From eSports Pioneer to Funeral director.

My name's Chris Lemley, I was the President and General Manager of Team Pandemic from 2006-2009, and I've since settled back into the family business -- I'm a fifth generation funeral director at Lemley Funeral Service in Atkins, Arkansas.

It's hard to compare the two, they're entirely different lifestyles with completely different pros and cons... but it's obviously hard to top what I was able to call a 'career' for a few good years with Pandemic....
My life is much more stable these days, and I take pride in being able to say that what I do is genuinely a service to others in a time of need. That's not to say I don't miss the rollercoaster of trying to run an eSports organization profitably, the travel or the fact that it never seemed like we were 'working,' but I don't know that I could have the family or the security that I do today if I was still chasing that dream.

I think about it from time to time, and I often find myself wanting to get involved in things part-time or as a consultant, but the circumstances surrounding the closure of Team Pandemic, and my move to the funeral home are largely the same reason I don't see myself leaving, now.
At the end of 2008, the economy went down the toilet. Dell, our largest sponsor, saw their stock drop by more than 50% in a matter of days. Everyone was struggling financially and esports was in a very uncertain state, but we tried to carry on.

The longer we operated in a state of limbo, I began asking myself if what I was doing was truly what I was meant to do. I prayed about it, argued back and forth with myself (and my family) wether we should keep spending, keep holding onto faith that other sponsors would come aboard -- not just to our own organization, but to events as well. We weren't even sure what tournaments would happen even if we could afford to get teams to them, everyone was struggling.

In the fall of 2009, my uncle passed away unexpectedly. The funeral home needed my help, and I was exhausted from trying to operate on a budget that was no longer fair to my players or to the expectations of our fans. Everything came together for a reason I believe.

Only through my close friends that are still involved in some way. I'll see news in my Twitter timeline that piques my interest from time to time, but I no longer actively pursue it. I can't remember when I finally kicked the habit of checking all the sites as soon as I sat down at a PC, but my homepage hasn't been set to GotFrag in years and I don't even know what most teams pages look like these days.

If I had to choose one, I'd say Dreamhack Winter 2007. It capped off a phenomenal year and also was the largest prize purse we'd ever brought home, $45,000. We just couldn't miss that year... the other 'powerhouse' American organizations of the time had sold out to CGS and the entire independent side of the industry was ours for the taking, and quite frankly, nobody even came close for a long time. That year we signed the largest corporate sponsorship (Pandemics deal with Dell Unitversity, which was an umbrella effort for Dell, Intel, and Microsoft) eSports had seen to date, made history with a number of our squads, and everything we did seemed to go right.

I can't even remember what my mindset was going into those meetings, but we wouldn't take no for an answer. After months of back and forth with what seemed like no real intention to press forward, I drove down to Austin and met with our contacts face to face. I was as green as you can get -- I'd never been in a situation like that before, fresh out of college facing down the suits at Dell for my first real 'business meeting..'

Somehow it worked, and I knew before I left that day that we would do business together. I think they understood how genuine and passionate I was about what I was pitching to them... I didn't have the fancy metrics and polished marketing kits that we'd develop later, I just sat down and talked to them about what we could accomplish together.
At one point in the meetings, long after it was decided that they would be working with us, the most important man in the room stopped me to ask 'what level of a team' we were... if, in comparison to baseball, we were like a minor league team, a major league organization or what. He didn't even know if we were any good. And it didn't matter.

He somehow entirely missed out on what we believed was one of the core values of my presentation, but picked up enough from the rest to green light the deal. From that day forward I realized none of these sponsors (besides the truly gaming endemic, such as Razer and Steelseries) would likely ever understand a thing about what we actually were.
...It always felt like I was selling a make believe industry.

There's no rules to what makes a pro gamer, theres no schedule we have to follow, no events definitively more important than others... Everything is relative and subjective. Each sponsor had their own unique goals and ideas of how to best utilize us to obtain them. Some came up with elaborate marketing events that, in retrospect, made no sense at all... but who were we to tell them they couldn't spend their money with us in that way. Others sat back and let us do what we do, latching on to our own campaigns and natural initiatives.

The 18-24 year old male demographic gets referred to as the 'Holy Grail' of advertising. Supposedly we're the hardest to reach, have the shortest attention spans and so on. When pro gaming was in its heyday, it was being pitched as the new and exciting way to get those eyeballs on your product.

Things were a little simpler then. You hadn't had any failures yet (CGS, WSVG, CPL), it was fresh... Internet functionality wasn't as developed as it is today, and online leagues were few and far between, so tight knit communities formed and it was easy to focus on specific leagues and events instead of this overload of competing ideas and clones that we have today. Console gaming hadn't really entered the online market yet, either, so it was easier to concentrate focus on one system (PC) and a handful of titles.

I'm happy to see it uniting some of the focus back into one game. I haven't kept up enough to comment on the state of the game or the industry around it, but I don't see anything stealing away the spotlight right now... And that's a great thing for all parties invested in the scene however long it lasts.

Our entire country was operating inside a bubble market when it popped in 2008/2009, those circumstances were much, much larger than gaming. That said, and alot of my former peers will be upset with me saying this, I don't believe that the vast majority of eSport organizations/teams offer enough return on investment to be worth the risk companies take in doing business with them. Ask yourself how many peripherals, laptops, mice or whatever must be sold -- as a direct result of your involvement with these players -- to simply break even on the cost of travel and salary for those involved.

The ones that remain in business have done a phenomenal job of adapting and coming up with new ways to expand their reach and further their appeal, but I still question the efficiency of the business model. Professional gaming still lacks the structure and mass appeal necessary for consistent growth worthy of the dollars being thrown around. Event organizers are the ones who hold the power to create such an environment, but we've all seen how that's turned out so far. Imagine where we'd be if CGS had taken off, if WSVG was still airing on CBS and so on...