Today’s 1300Z press conference will, supposedly, answer a lot of questions about what the World Esports Association is supposed to be. Dexerto broke with details with an interesting tidbit of opinion.
The World eSports Association will be revealed at 3pm. Aiming to be FIFA of eSports
— Dexerto.com (@Dexerto) May 13, 2016
The Dexerto report is largely a repost of an article Sky News is running before the press conference scheduled for today, and it confirms a few details based on the step and repeat leaked earlier this week.
First, no publisher is on board yet, but Sky News notes that negotiations are underway to court as many of the major esport developers as possible. Without publishers, as the article notes, their major leagues and tournaments such as Riot’s LCS and Valve’s International will be beyond the reach of this new organization’s control.
Secondly, they intend for this organization to control all of esports, even if the organization they’re modeling (FIFA) only controls one sport, otherwise there’s no need to confirm that they’re looking to negotiate with publishers–plural. If they were going to keep WESA’s focus on CS:GO, they’d be talking about a single publisher, Valve–and probably getting nowhere trying to take the Majors out of their hands–especially when they usually end up operating two out of the three yearly Majors.
I just don’t understand how the teams and players are willing to accept the nonsense of WESA when they know full well that they’ll be giving up not only their ability to freely choose which events they want to participate in, but the rest of their rights as well. How ESL have gotten away with pulling the wool over these teams’ eyes is beyond me.
I doubt there’s any level of transparency that WESA can offer to show that will definitively prove that they intend to be a force for good in esports.