EPTI recently made a comment about the ridiculous nature of western esports companies and received a few PMs imploring me to reveal more details. This is a blog I’ve been thinking of doing for a few months now but wasn’t sure how to do it without hurting relationships but I think I’ve worked out a formula that will provide you with the gory details while still maintaining some level on shadow. I would probably post this in blogs but im using my self appointed freebee to post this in BW instead (maybe i'll move to general instead).
I guess I should introduce this with what I do on Teamliquid. Chill asked me once and my response was “….stuff…I guess”. I don’t write. I can churn out the odd photoshopped image but I’m nowhere near the skill of most of the graphics team. I don’t code – I dream up the odd idea, ask bob if we can do it, hear “no” and then ask another coder to help. What do I do then? I guess I manage. Manage is a pretty loose term and for me it’s been everything from figuring out good choices for staff, rethinking the way do things as a staff, coming up with and shooting down ideas, and the last one which ive taken under my wing is communicating with third parties. You know those guys at companies who you think "lol wtf does that guy even do" - im that guy except i actually do some stuff.
Staff don’t get paid – we do what we do cause we are a) huge nerds with nothing better to do with our time b) stupid and haven’t figured out we should be getting paid c) would rather keep the level of “LOL CHECK DIS YOUTUBE LINK OUT!” and not go all corporate on the community (one of the foundations of what makes this community great imo). As a result we are very protective of the people we represent (you guys), and for me at least feel a sense of pride and duty to make sure as a community we don’t get fucked over by Joe Big Shot with his hundred million dollar investment from venture capitalists. There’s a reason you don’t see TL covered in ads like other BW communities.
We get contacted pretty frequently by third parties via email, msn, PM, IRC etc and for whatever reason I just started responding to a lot of the inquiries we get. Most of them are pretty mundane but some of them are flat out ridiculous. Because im a gossip queen I figure ill let you guys in on some of the dirt that has happened in the last year or so . If you know who these people are or companies are that im talking about id appreciate if you dont make a deal of it - their names aren't really imporant in the context of this blog/ramble/piece.
Situation 1
Last summer we were contacted by a certain company regarding our connection to Korea – they felt they could be an aid Teamliquid in getting interviews with progamers, get more access to items etc etc. They wanted to “share” news with us – basically we would send in a list of 10 questions, they would get the progamer to answer them and then we would both share the news post on our respective sites. I was pretty ambivalent to this idea – probably because I was already jaded by this point but I figured we could at least talk it out.
Me: “What were you looking for in return”
Him/Her: “A large banner linked to our site on every single page on Teamliquid”
Him/Her: “Lol?….that’s not going to happen”
~insert mumbo about how much of a help they can be to us etc~
At this point we took a step back and I had some time to do a little bit of research and snooping into their business, practices/who they were associated. It was a load of horse shit so I sent them an advertising proposal for a certain amount per month.
Him/Her:“Oh I can’t believe this is the way you guys acted…im really surprised….we are just starting I thought you guys could help us L”
Me:“I definitely understand the way you feel…it’s just business”
Him/Her: “But we are a non profit site”
Me: “Umm…you bought XXXX and XXXX for ~3 million$, invested a whack load into your site, have financial backers and you are telling me your are a non profit site? That’s crazy man, I admire you, how do you support a family like that”
Him/Her: “…um…yeah I understand what you are saying….its complicated”
lol.
The longer version of this includes an hour long msn convo chill had with this person where all they did was insult each other viciously and the person wanted to phone Chill at work lol. DRAAAMAAAA…
Situation 2
Last summer a bunch of us had the chance to go to BWWI in Paris. We had originally planned to have a sit down over dinner and discuss more srs business things like site direction, features we wanted to add etc, but basically it just turned into us getting drunk and looking at pretty French girls.
A certain girl/guy who I had spoken to numerous times online and had helped was at the notorious unofficial-shitface-disaster-after party in the lobby of the hotel where Blizzard had put the progamers. This guy/girl came up introduced him/herself to me so we had a few drinks and he/she asked me to introduce him/her to the other TL members who I knew.
….he/she had brought a list of graphics/writers from TL of ppl he was going to try scalp and when I walked away he went to try recruit. To say the least I was pretty livid with this situation and have done everything in my power to fuck him/her and their organization over ever since.
Side Note: Everyone he/she talked to told him/her to go fuck theirself. Sup.
Situation 3
Guy> Hi
Kennigit> Hi sup
Guy> Hi are you Kennigit?
Kennigit> Yeah who’s this?
Guy> Hi im XXX, im the senior associate and executive editor in chief from XXX.com. You may have heard of us
Kennigit> nope never heard of it
Guy> Oh we are a big esports and WoW site
Kennigit> yup never heard of it. Wanna Hear my title?
Guy> hmm?
Kennigit> Kennigit – Admin who bans kids and does other stuff sometimes, mainly drinks though.
Guy> :p
Kennigit> so sup
Guy> h,mmm well im not sure how to approach this so ill just say it straight
Kennigit> Ruh Roh. Ok
Guy> You guys have all the best writers so I was wondering if we could have some
Kennigit> lol wat
Guy> Well you guys have really good coverage so I was wondering if we could approach some of your writers to offer them positions.
Kennigit>……hmmm it sounds ok I just have one question
Guy> Sure.
Kennigit> Are you a fucking donkey?
Kennigit> Hey Bill Gates, It’s Steve Jobs phoning up ‘oh sup daug how dem macs.’ “yeah can we hire your engineers cause ours suck Lolool0l0” “hey sure no prab Ll0l00l” “l0l0l0l”
Guy> Well I thought I’d ask first
Kennigit> You can do what you want but a) you’re a fucking donkey b) All the writers are going to laugh at you and your big baller WoW site.
They all told him to fuck off…don’t think we’ve heard from them again.
Some other randoms tidbits about random shit
That TV station…RussiaToday I think…yeah they are doing a special on gaming addiction in Korea and wanted contacts to teams and players in Korea lol.
- The new Front Page took over a year from the day the idea was posted till the day it was release.
- TLPD took like 4-5 months and included a 20 page design document and weeks of preliminary work
- TSL took 3 weeks…lol
- Some Teamliquid staff have clauses that if incontrol of dronebabo are ever made mods that they will quit immediately – I think they’d both be awesome mods.
- Razer are cool guys/girls. Their CEO has a TL account and is a hardcore gamer– what a baller.
- I always get pissed off at Blizzard because they try to be fair by treating all their fan sites (in RTS) the same. That means that donkeyasssc2bestfriendsl0lheresmysc2site.com gets the “same” number of tickets to blizzcon as us or Gosugamers who pull in a billion hits in free advertising per day. In the same breath they have always been super cool with letting have free reign to do what we like (TSL etc) and despite the heart ache that MBS has caused, i think the feedback system if pretty baller
- If we get the same number of beta keys as donkey start up sites im going to ragequit my life lol. Fuck it, Stimey you take over.
- Despite being the largest SC esports site I think we have one of the most silent relationships with Blizzard – I know LoA talks to the top blizzard guys a hell of a lot more than I do (read 0 times…except when I saw samwise in the subway in paris and peed my pants).
- Blizzard always hides the list of progamers attending Blizzcon/Wwi until the very last minute which gives us zero time to fanboy it up with cheerfuls etc. Usually theres a secret staff campaign at least 2 weeks before to infiltrate and figure out who is going – We have a pretty good track record so far.
- Karune is awesome. If I send him a question that he doesn’t know the answer too or he’s too busy he doesn’t reply. So one day I followed up my question by trolling with “oh yeah we are talking about selling beta keys for cost, is that ok with you guys?”…he immediately appeared to tell me no hehe…then disappeared back into the void.
- An independent study by a certain Korean company shows that TL is the biggest BW site in the world. Sup!
- I was sitting in a starbucks one day like a trendy college hipster donk and saw some guy go walking by in a TL shirt…when I went outside he was gone L
- I was going to write all about the SC2GG drama cause it’s so awesome but I think most of it is public as is.
- Even though he constantly jokes about leaking MiR (men in red – staff forum) to various “enemies” of Teamliquid, and about starting his own site to destroy TL we still allow rekrul to access MiR.
- Seeing MiR is literally the biggest let down in one’s Teamliquid career…seriously its only boring shit lol
What was I writing about before? Oh yeah lol western esports companies and why they are so fucked and useless. Basically what I’ve learned from having interacted with a good majority of these people/companies is that they got there via the following reasons/processes.
1) A small site starts up
2) Play a game like BW/CS 1.6/WoW and get to the equiv of c+/B-
3) They suck too much to become a pro player so they figure they will get into the industry
4) They decide the company is going to be fucking awesome and the “next big thing” in esports
5) They go to moores and rent a cheap suit
6) They go meet some venture capitalists and compare their financial potential to massive esports companies in korea or china
7) The VCs bite and invest way too much money cause they are idiots and don’t realize that guy they are investing in is actually some US East kid with an MBA.
8) Instead of sticking to their community roots they start acting like idiots and invest their capital into bullshit projects that are easy and no one really cares about. They figure they can generate a bunch of revenue short term to impress the investor and gain the confidence for further investment
Seriously some guy contacted us and in the first 10 minutes told me he had an MBA…he also used to play games like 10 years ago and was at the top of Diablo or Wc3 ladder or something when it first came out. I don’t think you’ve ever heard of this site and probably never will.
This is the vicious cycle and why most recently you’ve seen a lot of these companies suddenly go from “very successful” to going under in a couple days or dropping all of their successful Players and teams (cough Moon). It has nothing to do with the recession/economic “climate”. Esports firms have used this as an excuse to drop teams, but the real reason is that they ignored the costs and brushed their financial diligence aside in order to take a 1 in a million risk that they could be profitable. Esports is not profitable (yet). If you get into it to make millions of dollars you are fucking dead.
The only thing western esports needs is 1 consolidated body. EPL ESWC CPL CGS – honestly, despite the attention these companies get at the time no one remembers when they die the next day…..Do you think people would notice if the NFL died tomorrow? Now what if there were 12 NFLs. All these donkey ass companies get headed by a guy/girl who has played guitar hero and did their MBA – ching ching time to run a company bro! Western Esports simply wont work without consolidation. Stop wasting millions on silly projects, Just buy everyone else with some capital and become massive – then you can’t be ignored. If someone could legitimately get this started and not pull an Angel Muneoz then maybe we’d a legitimate organization and not one that runs an event once a month.
CGS sort of had the right idea but once again with some donkey MBA at the helm they chose games that don’t have a solid hardcore base and bit the dust.
How does this relate to TL.
TL can never die. We have no overhead. We can fuck around and post what we like (actually we have rules so we cant post what we like L ) and as long as we deliver then you guys are happy which makes us happy and then we deliver some more (we’ll deliver again in the next few days). We have had semi serious talks about “going pro” but to be honest the level of intelligence of people who have “gone pro” is astronomically low. Until the last 6 months I’ve have only ever laughed at sites who tried to compete with us because no matter how much money and investment they have, if they don’t have some wits then the game is already over – if they did have that wit, they’d probably be working with us in the first place.
There was a period of a few months where we got worried about sites competing with us but as much as I hate to admit it, Fakesteve was right when he rudely told us we were fucking idiots and that we should shutup and not worry about it. Fuck you steve.
What a fucking rant.
Oh ill answer any drama questions or other questions you have….unless you work for some esports company and then you can go bite a big knob.
