Next week can’t get here fast enough.
Monthly Archives: June 2014
The International hype has quieted down, but the prize pool keeps growing.
With just over $1.5m USD to go until the entire second set of stretch goals have been met, it sort of seems like The International is becoming an outlier to the greater esports scene rather than a leader in it.
That’s not to say that I think the achievement of giving away the most amount of money for the sake of a video game isn’t an important one, but I think that as the hype dies down about the prize pool and turns towards the tournament qualifiers and the main event, the other companies who have games out there will be beginning to implement their league’s year-end plans.
Only Riot has the player base that can compete in the crowd-funded tournament arena, but they’ve always had solid prize pools from the get-go, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Blizzard isn’t really in the conversation anymore as they’ve seemingly taken the role of an outsmarted pioneer in so far as to have pretty much started the hype train for modern esports and then having the scene completely abandon it.
Activision gets a lot of press for its million dollar world-wide championship tournament thingamabob, but let’s get real—COD is fan worship to the extreme, Ghosts is bad and Advanced Warfare looks to be worse.
EA could step up, but I’m not sure that’s possible when you consider their big games (Battlefield and Titanfall) both fell flat after their release for one reason or another. Between releasing a broken game and releasing an incomplete game, there’s not really much hope unless they get serious about a Command and Conquer reboot. And I’m saying that mainly because I’d like to see a Command and Conquer reboot.
An esports primer on how to make a mess of a situation when your company hasn’t paid a salary in months.
So, let’s say you haven’t been paid your agreed-upon salary for three months, but you feel compelled enough to stay and turn a profit, even though they haven’t paid anyone in three months. I suppose you’d have to just hope no one would bring up the fact that no one’s been paid.
What do you do if someone finds out, though?
Oh yeah, you hand a statement from your CEO over to Slasher and tell him to post it for you because you can’t post it on your own website for some awful reason.1
What next?
Oh right, you lose complete control over the story when you let Slasher hold your statement while trying to investigate its claims. Turns out you’ve been caught being a little fast and loose with the truth. Now you have to double down or else it’s time for the real mea culpa.2
What then?
Oh sure, you tell someone who can read that they misread your months-overdue public statement when it was concluded, based on information from ex-employees, that ESGN’s CEO was simply moving the goalposts regularly.3
What now?
Oh what? You start acting responsibly and hold off making more broken promises?4
Is it too late to turn ESGN around? Most likely. As ambitious as the project was from the outset, I suppose the only thing I can credit them with is how focused they are on proving to everyone that they can create international context to all of the esports. It’s never really going to work, but I’m not going to crusade against them for trying even though their content is 100% cringeworthy and it sets a bad precedent for venture funding independent content producers in the industry moving forward.
I do hope that they would stop spending money like it grows on trees and that they stop trying to punch above their weight. Making it seem like you’re legitimate because you have plenty of money to go around doesn’t really work after it’s been nearly-scientifically proven that you’re unable to pay your own employees, who—by the way—don’t even have employment contracts! How about moving out of that ridiculous sound stage and into someone’s garage or even a small warehouse for a few months? Why jump skip straight to spending hundreds of thousands of Euros when you know you can’t sustain your own workforce without capital infusions?
I know working for free isn’t a historically uncommon theme in esports, but if you were focused on standing out from the get go—why not pay everyone within a reasonable amount of time? Sounds like a great differentiator to me.
Update: Well, I suppose that focus on proving their point wasn’t as strong as I thought.5
- Twitter: Clauf GmbH Business Relations staffer announces exclusive statement ↩
- OnGamers: ESGN has released a statement saying that all outstanding debts will be paid by the end of June ↩
- Twitter: Clauf GmbH Business Relations staffer says Slasher misread the statement. ↩
- OnGamers: ESGN cancel their future ‘Hearthstone Champions’ $25,000 prize pool tournament ↩
- Esports Heaven: ESGN Studios To Close; Staff Contracts Terminated ↩