Esports

“I would say people who have played at the highest level of e-sports, that is playing official tournaments for a franchise or not a franchise. We don't have franchise, but for a registered e-sports team, I think they could be doing close to 35 lakhs a year. By …”

“And that's why a lot of these esports things are pretty challenging other than for the game developers themselves, because they can sell a lot of copies of their games because parents buy kids games, right? But any other model in terms of the esports portion o…”

“I think esports has underperformed dramatically compared to what people were expecting.”

“Like, esports will probably become an Olympic sport at some point.”

“Esports needs its Dana white. It needs its person. Who's going to take this sport from like just the underground and brick by brick, build it into a mainstream brand and like take no prisoners and like organize the whole fucking thing along the way.”

“Yeah, we didn't look at it as a revenue stream, especially early on. We looked at it as sort of a feature- That would help drive engagement and just be a value added experience for the community for just something cool to watch.”

“Ultimately the economics of e-sports is different because it's not an aggregation of teams that make the league. It's the league that owns the teams. Completely different. And in this case, the league is Activision, Electronic Arts, Riot, Take Two, Bethesda, a…”

“In 2017, there were three hundred thirty five million known viewers of esports content around the world. One year later, that number grew 18% to just shy of four hundred million views, and in 2019, the global esports audience base grew another 15% and surpasse…”

“Assuming a 14% annual growth rate beginning in 2017, which is conservative, by the way, we can expect around six hundred fifty million global esports viewers by 2022.”

“If you compare each league's audience size with esports, esport leagues had a larger audience base than both Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League in 2017.”

“On average, the top four North American sports leagues drove in 54 dollars of revenue per each individual fan in 2017. Esports today is about seven percent of that, or four dollars in revenue per fan.”

“This year, global revenue will surpass one billion dollars, having been less than half a billion a mere three years ago.”

“E-sports and gaming just has such a huge advantage because they're coming from a blank slate, right? And they're coming from an audience that, that they can define how that consumption happens.”

“A lot of the talent is sort of moving from traditional sports into eSports in order to sort of supercharge the IQ, you know, within all of this, which is super fascinating.”

“Gaming and eSports has like such a huge advantage over traditional sports, right? Like the idea of like the version you hear of this in the kind of traditional sports media ecosystem is like, oh, we're going to let gambling happen, right? And it's like, that's…”

“Gaming and I guess eSports, but probably like gaming more specifically, is it's now entering that like pantheon of cultural like areas. That are now going to exist like generation over generation over generation.”

“I think we're in this hockey stick right now with eSports. Like video games, it's just gonna be obvious that like, it's gonna seem, I mean, I think it's always great that people play physical sports, I'm not anti, but you know, it'll be like horseback riding, …”

“Esports are more like, The way games have traditionally been made, which is less the sort of individual author and more like this folk practice of many people working together, like a community of people kind of carving out a set of a set of habits and convent…”

“Overhyped, I think, has been esports and VR, too, but definitely esports.”

“I do think we will, and I think it'll be, it might look a little bit different, so it may not look as hardcore.”

“I do. Based on the underlying data today and how accessible it is to people, I do believe it will be larger, certainly, than the NFL.”

“I don't just for a lot of reasons, I mean, I think until they solve the television problem, it's going to be very, very difficult. You know, so much of our experience of, I don't want to call them real sports, but of traditional sports is, is mediated by 2030,…”

“As far as a VC, interpreting the question is sort of where do we think the most equity value will be where will the biggest companies be formed? I think it is around the technology around enabling esports to become on par with traditional sports, and so all th…”

“The biggest challenge right now is that the longevity of an esports player is not very long. So meaning that the careers of these players are just a couple of years because a lot of the, at the Very highest. And, you know, you have people who could do, you kno…”

“There's a new game that's a relatively new game that's come on the scene called Hearthstone, which is by Blizzard. And that's become a really interesting eSport because it's a card-based game. It's not a fast Twitch game, meaning you don't need 250 actions per…”

“What'll make this industry really take off is that you need the longevity of the players to be in the five, ideally 10 year long sort of time frame, because people love, you know, having a favorite athlete, right? Like if you're a huge LeBron fan, or if you're…”

“But you're seeing things like eSports increasing 20 to 30% per year in viewership and engagement, and you have this amazing demographic of 14 to 24 to 34 year olds who are just starting to change viewing habits in a pretty fundamental way.”

“And I think that that demographic is going to supplant some traditional sports. And I think some are going to survive. I think, for instance, basketball and soccer are two very healthy international sports that are going to do very well.”

“I just think that the intersection of VR and e-sports is still maybe say three to four years off.”

“I don't think that Riot Games and Valve are And Activision Blizzard were really conscious that esports was something that was growing so big over the last five to 10 years.”