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GrandInquisitor
New York City13113 Posts
On October 20 2017 04:12 Numy wrote:
I spoke to Neo about companies especially game companies seem to value control over profits. They'd rather lose money if it meant no one else had any control or gain in it. OWL in LA should be a boon for Riot if it works since it'll get more people locally interested in gaming which could have a cascade effect. However if you look at it from a control perspective they are losing some of that by not being the alpha dogs. Blizzard has shown the exact same mentality in the past and still do. They want all the money and all the control. Someone else making money off their product which is helping their product so tangentially helps them? Nope shut that shit down.
It's baffling but in the context of big corporate it makes some kind of twisted sense.
It's also why they see other esports as competitors. Instead of seeing it as other sports which could muster up interest in the whole field they see it as people stealing away their audience. Crazy stuff, short sighted but again if the goal is just to get as much money right now as possible it makes sense. Long term growth is irrelevant for majority of companies/people.
I strongly disagree with this. Long term growth is exactly why you can't have conflicted teams. Go back in time to 2004. If you're starting Facebook, you cannot have one of your 10 key employees have massive stock options in MySpace and care way more about MySpace than Facebook. Is this about you "wanting all the money and all the control"? Or is this you saying, at the most important stage for my startup venture, I cannot have 10% of my workforce care more about a rival than about me?
esports engagement is limited. Look at how dramatically PUBG has cost all the other games Twitch viewership. There are a limited number of gamers with limited amounts of time and money. No one is gonna watch IMT OWL and be like "OK now let's watch IMT LCS". How many games do you think the average Bjergsen fan has watched of Leffen? FlashX? GaleAdelaide?
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I mean, lets be clear why there is VC fronting the $10 million to be in the LCS at all: These people are under the impression that they will be able to suckle at the tits of Riot, TSM, & C9 while occasionally fielding a good team and still be able to more than recoup that money.
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On October 20 2017 04:29 GrandInquisitor wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2017 04:12 Numy wrote:
I spoke to Neo about companies especially game companies seem to value control over profits. They'd rather lose money if it meant no one else had any control or gain in it. OWL in LA should be a boon for Riot if it works since it'll get more people locally interested in gaming which could have a cascade effect. However if you look at it from a control perspective they are losing some of that by not being the alpha dogs. Blizzard has shown the exact same mentality in the past and still do. They want all the money and all the control. Someone else making money off their product which is helping their product so tangentially helps them? Nope shut that shit down.
It's baffling but in the context of big corporate it makes some kind of twisted sense.
It's also why they see other esports as competitors. Instead of seeing it as other sports which could muster up interest in the whole field they see it as people stealing away their audience. Crazy stuff, short sighted but again if the goal is just to get as much money right now as possible it makes sense. Long term growth is irrelevant for majority of companies/people. I strongly disagree with this. Long term growth is exactly why you can't have conflicted teams. Go back in time to 2004. If you're starting Facebook, you cannot have one of your 10 key employees have massive stock options in MySpace and care way more about MySpace than Facebook. Is this about you "wanting all the money and all the control"? Or is this you saying, at the most important stage for my startup venture, I cannot have 10% of my workforce care more about a rival than about me? esports engagement is limited. Look at how dramatically PUBG has cost all the other games Twitch viewership. There are a limited number of gamers with limited amounts of time and money. No one is gonna watch IMT OWL and be like "OK now let's watch IMT LCS". How many games do you think the average Bjergsen fan has watched of Leffen? FlashX? GaleAdelaide?
I think you misunderstood what I mean by one helping the other. Let me try use an analogy which I loathe but think it helps.
Let's say I grow up in a place where no one plays or watches sport. It's unlikely that I'll grow up caring about sports because it's just not something that is a part of life. Now say instead the place I grow up in is super into only two sports, soccer and rugby. I try them out but neither really appeals to me. However I've started to enjoy the activity and competition while not exactly enjoying the sport. Knowing this information I may be more inclined to try find a sport I do enjoy say hockey and squash. It's just normal part of life to enjoy sports for me now as it's been a part of my culture/society growing up.
That's how I view all these different esports. While in the short term they may be competing with the limited viewership, in the long term as they gain more traction and become more a normal in society they will attract more people to it. Some of those people may not enjoy the exact game their friends/family are into but enjoy the concept enough to find one they do enjoy. Likewise having local OWL or LCS events in the city may become a part of life for that city which could just interest more people in the area. It's not about "hey IMT has OWL team and LCS so let me go watch other", it's more about bringing more people into the whole concept of esports.
Personally I never was a fan of Dota. I grew up on Half-life 1 and Quake. Those were the big titles we played at lans. Gaming and sporting was just a part of life. As for startup analogy. Blizzard isn't a startup and have a history of valuing control over anything else. Riot isn't one either and opted for control first. Companies just prefer having absolute control over their products in how they used. I also don't agree there's a finite viewerbase for esports and one getting popular makes another unpopular. That may be in the short term but in the long term they'll all find a place. We have a million different sports titles, why can't we have a million different game titles eventually?
edit: I realise by nature there's a finite viewership at any given time. That was a silly statement lol. I meant more that the viewerbase is limited and stagnant to the point where multiple titles can't survive in the ecosystem.
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GrandInquisitor
New York City13113 Posts
On October 20 2017 04:30 cLutZ wrote:
I mean, lets be clear why there is VC fronting the $10 million to be in the LCS at all: These people are under the impression that they will be able to suckle at the tits of Riot, TSM, & C9 while occasionally fielding a good team and still be able to more than recoup that money.
That doesn't change the fact that performing well = more money. More money is always better than less money, particularly when it doesn't cost much more to have a good team than a bad team.
On October 20 2017 04:41 Numy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2017 04:29 GrandInquisitor wrote:On October 20 2017 04:12 Numy wrote:
I spoke to Neo about companies especially game companies seem to value control over profits. They'd rather lose money if it meant no one else had any control or gain in it. OWL in LA should be a boon for Riot if it works since it'll get more people locally interested in gaming which could have a cascade effect. However if you look at it from a control perspective they are losing some of that by not being the alpha dogs. Blizzard has shown the exact same mentality in the past and still do. They want all the money and all the control. Someone else making money off their product which is helping their product so tangentially helps them? Nope shut that shit down.
It's baffling but in the context of big corporate it makes some kind of twisted sense.
It's also why they see other esports as competitors. Instead of seeing it as other sports which could muster up interest in the whole field they see it as people stealing away their audience. Crazy stuff, short sighted but again if the goal is just to get as much money right now as possible it makes sense. Long term growth is irrelevant for majority of companies/people. I strongly disagree with this. Long term growth is exactly why you can't have conflicted teams. Go back in time to 2004. If you're starting Facebook, you cannot have one of your 10 key employees have massive stock options in MySpace and care way more about MySpace than Facebook. Is this about you "wanting all the money and all the control"? Or is this you saying, at the most important stage for my startup venture, I cannot have 10% of my workforce care more about a rival than about me? esports engagement is limited. Look at how dramatically PUBG has cost all the other games Twitch viewership. There are a limited number of gamers with limited amounts of time and money. No one is gonna watch IMT OWL and be like "OK now let's watch IMT LCS". How many games do you think the average Bjergsen fan has watched of Leffen? FlashX? GaleAdelaide? I think you misunderstood what I mean by one helping the other. Let me try use an analogy which I loathe but think it helps. Let's say I grow up in a place where no one plays or watches sport. It's unlikely that I'll grow up caring about sports because it's just not something that is a part of life. Now say instead the place I grow up in is super into only two sports, soccer and rugby. I try them out but neither really appeals to me. However I've started to enjoy the activity and competition while not exactly enjoying the sport. Knowing this information I may be more inclined to try find a sport I do enjoy say hockey and squash. It's just normal part of life to enjoy sports for me now as it's been a part of my culture/society growing up. That's how I view all these different esports. While in the short term they may be competing with the limited viewership, in the long term as they gain more traction and become more a normal in society they will attract more people to it. Some of those people may not enjoy the exact game their friends/family are into but enjoy the concept enough to find one they do enjoy. Likewise having local OWL or LCS events in the city may become a part of life for that city which could just interest more people in the area. It's not about "hey IMT has OWL team and LCS so let me go watch other", it's more about bringing more people into the whole concept of esports. Personally I never was a fan of Dota. I grew up on Half-life 1 and Quake. Those were the big titles we played at lans. Gaming and sporting was just a part of life. As for startup analogy. Blizzard isn't a startup and have a history of valuing control over anything else. Riot isn't one either and opted for control first. Companies just prefer having absolute control over their products in how they used. I also don't agree there's a finite viewerbase for esports and one getting popular makes another unpopular. That may be in the short term but in the long term they'll all find a place. We have a million different sports titles, why can't we have a million different game titles eventually? edit: I realise by nature there's a finite viewership at any given time. That was a silly statement lol. I meant more that the viewerbase is limited and stagnant to the point where multiple titles can't survive in the ecosystem.
I guess you and I disagree on that front. I think esports is already fairly saturated, and now we're entering the winnowing phase. You and I grew up in a different era, where we'd stay up to 3AM to watch 240p untranslated OGN games and when ESPORTS was something Hot_Bid talked about ironically. It's now big business, and a bunch are going to start dying off.
Do we really have a million different sports? We have fewer than 10 big sports around the world. There used to be a million different sports. Riot doesn't want to end up as one of the sports that people don't play any more.
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On October 20 2017 05:02 GrandInquisitor wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2017 04:30 cLutZ wrote:
I mean, lets be clear why there is VC fronting the $10 million to be in the LCS at all: These people are under the impression that they will be able to suckle at the tits of Riot, TSM, & C9 while occasionally fielding a good team and still be able to more than recoup that money. That doesn't change the fact that performing well = more money. More money is always better than less money, particularly when it doesn't cost much more to have a good team than a bad team.
That is the goal of franchising, that having a good team will not cost much more, however, I expect that not to be true at least short term. Its possible/probable that teams will ask for a salary cap soon because salaries will quickly eat up performance incentives.
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On October 20 2017 04:24 GrandInquisitor wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2017 04:05 Gahlo wrote:On October 20 2017 03:30 NeoIllusions wrote:
Initially I felt rather peeved that IMT got cut over EF because I looked at it through the lense of orga success. How could a team that placed top 3 in NA and just made it to Worlds get cut but a team that's consistently bottom 3 got in?
But after taking a step back to reassess why IMT got cut over EF, listening to Travis' vlog, and reading Lunar's musings, I think the overwhelming factor determining if an orga gets franchised is their finances. It should be no surprise that money is a driving force here, all the teams franchised for next year need to be pulling their own weight, more or less. If you can't generate revenue, it just creates added pressure on Riot and the other team owners. So from that perspective, it makes more sense.
So in light of FQ making it in, one has to wonder: just how poorly run was IMT's books?
Tin foil hat on, I probably do think IMT's decision to back OverWatch in LA was also a huge detriment in Riot's decision to reject them. IMT prob got cut for more than one reason. At the same time, I'm concerned that Riot is putting more emphasis on financials than actual developement of the teams with this. Part of the reason people are against franchising in the first place is they don't want bad orgs getting in and then bottom feeding for the 2.5-4 years before getting the boot. Echo Fox has a history of doing just that either being in relegations of skimming just above it while never getting into playoffs. I'm concerned about EF being back along with groups getting in that have 0 experience actually running a esports or League team. IMT being LA for OWL being a negative to Riot's evaluation should be beyond even thought. And yet one of these 10 teams will inevitably finish last this year. That doesn't mean franchising them was a mistake. The whole point of a franchise was that you can have bad years and stay in LCS: that if you're a good team that provides well for their players with financial stability, you deserve to stay in, even if you happened to pick the wrong players this year. You seem to think that there will be teams that just say fuck it, join the league, and sit around with their dicks in their hands for 2.5-4 years. It's hard to imagine why that would be the case, though, assuming they aren't allergic to money and success. Everybody's gonna try, but only one will win. That's fine.
Yes, I understand that. That's why I haven't been saying TL shouldn't get in. Steve has shown a track record of putting forth a competitive team that, at times, has been towards the head of the pack. EF on the other hand has a track record of doing nothing but skirting relegations/getting relegated their entire 2 year existence.
Being 10th doesn't mean a team is poorly ran. Being 10th while having players like Keith as your starting bot laner, for example, a player that has proven time and again he a) doesn't deserve a starting spot and b) is only useful as a motivator to take spots from struggling ADs, yet never actually doing it, isn't. Coddling outright non-competitive players and treating them well isn't the sign of a well run team.
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I'm glad Immortals won't be in LCS I find them to be very annoying (and too self-righteous) to listen to.
I'm still pretty sure that no one will actually care about what teams made it in a couple months, the players they like will all find teams anyway.
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On October 20 2017 05:02 GrandInquisitor wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2017 04:30 cLutZ wrote:
I mean, lets be clear why there is VC fronting the $10 million to be in the LCS at all: These people are under the impression that they will be able to suckle at the tits of Riot, TSM, & C9 while occasionally fielding a good team and still be able to more than recoup that money. That doesn't change the fact that performing well = more money. More money is always better than less money, particularly when it doesn't cost much more to have a good team than a bad team. Show nested quote +On October 20 2017 04:41 Numy wrote:On October 20 2017 04:29 GrandInquisitor wrote:On October 20 2017 04:12 Numy wrote:
I spoke to Neo about companies especially game companies seem to value control over profits. They'd rather lose money if it meant no one else had any control or gain in it. OWL in LA should be a boon for Riot if it works since it'll get more people locally interested in gaming which could have a cascade effect. However if you look at it from a control perspective they are losing some of that by not being the alpha dogs. Blizzard has shown the exact same mentality in the past and still do. They want all the money and all the control. Someone else making money off their product which is helping their product so tangentially helps them? Nope shut that shit down.
It's baffling but in the context of big corporate it makes some kind of twisted sense.
It's also why they see other esports as competitors. Instead of seeing it as other sports which could muster up interest in the whole field they see it as people stealing away their audience. Crazy stuff, short sighted but again if the goal is just to get as much money right now as possible it makes sense. Long term growth is irrelevant for majority of companies/people. I strongly disagree with this. Long term growth is exactly why you can't have conflicted teams. Go back in time to 2004. If you're starting Facebook, you cannot have one of your 10 key employees have massive stock options in MySpace and care way more about MySpace than Facebook. Is this about you "wanting all the money and all the control"? Or is this you saying, at the most important stage for my startup venture, I cannot have 10% of my workforce care more about a rival than about me? esports engagement is limited. Look at how dramatically PUBG has cost all the other games Twitch viewership. There are a limited number of gamers with limited amounts of time and money. No one is gonna watch IMT OWL and be like "OK now let's watch IMT LCS". How many games do you think the average Bjergsen fan has watched of Leffen? FlashX? GaleAdelaide? I think you misunderstood what I mean by one helping the other. Let me try use an analogy which I loathe but think it helps. Let's say I grow up in a place where no one plays or watches sport. It's unlikely that I'll grow up caring about sports because it's just not something that is a part of life. Now say instead the place I grow up in is super into only two sports, soccer and rugby. I try them out but neither really appeals to me. However I've started to enjoy the activity and competition while not exactly enjoying the sport. Knowing this information I may be more inclined to try find a sport I do enjoy say hockey and squash. It's just normal part of life to enjoy sports for me now as it's been a part of my culture/society growing up. That's how I view all these different esports. While in the short term they may be competing with the limited viewership, in the long term as they gain more traction and become more a normal in society they will attract more people to it. Some of those people may not enjoy the exact game their friends/family are into but enjoy the concept enough to find one they do enjoy. Likewise having local OWL or LCS events in the city may become a part of life for that city which could just interest more people in the area. It's not about "hey IMT has OWL team and LCS so let me go watch other", it's more about bringing more people into the whole concept of esports. Personally I never was a fan of Dota. I grew up on Half-life 1 and Quake. Those were the big titles we played at lans. Gaming and sporting was just a part of life. As for startup analogy. Blizzard isn't a startup and have a history of valuing control over anything else. Riot isn't one either and opted for control first. Companies just prefer having absolute control over their products in how they used. I also don't agree there's a finite viewerbase for esports and one getting popular makes another unpopular. That may be in the short term but in the long term they'll all find a place. We have a million different sports titles, why can't we have a million different game titles eventually? edit: I realise by nature there's a finite viewership at any given time. That was a silly statement lol. I meant more that the viewerbase is limited and stagnant to the point where multiple titles can't survive in the ecosystem. I guess you and I disagree on that front. I think esports is already fairly saturated, and now we're entering the winnowing phase. You and I grew up in a different era, where we'd stay up to 3AM to watch 240p untranslated OGN games and when ESPORTS was something Hot_Bid talked about ironically. It's now big business, and a bunch are going to start dying off. Do we really have a million different sports? We have fewer than 10 big sports around the world. There used to be a million different sports. Riot doesn't want to end up as one of the sports that people don't play any more.
Yea maybe we just have differing viewpoints. I know we grew up in a different period in esports. Back when you had to cart around your 15 inch CTR to lans to play hopping rides with buddies or trying to negotiate with parents before you had any buddies old enough to drive.
There are a lot of sports. Off the top of my head you have Football, Cricket, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Aussie Rules rugby, American Football, Tennis, Ice Hockey, Hockey, Basketball, Baseball, Boxing, MMA, Wrestling, Squash, Golf, Motorbike Racing, Car racing, Cycling, Swimming, Track and Field, Other Athletics, Marathon/Triathlon stuff, etc. Even less physical stuff like Chess, GO etc. There are a loooooot of sports out there. They may differ wildly in size and geographic location but they are out there. Don't see reason gaming can't get there. Not every game has to be biggest in the world.
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Can anybody explain the whole Overwatch League to me? It just seems like a giant money sink for rich people, with little to no hope of ever getting your investment back, and literally no hope of multiplying it by some insane number.
It just seems bad even by normal investment standards.
I kinda feel the same way about League, but at least there you have a big playerbase and viewerbase which you have a chance to monetize.
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From what I've gathered from a distance, you pay a bunch of money to get in and pick a city to make your home city. Eventually, you need to have a facility that can hold a decent crowd and then teams will have home and away games/sets like traditional sports. In the meantime, at least the first season is going to be held in LA while teams get their facilities ready.
In my opinion, it's super ambitious to a fault and is bound to fail. Blizzard is jumping the gun on this with an esport that isn't proven. This is something that, hypothetically, Riot should be attempting in 2 years after franchising and running leagues for 7 years, not Blizzard from the jump.
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I think Blizzard is trying to take a huge step into the future. Considering that OW didn't really set the world on fire in the semi-organic tournament structure, they've decided to turn it into this huge experiment. And since they are Blizzard, they've managed to sell this experiment to enough rich people. Personally I'm kinda excited because having one go-to overproduced show might be perfect for the ammount of interest I have in OW, and I guess there's actually quite a lot of people who feel similarly?
And to keep this on-topic, this seems to be pretty much exactly what Riot has been trying to do, except they skip the first 6 years and go straight to current day (and beyond).
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OW was actually doing great with the organic tournament stuff going on. Blizzard decided that they didn't want that but instead of forcefully stopping that they made it so you had to pay a fee to host tournaments. This fee was obviously enough to make sure no one bothered. Effectively killing off anything organic while having enough deniability to get away with the PR.
God I hate what this company has become.
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Really? Even at height of my interest in the game the tournament broadcasts were just so boring and unmemorable to me. Maybe I'm just not into the game.
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United States37500 Posts
Houston Rockets accepted into the 2018 NA LCS
l0l, this is the kind of applicants Riot was getting for their franchises, so I guess IMT getting dropped isn't as surprising now? Still makes me wonder who's behind FQ again? Cause didn't DIG have the 76ers behind them? zz
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I hope Riot never tries the OWL approach as it feels like there's too many logistical holes beyond the fact that its Overwatch and not some proven esport. Having a geolocation based esport sounds absurd when you consider that the nature of competitive video games is that they can be played anywhere with an internet connection
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On October 20 2017 10:44 NeoIllusions wrote:Houston Rockets accepted into the 2018 NA LCSl0l, this is the kind of applicants Riot was getting for their franchises, so I guess IMT getting dropped isn't as surprising now? Still makes me wonder who's behind FQ again? Cause didn't DIG have the 76ers behind them? zz
Yeah, it makes me curious as well. As a Philadelphian and Ssumday fan, it was a gut punch.
On October 20 2017 10:52 chipmonklord17 wrote:
I hope Riot never tries the OWL approach as it feels like there's too many logistical holes beyond the fact that its Overwatch and not some proven esport. Having a geolocation based esport sounds absurd when you consider that the nature of competitive video games is that they can be played anywhere with an internet connection
What it does do is it solves the "Why should I care about any of these teams?" issue that esports has where fans hop from team to team due to success or their favorite player at a higher rate than traditional sports. It also gives more opportunities to be able to experience an esports event live. However, anything larger than the existing regions is stupid.
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United States37500 Posts
Team SoloMid: looking for minority investors soon (tm)
Cloud9: "individual" investors Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, NFL hall of famer Joe Montana, Golden State Warrior owner Chamath Palihapitiya
Counter Logic Gaming: Madison Square Garden
Team Liquid: aXiomatic eSports (Magic Johnson, Peter Guber and Ted Leonsis)
Echo Fox: New York Yankees
OpTic: Chaney Sports Group
New Team 1: Joe Lacob of the Golden State Warriors
New Team 2: Cleveland Cavaliers
FlyQuest: Wesley Edens of the Milwaukee Bucks and the Fortress Gaming Investment group
So DIG couldn't compete with 76ers money and who knows if IMT had anyone backing them, but these are all serious levels of monies. OpTic's backers are least notable to me but even then, they have such a stronk eSports background for an orga not already in League.
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On October 20 2017 10:52 chipmonklord17 wrote:
I hope Riot never tries the OWL approach as it feels like there's too many logistical holes beyond the fact that its Overwatch and not some proven esport. Having a geolocation based esport sounds absurd when you consider that the nature of competitive video games is that they can be played anywhere with an internet connection
That's an approach very specific to games that were made in internet era and are designed with some ammount of input lag in mind. If you look at CS, that's a game that sprouted in an era where LAN Parties were extremely common, people played only on servers with very low ping (ie located in their own region) and what do you know, until recently teams were for the most part national. And a 100 times better example, fighting games which originated from arcades and maaaybe consoles (with no online play), and thus were very regional (Norcal vs Socal, East Coast vs West Coast, America vs Japan etc etc etc). Even nowadays when online play is standard, the genre is built on timing so strict that 16ms of lag changes everything. It's only games like League that force everyone to connect to the same server that made it seem like regions don't matter.
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On October 20 2017 11:09 NeoIllusions wrote:
Team SoloMid: looking for minority investors soon (tm)
Cloud9: "individual" investors Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, NFL hall of famer Joe Montana, Golden State Warrior owner Chamath Palihapitiya
Counter Logic Gaming: Madison Square Garden
Team Liquid: aXiomatic eSports (Magic Johnson, Peter Guber and Ted Leonsis)
Echo Fox: New York Yankees
OpTic: Chaney Sports Group
New Team 1: Joe Lacob of the Golden State Warriors
New Team 2: Cleveland Cavaliers
FlyQuest: Wesley Edens of the Milwaukee Bucks and the Fortress Gaming Investment group
So DIG couldn't compete with 76ers money and who knows if IMT had anyone backing them, but these are all serious levels of monies. OpTic's backers are least notable to me but even then, they have such a stronk eSports background for an orga not already in League.
To be fair, they are owned by the owner of the Sixers, who also own the NJ Devils, and is the co-founder of the Apollo Management Group. The guy is worth $3b by himself. We're reaching the point where numbers don't really matter.
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EPT
