WESA goes live, Reddit AmA underway

It begins.

There’s a Reddit thread on r/globaloffensive promising official answers to user questions. I’ve got one in there near the top of the list, but there’s some great questions being asked. Here’s hoping we get some genuine answers from the people behind the WESA scheme. Sadly, the press conference wasn’t streamed for some awful fucking reason, I’m sure, but we’ll be getting some sort of highlight reel this weekend, according to the WESA spokeshole running their Twitter account.

Here’s some of the finer tweets that came across my timeline regarding this morning’s announcement:

And then there’s this gem from the Reddit thread, where the WESA founders AMA hasn’t started yet:

logic

Sky News thinks the WESA wants to emulate FIFA but that’s not entirely true

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 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.

TLEP #034 – Non-Exclusive Exclusivity

Today’s episode of the lowercase esports podcast uses the details from yesterday’s post about the World Esports Association leak as a jumping off point for a discussion about how far-reaching this organization’s potential legal authority could be. It’s so weird for ESL to think that an organization like this benefits players or that it needs to exist at all.

I’d also like to take this space to express my gratitude towards the whiskey I consumed during the production of this episode. You helped me through some mental blocks and even though you impaired me to the point where I stumbled on the simplest of acronyms and initialisms, you also helped me to ignore that horrible squeaker that gaben matched me up with on CS:GO MM later that evening. You’re the true hero, whiskey.

The episode listing and subscription links can be found at the podcast index.