@AviBhuiyan

I got my start in esports as a fan while in law school in Texas. I’d stay up until ungodly hours of the night to watch grainy livestreams of the best StarCraft II players in the world duking it out in South Korea for humble prize money but immortal glory.

As a lifelong gamer and sports fan, in retrospect it was unsurprising that esports brought me an unreasonable amount of joy. Still, it was particularly important to me because at the time I was struggling with depression generally and anxiety specifically about whether I actually wanted to be a lawyer or if I was half-heartedly box-checking my way through life.

For that period of my life, gaming and esports were my refuge.

While I was studying for the bar exam I started a media site devoted to longform essays and interviews about gaming and esports as a passion project to let me hold onto an ember of my secret dream of working in the games industry someday. I built, wrote, hit publish, and had no expectations of what would happen next.

Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill retweeted my first piece, which I’ll never forget. My second front-paged the r/leagueoflegends subreddit. My third led an editor at ESPN to DM me to ask if I’d be interested in writing an esports feature for the site.

The site quickly spiraled upwards and soon the bar exam was an afterthought. I’ll never forget getting an email from a recruiter at Riot after I had done some phone screens asking if perhaps I’d be interested in flying out to Los Angeles, California to visit Riot Games HQ regarding taking a full-time role on their esports team?

?

That set off the adventure of a lifetime. Soon afterwards I joined Riot to run day-to-day league operations for League of Legends’ North American League Championship Series (NA LCS), one of esports’ greatest cathedrals, in its earliest days. It was my dream job acquired by an impossible path, and I joyfully poured my heart and soul into it. I traveled the world, made lifelong friends, and learned from some of the best at one of the world’s iconic game publishers.

After several years at Riot I moved into the business side of the industry in 2017, building up an advisory business alongside some of my favorite people. I began working closely with non-endemic professional sports teams, esports organizations, other game publishers, and brands as I quietly tried to do my part in moving the industry forward.

During my time on the business side I reviewed countless esports organization P&Ls, pro player contracts, streaming platform deals, sponsorship agreements, and game publisher strategy docs. Perhaps just as importantly, I spent countless hours discussing behind-closed-doors hopes and frustrations with a super diverse array of stakeholders both endemic and non-endemic to esports. This context gave me a much more well-rounded perspective on esports than I’d had before.

Two takeaways were particularly memorable for me:

(1) It was wild to me how many parties misunderstood either the leverage they had with their counter-parties or the incentives that were driving other stakeholders’ decision-making.

(2) It became clear to me over time that my original thesis that esports were the next iteration of traditional sports was at best incomplete, and more likely: wrong. I was aware at the time that esports had completely different macro incentives, constraints, and stakeholders, of course. However, it took me time and experience to realize that those differences weren’t mild ones that could be worked around with an impressive, professionalized traditional sports business playbook. These were fundamental issues that would necessitate esports to develop very differently in its own unique and uncharted way. Humbling to say the least.

Troubled, I seriously considered writing publicly about my thoughts and concerns at the time, but held off because I dislike writing criticism without substantive recommendations on how to make things better (which I frankly didn’t have at the time.) Instead, I surfaced my concerns behind closed doors with industry peers and clients.

Over the last several years I shifted away from esports to working on the product and creator economy side of the broader games industry, and as such have developed a more holistic view of entertainment products and game marketing more broadly.

This has given me more optimism about some esports having a path to sustainably scale but also conviction that it’s going to be a journey of decades not years, and that the top level of esports will look distinctly different from the esports models we see today.