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This article was originally published in the SCCG Management Weekly Newsletter #4 on September 3, 2020.
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We wrote about an eSports media success story last month. NASCAR suspended its 2020 seasons and filled a part of that gap with a one-time esports event: the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational. It was so successful, it became a weekly series on Fox Sports, featuring NASCAR drivers from all their series events. That weekly series was so successful; it came in second to WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown on Fox, which draws an average of 2.3 million viewers.
Why was this niche esports racing event able to compete well against mass-market media content like Pro Wrestling?
One contribution is that the esports players were established professional NASCAR drivers in the real world, indeed. Another is that NASCAR did an excellent job of promoting the event across all its available channels. Third, it had robust branding and co-branding partnership with NASCAR, FOX, FOX Sports, FS1, and its affiliated networks. Lastly, you don’t have to translate a car race’s game mechanics for a general audience.
“What’s a ‘jungler’?”
“What’s the ‘meta’?”
“Why is a mid-laner important, and WTH even IS a mid-laner?”
My favorite is, “Who is winning? How even DO you win?”
THE DEEP END IS DEEP
We understand that complexity is a big plus for avid fans who want to dive deep into a game’s tiny details, including players, historical statistics, mechanics, and meta.
What may be missing for some esports titles is a funnel that allows large numbers of new viewers to engage with the game at a superficial level, so that some of them convert into regular viewers and that valuable smallest cohort, the super-fan.
THE CULT OF NO-PERSONALITY
Leagues and teams are doing a relatively good job at branding, but things tend to fall apart at the player level. Before we go much further, please understand that we are not arguing that most pro esports players, to put it kindly, lack marketability. Fans across traditional US sports love players who can’t extemporaneously string three sentences together in front of a camera, or, outside the context of their sport, would never get a feature photo spread in a fashion magazine.
These players have committed the better part of their lives to their sports. They are loyal and engaged with their fans. They participate with their teams, leagues, and sponsors to introduce, expose, and relate with their fans, new and old, to ensure their attention pipelines are always full.
We believe this is a crucial piece of what is missing in the esports media process. Games are games. It’s the participants that give games heart.
- We need to solve the problem of player longevity in games.
- We need to address the inattention to fostering admiration for the pro gamers as individual loyalty assets in the esports marketing ecosphere.
If we don’t do that, our only other real option to turn esports teams into vehicles like the 1970s Latino boy band, Menudo, or The New Mickey Mouse Club of the 1990s. The individuals were explicitly and strategically unimportant and replaceable as needed.
Before this sounds too callous, remember Ricky Martin got his start in Menudo, and Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Ryan Gosling all broke out of the Mouse House.
Talent will almost always find a way forward.
THE COST OF LIVING IN THE MARGINS
We love esports here, but some days, it’s hard. We find ourselves repeating real-world statistics about its popularity.
“League of Legends world championship finals had more unique viewers watching than the Super Bowl!”
“The 2017 League of Legends World Finals in Beijing’s Olympic Stadium sold out to 40,000 fans the day tickets were released.”
“Esports is projected to generate revenues of more than 160 Billion USD in 2020 — twice the estimates for the world’s recorded music industry and film box office, combined.”
These measures are driven by the converted — those who already live in the fandom. What money is being left on the table because we don’t invest in attention, long term?
European football and the North American major leagues dominate the world’s top 10 most valuable sports media rights properties. The US is the top spender for sports media rights (USD 21B in 2018). That’s more than four times the UK’s spend at number two, and more than the next ten top spenders combined.
Are we spending the attention proportional to the opportunity? We argue that we are not. We are not advocating for more badly produced, out of context content out for mass markets. We’ve done that, and it’s self-defeating, with their low ratings reinforcing a belief that esports isn’t popular and won’t work in the US.
We advocate for a mature, long term view to exploring and unlocking the value of esports and media. If you share that interest, we should talk.
