Change was in the air last week at the Capital Suite of London’s ExCeL, where an assorted pick’n’mix of industry veterans and curious outsiders congregated to discuss esports’ future – and, with surprising bluntness, its failings – at the 2023 ESIC Global Esports Summit, writes DotX Talent‘s Jay Massaad in this guest article.
Incongruously placed at the end of ICE London, an enormous B2B gathering set up like a Vegas strip – with 600 metres of stands for various gambling-related companies – the 2023 ESIC Global Esports Summit (EGES) promised an opportunity to join key conversations around esports integrity.
I travelled there on Thursday with colleagues from DotX Talent to network with fellow professionals and catch talks from some industry titans. Here’s a recap of what went down.
‘Esports is Game of Thrones for really stupid people’ – Richard Lewis
The most remarkable talk of the day was delivered by Dexerto’s Editor-at-Large, and legendary esports incendiary, Richard Lewis.
Lewis gave a good overview of the current state of esports and its background, before tracking how corruption and self-interest has led to it gradually being sold off to those with the deepest pockets and the weakest ethics.
“People have struggled to build anything worthwhile,” he said. “We’ve struggled to build foundations.”
In particular, Lewis decried the involvement of controversial bodies such as the Saudi Arabian PIF, NEOM and the Chinese government.
“We ended up having to do things that our conscience should be against,” Lewis said about how perceived influence from China led Blizzard to censor and punish anti-CCP sentiment.
“We do business with them in silence because the market’s so big.”
Lewis ended his speech at the ESIC Global Esports Summit with a rallying cry to remove bad actors from the scene.
“It is possible for us to meet and find the ones who are well-intentioned, to serve the industry as a whole and not treat it as a cash grab and a gold rush,” he said.
“You’ve got to fight. Because I’m old, I remember how we defeated apartheid in South Africa. We did that through international boycotts. It was a global effort, and a wonderful thing, to defeat that evil.
“We want to grow the market and make sure it’s welcome to everybody, but realistically how can we say that, when we’re working with [the kind of people there are in esports]?”
FaZe and FTX: Has the esports bubble finally popped?
At this year’s ESIC Global Esports Summit, FaZe Clan and FTX were both hot topics among speakers: the former, for its plummeting share value, and the latter for its complete collapse which left prominent esports bodies TSM and LCS reeling from hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sponsorship money.
Phelan Hill, International Head of Strategy & Consulting at Nielsen Sports, said that FaZe’s stock had declined from 25 dollars down to under one dollar per share due to investors wising up.
Phelan said:
“People are thinking about their fundamentals: ‘Where am I going to make money from this?’ And FaZe has never been profitable. What you see now is institutional investors talking about revenue streams; people have stopped talking about growth in terms of the size of the viewership. We’re going to see a levelling of the space.”
Phelan Hill, Nielsen Sports
David Harris, Managing Director of Guinevere Capital, which includes British-based Excel Esports in its portfolio, described the past year as “a trainwreck”.
“FTX is blatant fraud, basically,” he said. “And that sets off a lot of red flags for people at different areas.”
Harris described how SPACs (or ‘Special Purpose Acquisition Companies’) had been described by banks as “the greatest wealth generation device of our generation”. FaZe is not unique as a SPAC that failed, he said, claiming that “the average SPAC is down 20%”.
However, he was clear to point out that these two companies were not representative of the entire industry.
“I want to caution people who point to FaZe Clan as the death of the esports industry, because there are a lot of other factors,” he said, adding that, in general, “companies are becoming more and more sustainable.”
‘London has bid for MSI almost every year’
Talks were not just focused on the global stage, however, as a few speakers at the ESIC Global Esports Summit addressed topics a little closer to home.
Ailsa Buck, the Head of Major Events & City Experiences at London & Partners, revealed how London had managed to secure hosting rights for the Mid-Season Invitational, the second-biggest event in the League of Legends calendar.
“London has bid for MSI almost every year for the last few years,” she said, noting how Riot Games’ preference to cycle major events between continents meant that London’s 2023 bid was considered a “now or never” attempt to secure hosting rights, leading the team to “pull out all the stops”.
One key aspect to their campaign, she revealed, was their VIK, or ‘Value in Kind’, offering—a business term for the non-monetary value that the city could provide to make the bid stand out.
“It’s a ‘city experience’ thing,” Buck said. “Fans should be able to think back on MSI 2023 in a few years and think ‘London’. We did the same thing with Pokémon last year: facilitated a partnership between Pokémon and TfL where the cable cars were branded.”
Few experiences are more surprising than seeing London’s Mayor discuss League of Legends, but that’s just what fans witnessed earlier this year, when Sadiq Khan appeared in a Riot Games video announcing that London would host MSI.
“We were so grateful for the Mayor of London’s support,” she added. “It’s all well and good with us being behind [the bid] but you need bigger names behind it.”
Buck also spoke on plans to enrich the local grassroots esports scene and said that L&P were “hungry to speak to more people” that could bring esports events to the capital – and not just on the scale of MSI.
“The size of tournament operators doesn’t matter,” she said, “we need both [big and small].”
The UK could miss out on EU esports visas
Graham Ashton, External Affairs Manager at Riot Games, and Dr. Nepomuk Nothelfer, Research Assistant at SKW Schwarz, sat down at the ESIC Global Esports Summit to discuss the broad issues of esports governance.
Ashton revealed that the European Union has plans to create an “esports Schengen visa”, which he called a “fantastic” answer to some of Riot’s biggest logistical challenges in organising tournaments.
“There’s the potential to fund infrastructure at a territorial level,” he said, adding that codifying of what constitutes ‘professional’ esports players was also being discussed. “We do feel that the EU level is the appropriate place to deal with this.”
Following Brexit, the UK could miss out on being included within such a visa, as it is no longer part of the Schengen Area. As a result, it’s easy to imagine that tournament organisers would be less likely to hold events here—unless the UK government approved a similar scheme.
Elsewhere at the ESIC Global Esports Summit 2023
Several other talks took place during a jam-packed day at the ESIC Global Esports Summit: a discussion on esports governance and integrity with Audrey Cech and Valerie Horyna of Riot Games, moderated by Katie Simmonds of the Sport Integrity Global Alliance, an update on ESIC’s projects from its Commissioner, Ian Smith (pictured above), which was of particular interest to us at DotX Talent; and many more only excluded for brevity’s sake.
You can find the full agenda on the ESIC Global Esports Summit 2023 website.
The event also came as ESIC announced GGBet as an anti-corruption education partner and Denuvo as an ESIC anti-cheat partner.
About the author
Jay Massaad is the Digital Marketing Lead for DotX Talent, a talent management agency founded by Morgan Sports Law with a keen focus on integrity.
Jay kindly offered to produce this guest article on the ESIC Global Esports Summit for Esports News UK. Here he is pictured beside fellow DotX Talent staff Mitsouko Anderson and Rebecca Donaldson.
