As the inaugural Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) Global Esports Summit comes to a close, Dom Sacco looks back on some of the discussions and points made by industry figures at the London ExCeL venue.
The event aimed to produce a content track that avoided the usual ‘esports 101’ advice and to actually make progress on challenges in the industry – so did it deliver? Here are some highlights, plus some future plans from ESIC at the bottom of the article.
‘Our product is emotion’ – Carmac
Michal ‘Carmac’ Blicharz, VP of pro gaming/product development at ESL, delivered what was arguably one of the highlights at the ESIC Global Esports Summit.
His talk cut through a lot of the noise of other keynotes in the space, to focus on the heart of esports: moments, memories and the human side of esports. He spoke about building a platform for players to create these big moments and show their emotional side.
“Our purpose is to make sure players are emotional about this [Intel Extreme Masters] event,” he said. “They see pictures of older players who have picked up the trophy in the past. They’re ascending to greatness.
“Esports are a platform for players to show their talent, but to become a different version of themselves too. We try to convince the players that if you win this event, you become more than number one.”
Carmac used the example of Ukrainian CSGO player S1mple who spoke about the Ukraine war at the recent IEM, and how, in doing so, he transcended from being the best CSGO player, to an esports icon.
Creating effective esports policy
Graham Ashton, external affairs manager at Riot Games, was joined by Tobias Scholz, founding chairperson at the Esports Research Network for a deep dive into esports policy, chaired by ESIC’s Stephen Hanna.
Graham spoke about the benefits of Riot being in charge of its own leagues (i.e. having the resources to do so), the benefits of its European Regional Leagues (ERLs) like the UK/Nordics’ NLC, but also, working with more external tournaments like the Asian Games and how Riot can learn from this for other potential leagues in the future. For example, Riot has toyed with the idea of potentially running a League of Legends world cup.
How tech can change esports
British esports journalist and personality Richard Lewis was sadly unable to make the event and deliver his talk on everyone wanting a piece of esports. But standing in was James Dean, director of UK strategy and commercial at ESL, and he gave an interesting talk on technology – particularly the Weavr project – and how it could change how we view esports in the future.
“We utilise as many technologies as humanly possible that exist today in order to deliver contextual points and bring value to the fan,” he said. “Having a point of interaction means they give us value back, in terms of how they respond and interact.”
Weavr has looked at VR, XR and other technologies to enhance the viewer experience, with fans able to view a live 3D map and see game stats per player in real time, or view different parts of the stage and players via VR cameras.
Really interesting insight from @j1mco into VR and how that may change the esports viewer experience in the future. There was another clip of viewers watching players on stage via a VR camera #EGES2022 pic.twitter.com/b4RNPuVcvu
— Dom Sacco at #i68 Insomnia powered by AGON by AOC (@Dom_Sacco) April 14, 2022
The current state of esports investment and regional opportunities
Dave Harris of Guinevere Capital – which has previously invested in Excel Esports among others – spoke about the continued hype around esports investment.
“Every deck on esports starts with ridiculous numbers, I hate it,” Dave said, honestly. “But there is still a lot of hype around esports investments at the moment, it’s a hot sector, especially now we’re overlaying esports with the metaverse.
“The metaverse has been around for a long time, but Zuckerberg renames his company Meta and now suddenly everyone has to put the term in their pitch decks. Esports is all about long-term gain, I think in the long-term people are actually underestimating how big the sector is going to be.”
Dave also spoke about some of the regions to invest in, and the importance of recognising these, rather than investing in esports and expecting some kind of instant global reach.
Dave also spoke about the sustainability of esports, franchising and, in particular, he praised Ubisoft’s approach.
“Rainbow Six’s structure is a lot smarter [than some of the publisher models out there], they’re giving more revenue shares with esports teams for in-game items. That might be where we need to go [in other games too].”
Dave also looked at other organisations and the revenues they’re generating in greater detail.
What’s next for ESIC?
Ian Smith, ESIC commissioner and Stephen Hanna, director of global strategy and partnerships at ESIC, spoke about their thoughts on the CSGO spectator bug and how they handled the investigation into that, as well as what the future holds for the integrity body in the future.
You can see some of these potential future moves from ESIC in the image below:
“We are about to relaunch our online integrity tutorial, because at the moment all education is being done with admins, coaches and more on zoom, which is fine, but we want to give better access to this to everybody,” Ian added.
“We’re looking at launching a specialised esports insurance product later this year covering travel and prize pool risks, and we’re moving our current independent disciplinary panel operation, which is internal to ESIC prosecutions, to an international esports tribunal model that will do that work as well as be accessible to external stakeholders, non-members and people from the industry.”
ESIC reveals plans to scale-up: How will ESIC manage future investigations like other bugs and problems with its resources?
Esports News UK asked ESIC this question, and Stephen Hanna responded: “I’ve been working very hard to make sure ESIC can scale to meet this global need, both with an internal and external capability.”
Ian Smith added: “We had a manageable workload in respect to match-fixing. I could deal with it because of my expertise and there weren’t too many cases, but the fixing has become more sophisticated. The scale has gone off the charts, we had a 275% increase in suspicious bets in 2020, so during that year I became overwhelmed on a personal level, as investigation work is very time consuming and you of course have to be careful about it.
“There are two elements to this: expertise and the skill of doing the work, and also access to helpful software and resources that allow you to do that work more quickly. A normal social media search – say you’re looking for a link between a player and a bettor, for example, you can do that manually and it takes many, many hours. There’s also open source software that does that for you in five minutes, but it’s excessively expensive.
“So I’ve looked at upscaling our capacity for that type of investigation to naturally increase in activity. We are about to recruit our first full-time investigation manager, and then Stephen has looked at external resources. So we will have resources to complete our massive backlog of investigations far more quickly to start producing results we were established to produce.”
Ian Smith, ESIC
Stephen continued: “We’re a not-for-profit, so [we are conscious] of the money we spend. What we take really seriously is every dollar spent.
“We’ve set up some great strategic partnerships that will give us access to close to 4,000 staff on a scale-up basis around the world, that’s not been announced yet but nonetheless we’re in the final stages of discussions [around that]. So we’re working on now, is creating those workflow processes, so that when we need to scale up, we’ll be able to lean on partners that have that capability and capacity, with us always driving the subject matter expertise from a case perspective.
“Then, separately to that, as Ian said, creating in-house capabilities to be able to handle that workflow and have the right amount of resourcing internally to be able to manage that, and have coordination with our partners. On the software issues, we have a list of six new partners coming to ESIC on the anti-cheat level. That will give us access to a ridiculous amount of new intelligence capabilities and new anti-cheat capabilities we’ve never had access to before, such as retrospective analytics of underperformance and overperformance for match-fixing purposes, including the open source software was mentioning.
“Over the past few years we’ve built the right structure, so when we have this ongoing stream of demand from an investigative, cross-sectioning and enforcement workload perspective, we’re able to service it but not with a detrimental impact on the membership [of ESIC].”
There were also a host of other speakers at the event, from Swipe Right PR’s Kirsty Endfield to Fnatic’s Edward Gregory and others, and we couldn’t write in detail about them all. You can see more info and the full agenda for the 2022 ESIC Global Esports Summit on its website here.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
