MAY 13
Y’all already know what it is. Rowdy Thursday begins now.
This week, Roblox proves haters wrong and Envy keeping it strong, but first...
Made by Franco
The Curious Case of Publishers’ Personalities
Comms. Communication. The act of communicating. The difficult art of making your company look dope, smart, funny and edgy, while selling a product to the fans.
When we talk about esports, we have a different beast, since the publishers are the literal owners of the game, the competition, the rules and all the changes involved. Because of controlling 100% of the ecosystem, the publishers’ personalities come out like seabirds when baby turtles are chilling at the beach. You might think that’s too harsh, think twice.
Let’s compare recent events folks:
Apex is that you?
Time for “bad one, good one”.
👎 Apex Legends’ new update brought crashes and people queued for hours.
-Respawn communicated.
👍 People enjoying streamers’ misfortune brought record viewership.
-Respawn communicated.
👎 Streamers changed games, and people got real toxic towards devs.
-Respawn communicated.
👍 Once the service was fixed, Apex hit an all-time peak on Steam.
-Respawn communicated.
This tells me:
People are like pancakes. When shit goes down for a bit, they instantly hate, when things work, they preach being loyal since the cradle. Which yes, it makes social media managers go to the panic room 2 or 3 times a day, but these are the moments where publishers can see if their current staff are keepers or sleepers.
Respawn showed strong and consistent comms during a worse case scenario and it paid off. Not a lot of publishers can say that, which takes me to...
The lazy kid, Valve.
People at Valve said that they prefer to let the community talk between each other because when they do, it becomes toxic and it’s difficult to find solutions.
Oh, so let’s just not do it at all then?
Every single game goes through to the same situation. People in gaming will always be toxic, you have to find ways to get creative and communicate. You can’t just say, “we don’t give a fuck, let the plebs talk” and later expect to have player loyalty.
That’s lazy, the CSGO and Dota unorganized scenes are direct evidence of it. Valve’s comfortable ego is fair, since these games have been traditionally solid for years. However, CSGO is falling and The International is the only rope saving Dota.
Kids are not born toxic, the environment defines them.
Games are not born toxic, the publisher defines them.
🔫 Game Changing Destruction
Gotta say, every time this guy Geoff posts teaser news into the world wide web, I get really hyped. Now, Battlefield.
🏆 Esports Highlights
🥇 Show me the Lineup
The Tribeca Festival has a section for us lil’ gaming aficionados, the Tribeca Game Awards. And these are the nominees… always wanted to say that.
🐦 Thread of the Week
Ubisoft’s game strategy, by Daniel Ahmad.
👅 Coming like a Roblox ball
Interesting facts:
🌕 Crypto & NFTs Fundamentals
I know you are tired of it. But trust me, when it's related to our friends at On Deck, you want to read it.
🎮 Game of the Week
Hood: Outlaws & Legends — Pull out the perfect heist.
🍿 Trailer of the Week
New World: This is Aeternum. Absolute fire work in terms of momentum and music.
Media rights deals are viewed as the saving grace of esports in many of the conversations I have with industry figures. Typically citing the success of the collective licensing deals seen in the English Premier League, they believe that titles such as OWL and LoL could make unruly amounts of money from legacy linear broadcasters.
What we’re seeing a lot of right now are regional deals, with many European countries acquiring the rights to Riot Games’ LEC being a solid example. This makes sense considering not every fan speaks and understands English — native content is often a better experience. With the young demographics we appeal to in esports, considering the noticeable decline in the youth watching TV in favor of the likes of Twitch and YouTube, are people massively overestimating the amount of interest attached to linear broadcasting? What can televised esports events offer viewers that they’re not already getting online, while browsing Twitter or playing games themselves on a second monitor?
I’d like to open up the conversation around these deals. Will linear broadcasting ever be a major factor in esports? How can current broadcasts be improved, and are those not native to the industry able to do so?
VERIZON'S 5G "THE RESET" COMMERCIAL
Me spending that retirement money:
May 13 / Overwatch Mei Gala
May 13 - 16 / CDL Major
May 20 - 30 / cs_summit 8 NA
May 23 / LoL MSI Finals
May 26 - 28 / Nordic Game
May 30 / Flashpoint Finals
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