But when you're someone like like double lift or some of the other players who do it, you're likable and your charismatic, and then you turn that into being like a great movie villain, and that is always going to be good for the sport because it encourages people to watch. Okay. So, let's talk about it so you mentioned double lift who's on a team is a team game with four other players besides himself. So, what happens when your trash talking and say your team wins but you did horribly or that the flip side say your trash talking and you play out of your mind but your team loses. What do you do about those sorts of things? Okay. So, here's something that I'm trying to teach my players, and honestly this is like good advice for just teams in general. I think if you're ever going to make claims, make them known binary claims. Okay, because saying like, we're going to win today, or we're going to win the championship. The problem is as soon as you don't win the championship, everyone knows you just failed. So, it's like I always tell people like look it's okay to talk trash and be confident but be like, we're going to knock your socks off onstage. Make it something that people can't point to and instantly know if you fail. There's a way to be confident and there's a way to make that little social wager without something people go like well, you did not get any kills on the stage today. I think sometimes we do see practically like that joke like so double lift recently on the team TSM, and what TSM does with their branding is really interesting is when they have double lift, they have everyone else kind of be the nice guys. Right. When DoubleUp wasn't on the team, they had another player Hansir, take over the cocky, jerky person. Then, when DoubleUp came in, Hansir became nice again and all their public figure. They definitely plan this out to have one trash talker and then likable faces everywhere. So, people don't see that dichotomy so much. They see this mean little spirit and all of his friends and it works together and they'd script all of those moments. I think that's a great point, and something that when we've got, say five or six players on a team, you're really trying to find unique identities, for each player just to help fans attach to them in ways and the confident trash-talker guy is like a really iconic characteristic for a player. So, teams that aren't pursuing that in some aspects, I think are really missing out on an opportunity to diversify the characters on their roster. Absolutely. So, let's talk about trash-talking from a single-player esport point of view. This is my personal favorite for you, guys. Okay. I love fighting game trash-talking than most out of anything I think because fighting game players typically will run their mouths and trash talk at every opportunity. So, how do you guys feel about single-player trash-talking? Love it, that's great. Absolutely love it. Maybe we can find out more about it here, but I think in the fighting game community, it feels a little different. Everybody's trash-talking so much, but if you've ever been to one of the smash term whatsoever, I was like, but I think they're all best friends. It's like what they're all calling each other out constantly, but they all love it, and they all celebrate each other and encourage each other to trash talk. It's a great community and it feels great and the fans eat it up. Yeah, absolutely. That's a grassroots scene. So, the players feel close to each other. The fans feel close to the players. We recently saw Auntie in a video where he just flips everyone off, and you know there's a producer who said, "Please don't do that on camera." But, he does it anyway and we love it. We circulated that around the office is like, "Oh my God, how did we get there?" Can we ask our players to flip people off and the fans and management's going crazy, like absolutely not. So dumb ass, no guys, let's stop. But, you know it, it worked. I remember it and everybody else remembers it. Because he's different. People can sympathize a little bit with the rebel or the guy who doesn't care about anything, we love him. I think to your point about it being a single-player based thing, I think what we're seeing is that, in those kind of communities, like the fighting game community, each player is sort of the harbinger for their own individual brand. They have to maintain their own brand. They're all very active on social because you're not a part of a team most of the time. You don't have the marketing and branding support to rely on. If you're on TSM, you're going to get a bump because everybody's known TSM for years, right? But if you're just a Smash 4 for player, you have to make a name for yourself, and you have to get known somehow. We had a player, Captain Zach, who was known for dressing up like Bayoneta and when he would win, he would stand up and dance like Bayoneta. He would actually taunt them in real life. We found him and everybody found him because of that, more so than his play. He's also really good, but that's what was interesting about him. Because how much capacity do we have to five nice guys? There's a weirdo and there's a mean one and there's a couple of nice guys, they're the boring ones. Just think of it in storytelling. There's no superhero movie where it's just like five Captain Americas. Nobody would like that. Would be pretty boring, how do you say that? Absolutely, you've got to have the Iron Man. You've got to have someone who's a little mean, a little snarky. Little snarky, and people probably love Iron Man a lot more than Captain America, so trash-talking, super important narratively. There you go. Be the Iron Man, don't be that Captain America. Also, Iron Man is richer. Yeah. There you go. All right. So, moving on from trash-talking and getting something out to the topic a little bit more serious, let's talk about the gender disparity in esports. So, basically it is a field that's dominated by men, statistically speaking. So, it's going to be a very deep topic, but why is that for starters. Let's just start from the very top. Super complicated topic. I can speak to parts of it, very well. I will say that socially it's difficult for a girl to develop a serious habit or interest in video games. So, if we take, like me and my best friend from high school, we both have very different trajectories. Okay. When you're a child or a young girl, most likely your parents don't hand you a PlayStation, or and then when you're three or five, and you're getting birthday gifts, you most likely don't get gaming things. When you get to middle school, your friends are mainly all female because that's super hormonal, and those girls for the same reason probably don't play games. Then, you get to high school and then maybe you might get some healthy male relationships there. But, it's kind of a little late then. So, that was kind of what my best friend in high school ended up, and I gave her a video game in high school, and she had never held a controller before. It was like, you can feel it like, it was almost a little too late psychologically and technically and socially for her to really take this in as a pillar of her life, and like something that she cared about a lot. I was very lucky, and when I was young, my parents gave me a Game Boy and a Barbie, and I love both of them, and then I just continued to receive PlayStations. But, then I got to middle school, and none of my friends played games I think, none of them. I didn't have a lot of friends, but the ones I had didn't play games, and you're like the loser in that really hormonally heated public life. Still playing games? Oh, yeah. Ostracized. You're ostracized. Yeah. I remember, I secretly played EverQuest too. I remember this moment, I had my friend Sidney, and I remember the day I decided I was going to tell her I play MMOs. I remember, like explain it, like she had never even heard of an MMO before. I was explaining, she's like, "Oh, is there like blood and stuff." I was like, well you kind of like swing and damage comes up. She was like, "How does that work?" Nobody, nobody is introduced to it even. It would've been really easy for me. Even though my parents introduced it to me, to drop it at middle school because I was ostracized for it, none of my friends played it. Then, I got to high school, and still none of my female friends had any experience with video games, and I continue that relationship with it through some of my male friends. My story is not the usual one. That's a very unlikely route and there are so many checkpoints through life, socially aware. Girls can like, not be introduced to gaming or find it very nice to look away from that and consider other things, just to do with your friends, to be accepted socially. So, once you get to the ages of 18 and 20 where you're seriously thinking about your career, and what you're going to do, there are very few statistically women, who have developed a care for gaming, and so they don't go into those careers, and we see few of them right now. So, what you're trying to say is that there's a smaller pool of people to pull from that are female for the jobs just because there's less people that are interested in that from a very young age. Riley, did you have something you wanted to add onto that? I think we've talked earlier about how difficult the path and how risky the path for a professional gamer is to forgo college, to forgo business opportunities, to invest in this career that may or may not pan out. That's already very scary for men in that area, but what do you think that's like for women, is it like 10 times superior because there's no real examples to follow in and society almost doesn't encourage it. When I think about scary, I think about what support systems you would have? So, your friends think it's cool and your parents support it. Those would make it less scary. So, I guess yeah. For girls, I think girls and guys both faced the parents don't support it up. A little, like girls definitely a little bit more. Right. Friendwise, definitely guys and all their friends love video games. So, it's a little cooler to do that. So, I would say, I think we have somewhat equal fear of specifically foregoing college, but in my case, I didn't forgo college. I majored in biology and philosophy and I wrote about video games on the side for free in the middle of night. Do you think that we're moving towards a world as esports becomes more acceptable just in general with society that that is going to trickle down, and we're going to see more young girls get into gaming at an earlier age? We're going to see more game boys in the girls' section just because of how popular esports and gaming's becoming in general? Well, will that have an effect decades from now when those young girls that have more access to video games grow up in the scene. Yeah. So, the marketing things probably exceptionally hard to crack. If you talk about that, you're talking about who makes marketing decisions, usually it's males. Males are really dominant at marketing as well, you major in marketing. The way that I think about local improvement, because math if I had a way to solve the perception problem and mass society I would have some sort of a ward but, on a local level I think give your kids in the future games regardless of their gender. That goes both ways, you can give your son a journal, it happens on both ends. If you are buying gift for a kid of your friend's, buy them Xbox games instead of a barbie or both. If you know people who have that sort of bias talked to them about it. I think on that local level we might see more of that. And honestly think it starts at a parental level. Because the parents raise their kids to think that's acceptable and then, you get handed off to your friends as soon as you start going to school in terms of social responsibility. So I think, as gaming becomes more popular, people understand that it's not a weird boy niche thing, which it was historically. So, I think over these we will see improvement of that of people thinking gaming as a little more neutral a subject. Riley, did you want to talk a little bit more about the marketing side of it too. Right. So, for my side of it on the marketing I think, what we're seeing is that, while there may not be professional female players, there is a large portion of our base that we're marketing to our female fans of the game and they watch. We actually have a dedicated marketing strategies to make sure that we're reaching out to women, we're communicating to women well. If you extrapolate that into more traditional sports that have larger audiences, we see that while there are no professional female NFL players, the fan market is 55 to 45. It's extremely diverse and there are tons of female. E-sports is not there yet, the data on E-sports. My content reaches 85% to 90% males. As we reach higher levels of market saturation, do you think that we're going to see more female fans come into the sport and make it more accessible? Honestly, my female friends will start watching E-sports if their female friend start watching, and their female friends would probably start watching if, when they were young people played video games, and it all goes back to like all these early social checkpoints. So, we do need time then too. It's not just a problem we can just magically fix right now this second? There's some things we can change now, but there's also some problems that needed a lot of time also. Yes. There's huge time needed. I think, generations need to move further away from the situation certain generations. I know parents right now who have a son and a daughter and how they treat them in what they give them is crazy. I've talked to them about this and not a. "No, she doesn't touch the wheel, that's for the kid." and I was "Wow". Okay So, I think further generations will have different mindsets, as every social issues. We're talking about women that are currently working in E-sports, and this goes from whether pro-players, to behind the scenes, to marketing, to journalism, to shout casting, I just want to cover people that are currently working in the scene and are doing good work for that. Our marketing director and our community manager are both women, and I know our community manager she's top 500 in Overwatch and is currently getting approach to join contender teams and we're hanging on tight saying, "Abston stop emailing her, could we need her, you can not go do that." So, there are people in the scene. I've talked to a lot of women like Saltzer, who is the host, and Forres Carren, who is a caster for the LCS, about what they experience and how they feel and half of this is the social upbringing and then the other half, is bias, perception bias and it does happen and why, that is complicated? How to stop it, complicated? Who it affects, crazy complicated? But, if I talked to Forres Carren, I asked her. I do a lot of on-camera stuff, she doesn't too, and we talked to each other about our personas because if we speak with the same vocal timbre as the male casters, we come off a little more annoying, or screechy, or bitchy. So, she was talking to me about, she's has tried a lot of stuff in her career. She's tried talking quietly like a school teacher when she does certain types of broadcast work and more forceful when she tries more analysis work and seeing how the community reacts, and there is a perception genes there and Saltzer talks about it too like when she asked questions as a host, so she'll also do interviews with players after the games and, really common interview question and just like "Well, how are you doing? How do you feel right now?" You just want to game, how do you feel? She's afraid to ask those questions sometimes because it makes her seem like she doesn't know a lot about the game. She's like a fluff reporter. So, she specifically goes out of her way to come up with analytical questions. Alright. On map two, in this corner you pulled this play, but that's countered by this, so why did you do that? There are women in the scene. There're few of them, and they really go out of their way to try to be perceived to challenge any possible bias. I think that's kind of what we probably don't notice, there's a lot of invisible bias in the scene. That they're just stipulations on women trying to have an impact on the scene that doesn't apply to men as well. We don't really notice it, for the male side. Perception bias just a psychological thing and not everybody carries it to the same degree, and woman definitely carry it towards other woman, and that's a big social thing as well. I think hopefully what we're looking for in the scene, is that we're getting more people to begin playing games across the board, male and female included at a young age, and what that would likely do, is when we get more people in at a young age, we see them follow that throughout the rest of their life and have more opportunities to invest in the scene and sort of see E-sports or gaming as a lifestyle going forward. Hopefully that's a better path for us. I'm very much looking forward to it. Give your kids gameboys. So, E-sports popularity right now is at an all time high, we have things like this course that students are taking at colleges. We have so much more going on E-sports, we have franchising, we have investors and sponsorships. Yet, tons and tons of people are saying that E-sports is just a fad. Obviously, all three of us wouldn't be here if we felt that way, but why does E-sports have longevity? I'll take it. I think it sort of thinking about whether or not E-sports is a fad. I like to think about do we see interest in sports in general weighing it. Because right now there's football, but before football was popular, baseball was more popular than that, and before that some other sport was. I think rather than keeping everything so separate, I think we see that we are a nation and a world that has always enjoyed watching competitive sports and what's more realistic is that, these new games, these E-sports are just the newest versions of competitive sports and society has always had an inclination to enjoy it and watch it for decades, over and over. So, I don't think E-sports is going away because I don't think sports fandom is going away. We might see the specific games. I think as the market develops, we might find what the most watchable, enjoyable, most entertaining version of these E-sports are but I think it's too big enough, it's going to be here in some form or another. So Devil's advocate, what happens when a specific E-sport title doesn't, they lose interest and do you think it can keep hopping to different E-sports titles as it goes along? Baseball is always baseball, football is always football, but what happens when you have E-sports as a collection of a bunch of different titles. So, what happens when one falls or one becomes less interesting, can then jump successfully between those titles? I think we've always held the opinion that E-sports titles will die and revive and change. I don't think League of Legends will be around forever. So, there are barriers to what you're talking about because, most E-sports viewers are and that's just easier to understand if you played it. Anyone can kind of jump in a basketball and sort of understand the back and forth. Sure. So, the reason that it can jump from eSports to eSports is because gamers jumped from game to game. We all stop playing League legends, we'll all start playing Overwatch to the next thing after that. So, I think it does have the power to jump around. Okay. I think we have sort of a warped view of it because eSports is still so young. We look in like, oh! There's only two or three big games, and like how could those everyday, but really we're only in like the infancy of eSports. I really think that things are still shaking out, and we may have a decade long eSport that runs and runs, you know, but I think we're still finding it. I think, you know, technology like Twitch has come out in the last five years, and that sort of dramatically changed what makes an eSports viable. It really has to be streamable on top of it, it has to be very watchful, it has to be almost TV format. We are in the renaissance of eSports right now. We kind of are. We're figuring everything out. But the nice thing about it is that, it feels like everything is in that forward direction. Like we're not really having any down years. It kind of continues to grow and it keeps going out into places that we didn't expect it to, more and more. So, I'm not personally worried. So, Hillary, takes this form narrative direction with it from the fan view. I always look at it from the marketing angle. So, I think eSports has longevity power because marketers need eSports. We are coming into a generation that has extremely high AdBlock usage. I once heard it as, we're not even cord cutters anymore, we're like cord-nevers. This is a generation who will not have cable, who will not interact with the world the way- they're all on the internet and they all use AdBlock to a higher percentage, and the reason that there's so much money in eSports is because it is highly valuable to have a reliable marketing linkin to- That they'll watch. Year, that they'll watch. Like this is young,18 to 25 males in the US are the most valuable just dollar-wise, you know, ad impression. If you want to reach them, there's almost no other way to get to them. Ten years from now, the adBlock usage and like the lack of cable will be incredible and how will they market? How is Gillette going to reach new people? They figured it out, it's through eSports. It almost needs to be- It's kind of scary for advertisers too, because not only is this like a new market, but you've got that lucrative 18 to 25-year-old male audience, but none of the traditional marketing techniques work. We've been doing marketing in this for years and like, I'm not making any TV sized commercials. I'm not making any print ads at all. Yeah. Like, we're on like the social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, all these but like you have to completely change how you think about marketing. You can't just make up an ad and give it to people and hope it works and you have to do this new thing where you like learn to communicate with people through your brand, as your brand, through your players. It's wildly different. I think the entire marketing communities kind of scrambling trying to figure out how to serve this audience that is there and they see almost no ads all day. So, whatever you can deliver them, is extremely effective. I think a lot of people are investing heavily in figuring out what the most effective way to reach that segment is. Actually, I have a really negative reaction to that unlike anyone experiences is. Like if you run into an ad, an intrusive ad on the Internet or like that five seconds a place for YouTube video, I think you're more likely to dislike that product nowadays. Yeah, I actually get upset about it. It's almost like a privilege for real. I'll click out of it. I was like, I just don't feel like it, but it just- If something gets through my adBlock, I punish it. Yes. I never buy [inaudible] instead. How dare you give me an ad? So, what sports sponsorship does is, and if you watch football, like they've really close relationships with their sponsors and they just kind of plug them in everywhere. The new generation is less likely to watch football, the more likely to watch eSports and so, these sponsors can put a thing on a jersey or on broadcast and get huge marketing dollars for moving forward. So, it gives eSports longevity through that? Where do you thinks with a pro player ends when he retweets it out to 700,000 fans? Like trying to calculate what that is worth in marketing dollars would be stagger. Like if you're Coca-Cola or McDonald's and you wanted to come out and reach 700,000, 18 to 25 year old males that care about gaming or if you're just some computer parts company. In a way that they respect. Exactly, in a way that doesn't feel like an ad. Away that they don't reject it. Like it's astronomical to sense the marketing dollars that should be changing hands for the actual advertising that's going on. Because it's so underserved right now. Because no one has figured it out. All right. So, for our last topic we're going to talk about professional play versus full-time streaming. So, for the students that aren't sure what we're talking about, it's basically if a pro player is still good enough to play the game, some of the times they decide to full time stream on a platform like Twitch. I'm curious to see why they do that. So, what are one of the reasons why you think a full-time professional player will swap over to streaming when they're seemingly good enough to stay pro? Well, I'll tell you. The biggest thing is the lifestyle difference. Yeah. What people may not know about a professional player is like you see them when they're on stage and they're competing for a couple hours Saturday and Sunday but the behind the scenes is literally ten hours of screaming each day. They only get one day off a week. Six days on very heavy schedules. Very hard practice and- You have to live in a gaming house so you can't like move in with a girlfriend or friends and- You're making some pretty hard lifestyle choices to commit to this professional lifestyle. If you slack off on that, the person who's willing to put in three more hours a day than you is going to out-compete you with that. So, these people, like anyone you look at who's been a professional player for years two, three, four years now. Like you need to understand that they have committed a lot of their life to that. It's a pretty grueling thing. So, when I see people transition into streaming and a long times they can make even more money streaming than they were professionally, and only have to stream 68 hours a day, they can have their own apartment, they can have friends, and they could sort of have a life. They can take a day off. Oh, wow. A totally different lifestyle so. No one is going to replace them. Sometimes they do make more money. Like, I'm a PewDiePie. One of those popular League streamer. He used to be a pro player and now makes what like $2 million sitting. Oh, at least. Yeah, he's got a suite. Obviously not everybody makes so much money but that's the hope. We need to think about that, like being a professional player has certain risks involved. In that, you have to be good or you can be cut from a team, right. But transitioning into streaming is also very risky because there is a limited pool of viewers that everybody is competing for it. But also not everyone can be a successful streamer. We talked to a lot of players about this who want to do that but they haven't built their personal brand enough or they're not- You can't just be a good player and then be like, "I'm a good player and now I'm streaming. " Yeah, you have to be an entertainer. You have to have personality. Yeah. Absolutely. You have to have a popularity and not a lot of players- Charisma. -have built that or can build that overnight, you know, so not everybody can do both. So, what are the things that pro players are people of the public thinks that being a pro player is easy because you're just playing video games. Right. But then I also see this stigma inside of the pro players that think streaming is easy, because they don't realize how much effort actually goes into streaming too. So much of pro players try and they realize, "Oh this isn't for me.", and you guys have experience with that. On multiple there were really good players and have long careers and then go to try to stream and- They disappear. Not a lot of people show up. Then, you know, it's not for everyone. It's a completely different skill set. You know, and it's all on camera personality. To be able to play a game at a high level and entertain up to a thousand people at once is Incredible, you know, and it kind of daunting for me so. There is people for both roles. So, I feel like they have to kind of determine what's best for them. The easiest example or the latest example would be shroud, who was a Counter-Strike GO player for a Cloud9, and he transitioned into streaming and he's getting 20, 25, 30,000 people watching him, and he's streaming consisted hours and he's having a field day with it. So, it really just depends on what kind of a personality you have and what you can bring to streaming I feel like too. Different skill sets, you know. So, I think finding people who happen to be good at both and had been successful at it then, you know, congratulations to them because they kind of deserve it. Riley, Share I appreciate you guys taking the time to come talk to me today. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, yeah. So, there you have it. Those are some hot topics in eSports industry. If you guys have any questions, feel free to write it down and we'll discuss them.
