What's in a Game?
| Publication year | 2019 |
| Author | By Andrew Schauer |
By Andrew Schauer
Andy is Owner & Principal of Law Office of Andrew Schauer. In addition to gaming and lawyering, Andrew is a baseball fanatic and stat-head who also enjoys golfing, skiing, and bicycling. He shares his life and his hobbies with his wife and their son. You connect with him on his website: http://aschaueresq.com.
As a former competitive player in the gaming community, my goal in this article is to advise attorneys who represent or want to represent competitive gamers or companies in the emerging esports field to elevate those competitors and their platforms to legitimacy and mainstream relevance through great contracts, branding deals, sponsorships, endorsements, and intellectual property law. This article will take the reader through the history of esports, the current status of the industry, and where it is headed to better understand how to best represent the gaming client.1
It's a high-stakes world with tens of millions of dollars at stake: Teams compete at the highest level for their shot at winning the world championship, which will be viewed by millions worldwide. An appearance in the championship game also guarantees a healthy seven-figure bonus on top of their seven-figure advertising and endorsement contracts. The individual players have big-ticket endorsement deals of their own, with sponsors giving players their branded training gear and (in some cases) even entire home training setups to use while the cameras are rolling and the audience is watching.
All that is just the backdrop to most business and legal professionals working in pro sports. However, that same landscape can be found in a new world: professional gaming. The world is so new that even basic terms are still evolving, but this article will use the term "pro gaming" throughout as a catchall for the industry, entities, and people whose main revenue streams come from some combination of esports or streaming (much more on those below). When parents used to ask their kids if they planned on growing up to be a "Pro Gamer" they'd be rolling their eyes, but now those kids are rolling in the dough: One gamer named Richard Tyler "Ninja" Blevins is rumored to earn between a half million and a million dollars per month, and, in September 2018, he was on the cover of ESPN The Magazine.2 That choice makes all the sense in the world to ESPN, if for no other reason than teams and players from the "traditional" major sports are some of the primary drivers behind competitive gaming's explosive audience growth. Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, the New York Yankees, the St. Louis Cardinals, and a large and growing number of NBA teams all either wholly or partially own pro gaming organizations. Athletes can also increasingly be seen in pro gamers' videos, or even hosting their own (the Minnesota Twins' Trevor May being one of the most visible examples).
Because of the large and growing number of similarities between pro sports and pro gaming, it can be tempting for representatives of those people or companies making the jump from the former to the latter to treat deals in the pro gaming world exactly as they would any other pro sports contract or negotiation. However, there are some key differences—especially around the margins and in the "soft factors"—that may seem completely foreign to a sports agent in an esports world, but which are hugely important to finding and fostering successful partnerships and helping your clients truly succeed at building their brand (and their audience) in that pro gaming world. We'll start by defining some basic terms and concepts.
TEAMS. The pro gaming concept of a "Team" is similar to what it is in pro sports: There's a wealthy owner at the top of the organizational chart, and usually some staff underneath them roughly equivalent to a front office. Beyond that, though, some differences start to crop up: Almost all the top teams compete across multiple different video games. For example, the team Echo Fox has "sub-teams" that compete in "League of
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Legends," "Call of Duty," and so on. This isn't totally unheard of in the Big Five North American sports—Mike Ilitch with Detroit's Red Wings/Tigers, Jerry Reinsdorf with Chicago's Bulls/White Sox, etc.—but the lack of any "National Video Game League," combined with the relatively cheap cost of entry compared with major sports teams, means that competitive gaming teams (colloquially "Orgs") often have players across many games, sometimes a dozen or more. Most games warrant hiring their own specialized front-office-type command center, a coaching staff, and (of course) players. To again use Echo Fox as an example, Rick Fox is the primary owner. As mentioned above, one game his team plays is called "League of Legends." Echo Fox has a General Manager in charge of the League of Legends staff and team—Jake Fyfe—who played a large role in acquiring their head coach—Thomas "Thinkcard" Slotkin—along with the actively-rostered players and the numerous additional...
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