Tag Archives: ESL

Cornerstone Euro teams, ESL form international cabal to consolidate marketing power

wesaleakEight teams, one event organizer, zero publishers, zero players, and a five person board with two ESL representatives. Just considering those details alone, you’d have to conclude that an esports organization with a power structure like that is not meant to fairly promote esports, player rights, or anything remotely resembling the utopian union idea that never seems to materialize.

I think it’s safe to say that, holy fucking shit, ESL have completely lost their minds. Here’s a translated version of the organization’s mission statement originally discovered by /u/Ivanuvo and translated from the original German:

Aim: Promote tuning and managing sport at international level and establishment of a global and structured platform for eSports, its players and teams through construction, promotion and operation of ESL-Liga/leagues, as well as other eSports events that are supported by the Association, online and offline.
Creation, creation and obtaining necessary licenses and/or development of software, technology, content and other materials that are needed for the ESL League/leagues and other eSports events supported by the Club (i.e. ticket sales, production logistics, event organisation) to work, can be advertised, promoted and operated;
Combining the sporting and economic interests of the teams who are members of the Association (‘WESA-Team(s)’), as marketing partners, as well as marketing of all of the WESA community rights conferred on team players (‘player’) and the Walsh teams.)

We’ll definitely be waiting to hear about details for this organization, anonymous spokesperson who is probably Carmac.

From the bits and pieces that are publicly available, it’s reasonable to conclude that ESL are trying to secure its place in the competitive scene–regardless if their place is already secure in the competitive scene because… y’know… it’s ESL.

Some ESL numbers prompted some thoughts about balance.

Patrick Howell O’Neill wrote up a great overview of the success that was ESL’s recently-concluded IEM Katowice event. ESL claims that the four-day stop in Poland was the most watched European-based esports event to date. While the numbers in the infographic released by ESL really do tell the story of a great success, something else caught my eye and my mind sort of started doing the thing that could be called thinking.

thedailydot

IEM Katowice was highest-rated European esports event ever — Last week’s IEM World Championship and EMS One tournaments in Katowice, Poland combined to be the highest rated esports event in European history, according to numbers just released by Twitch and Turtle Entertainment, IEM’s parent company.

Do the companies that publish and support other games that are on the Intel Extreme Masters’ series see the event as a success for their game’s community? I’m sure that the viewership numbers alone are probably affirmation enough to allow the companies to pat themselves on the back for allowing their games to be included in these tournaments. The question I’m curious about: excluding the distorted prize purse of the StarCraft 2 winner-take-all event, does the level of investment that the companies put forward relatively resemble what actually goes into the community? If not, is that a big problem for the future of these games as esports or is it simply the circle of life in a twisted economically unstable sense?

I’m not exactly sure that I’m going to find nice results if I start looking. Even estimating the cost benefit of a single tournament at a community levels shows that the community puts in considerably more money than what is paid out (a tip of the hat to keekerdc for sharing an estimate). Besides, the whole bit relies on tournament organizers not completely being financially sound enough to raise money that isn’t dependent on things like contest and entry fees, which hasn’t really been the case at all, as far as I know.

In any case, more questions than opinions above, but I just felt like I needed to write that out. Link post format working? Link post format working.