 Thanks everybody. So I'm going to start off today's presentation the same way I start off most of the conversations I've had about this for the last two years. And that's filling you guys in on what exactly esports are. So you hear the word, you might think of a few things, and often in conversations I just say, it's professional gaming, and we nodded each other and kind of go from there without any more attention. But now that I have a little bit more captives and audience, I'm going to explain it in depth a little bit more. So it's this really fascinating trend in gaming and actually has spawned this really cool industry that is really smashing together convergence of geek and jock culture, which for all intents purposes we've been trained to think are diametrically opposed. So it's at times really fascinating and other times really frightening. It's still fraught with a lot of issues of lack of diversity, sexism, you name it. It's still very white male dominated and still a very bro-y kind of inappropriate culture that's still finding its way around. But the thing to keep in mind is that it's not just this professional level that I'm going to be talking about here. I'm focusing mainly on the very highest level with the highest stakes, the big broadcasts. But it goes all the way down to the lowest grassroots things. We have e-sports clubs here at MIT who just a group of students get together and they can, if they want to, broadcast their game to a much larger audience at any time. They're involved in a few different leagues that are at the collegiate level that are doing the same sorts of things you're seeing in these big broadcasts. The other thing I want to point out is that this often comes with, did he just say sport? How is the guy sitting down playing video game, sport? And I don't want to rehash that argument and I don't think that this discussion here has anything to do with that argument. You'll see me constantly referring to and comparing to traditional sports broadcast models because that's really what e-sports broadcasting borrows from and how they're informed. So it's really important to acknowledge that, but I don't need to talk to you about whether darts or chess is a sport or video game is a sport. I just don't think it's that important. And lastly, I want to point out the thing that really makes e-sports look and feel like sports in these broadcasts and that's the shoutcasters, which I could give you a verbal explanation of, but I'd much rather just show you. So yeah, it's pretty fun stuff. The audio is more important in the video here because this is probably gibberish to you anyway. The cool thing to note here is that it sounds like a sports broadcast is kind of indistinguishable, but you just took the audio track out. On top of that, you have branding here in the top corner. You also have new ways that they're figuring out how to get sponsors and logos into the actual gameplay itself. So it's really taking on this kind of Monday night football feel. So that brings me to my actual project, which is e-sports broadcasting in comparison with traditional sports broadcasting models. And my main thread through this whole thing is that e-sports broadcasting is informed by and follows trajectory set out by traditional sports media, but it's not really in a position to be able to copy those things wholesale and it's actually running into a few issues here. So it's had to innovate where it can't just copy and it's had to kind of learn the hard way that not all of these things are equitable. So to break down the presentation today, I'm going to start with a discussion of those shoutcasters, which the word shoutcaster comes from the old software they used to use called Shoutcast, which was a very early 2000s streaming software that allowed these guys to watch a game and give audio commentary much like sports radio and broadcast it to small internet radio stations where maybe a few hundred people were here in the entire lifetime of broadcast. And that word, the shoutcast FM has really held on and signals the history of this. And a shoutcaster is effectively just an e-sports caster. So it's the exact same role, but they actually have taken on a lot more responsibility than your traditional sports casters. So they're in this kind of flex position of balancing traditional sports casting with gaming. Gaming and sports are different. They pose different challenges and these guys are in between the two of them. They also see community maintenance as a really important part of their job. And that's one of the cool things about e-sports is that it's gotten really big, but it's not big enough that you don't know what's going on everywhere in e-sports. And the first generation of casters, these guys from the early 2000s, they're only touchpoints were in traditional sports broadcasting. This second generation of casters that are just emerging now that it's getting huge, all of them don't look to traditional sports as their primary touchpoint, but instead are looking at other e-sports casters. So you're seeing a disconnect starting to form from e-sports casting and traditional sports casting. And I just want to mention here that this will work with my field work with the ESL and also I was able to do a whole bunch of interviews with professional shout casters. So all of this data is coming from those interviews and those conversations. I've had countless conversations while at ESL about all these things. The next thing I'll be jumping into is sports media and e-sports and kind of situating e-sports broadcasting and especially live streaming in the larger media landscape of traditional sports casting. Traditional sports have started streaming, a little known fact that in 2003 the MLB actually broadcasted 1,000 games online. Not many people really know that it even happened and it wasn't that successful, but they were doing it. They've been doing it for a while. But they are in this kind of difficult position of finding out exactly what they should be doing. So I'm going to talk about the different transitions from print all the way to live streaming and these transition moments of creating different sort of touch points and collecting conventions while creating your own. Finally I'm going to look at the revenue streams for both. What you're seeing happening with the sponsorships and logos showing up that I showed you there is e-sports broadcasting is borrowing almost wholesale for traditional sports, but their revenue streams aren't identical and they're actually very different in a few different ways that I'd like to get into later. But by looking at these revenue streams you can really see that the traditional sports model isn't recordable. You can't take the NFL's kind of revenue stream which is sometimes not a revenue stream and put that into e-sports. It just won't work. So starting out, talking about showcasters in general, this image here is showing you the... Oh, hold on. Oh, so you guys missed that whole slide too. Okay, that was that slide. That was the slide you got. So looking at this image here, first time I don't look back. So just showing you the transition, the top image is the same guy as the bottom image and that is from 2009. So that's an event from 2009 and then the lower picture is just from about three weeks ago. And you can see the crazy transition from long hair and t-shirt and jeans broadcaster to what effectively is a traditional sportscaster. And if Joe is watching this at some point I'm really sorry that I dragged that picture out of it. So these guys are somewhere in between sportscasters and the community. They're both fans and professionals and it's an interesting dichotomy that they talk about a lot in these interviews. So they all kind of got their start in this grassroots do-it-yourself and a lot of people like to talk about the passion, the cult of passion in esports where it's just a bunch of people who are really really into gaming, really really into esports and they go out of their way through great lengths to kind of create a profession out of this. And the shellcasters are really a perfect example of this and they're the what I would argue the primary signifier of this sports part of esports. So if you look at some of the earlier casters they will without blinking just let you know that their roots are in traditional sportscasting. The earliest one I know of would take his laptop and he set it up and he let me know that he would listen to hours of football and soccer radio just to kind of learn those the transition moments, how to hand off the end of a segment, how to handle dead air, all those things that he was just a gamer. He had no idea what he was doing but he took it upon himself to educate himself by going to traditional sportscasting. So they borrowed those transitions, those moments and even the wardrobe has started to resemble traditional sports. They've gone the whole game. They started with a t-shirt and jeans went all the way up to full suit and tie and realized well that might be a little too much. We're still gamers, we're still geeks and we're going to reflect that through our wardrobe too. So they brought it back down a little bit but there's not that much of a difference there. So one really crazy thing about esports is that a career in this people talk about burnout rates constantly and one of the big issues is that a career in esports might last two years. A professional player who is between 18 and 20 might have one season worth of playing in them and very few go beyond three or four years ever. The same thing with organizations and coaches. You have teams that will form and disband within a year. Some notable exceptions to that like fanatic or SK gaming have been around for quite a long time but they constantly are shuffling through rosters and there's almost no kind of standing backbone of esports besides these esports companies and these shoutcasters who end up becoming the gatekeepers of the community. They become the history keepers and the stack keepers. There's no place to go for all of the stats from the earliest esports matches. It's lucky to find out who won a match five years ago. Much less get the actual nitty gritty details from it but these shoutcasters go out of their way to aggregate the stuff. They all have their own kind of data bases and there's been an influx of those sites popping up with the help of APIs and shoutcasters to really formalize the stats in this to resemble traditional sports. So another thing that comes in is this broadcast persona. These guys become the face of esports. They become the sound of esports and as as you could tell there there's not much of a difference in the audio. So they resemble traditional sportscasters and then building on traditional sportscasters and new seeingers they become a sort of personality that people can interact with and this is known as parasocial interaction. I'll nod my hat to Ed in the back there who did a great meta analysis of this to find out that by creating a persona and becoming a character with regular schedule and broadcasting you make a greater connection and actually put people in more often but this comes back to the actual medium of live streaming which is both the audio visual feed and an internet relay chat next next door. So you have everybody whether it's 10,000 or 200 all the people in that twitch stream are able to chat with one another and the broadcasters can link right into that chat as well and respond to it and often do. So these shout casters are very aware of that and have taken up as their duty to kind of do this community maintenance, get information out there and respond to the community. Building is kind of really great rich connection and then you have the second generation of casters coming in now that are throwing off their traditional sports model all together and their only touch points are these earlier casters. So they've learned things like handling dead air or handling a handoff at the end of the segment from their other casters and one of them even told me like I don't I don't watch sports at all I don't there's nothing I can learn from it which is this amazing disconnect from his earlier casters because all they lived at and all they learned from was traditional sports. So they've kind of taken this community aspect to the next level and see it as almost a requirement that every broadcast they will respond to a stream they will let people know like hey I'm listening if you have feedback I'll check it out. All the older casters looking at more like yeah I understand that the feedback's there but I'm not going to not really going to engage with their ordinary these guys aren't professional casters so I'll go talk to other casters if I want feedback about what I'm doing. So it really boils down to what live streaming is and what they have access to. So the text is kind of small and I'll help you out with that but through the evolution of sports media you have live streaming emerging relatively recently I mean the first really good live streaming platforms were early 2000s with Justin TV and what we're streaming on right now Ustream showing up around 2007-2008 and Twitch TV the primary streaming platform for live streaming for eSports is only a few years old it came out in 2011 and has since blown up you might have noticed recently that Amazon acquired them for 970 million. So you have eSports emerging in a time where it was prohibitively expensive to get into live streaming and it was also almost impossible to break into television. Television's kind of been set it's tough to get into and for a long time eSports casters and companies thought that the way to go would be to get into traditional sports probably into television broadcasts and TL has a great case study about the CGS which was this kind of early partnering of direct TV with really big names in the eSports industry in 2007-2008 and the first earnest attempt to bring eSports to television and it failed pretty miserably so it was once again relegated to live streaming. The interesting thing about live streaming is that it's more accessible than television but as it grows up it's kind of brushing into these these other entities you have print coming out of this you have audio cast podcasts coming up from eSports and the streams are resembling television more often than not and this live streaming image I had here is just from two nights ago actually there's you can't see there but 90,000 people in that chat so it's almost unintelligible it becomes almost the roar of a stadium because nobody can read it and it just is memes and emoticons you name it. So as we look at the different agendas of each of these media print and radio very early on focused strictly as sports news their goal was to get the information there to get fans to be able to tune in and find out what's going on in this world. It wasn't until kind of the golden age of baseball and radio that you saw this news switch over into entertainment which television and live streaming have both really taken up this mantra of entertainment before news and with this you see a massive commercialization so television in particular you might see some of the scary figures come out which I'll get into shortly of just this huge amounts of sponsorship dollars and media rights going into these things and live streaming is sort of sort of starting to borrow from that as well and is funded primarily through sponsorships and publisher relations. So one thing I wanted to point to with live streaming is that it's actually a melding together of a few of these. So William Hamilton at all just a few years ago took on McLuhan and Oldenburg's ideas of hot cold media as well as third places to situate live streaming as this kind of new entity which creates this third place for communities to kind of coalesce and connect really richly and I'm just going to give a quick quote from that he says by combining hot cool media streams enable sharing rich ephemeral experiences in tandem with open participation through informal social interaction ingredients for a third place. So what he means by hot cool media which is coming directly from McLuhan is that your television broadcast is very hot media it's very active and then something like print or or the internet relay chat next to a stream is going to be a totally different interaction and a totally different way of engaging with this broadcast but combining the two creates this kind of interesting space in general. So that brings me to my my conversation here of of the revenue stream so as I mentioned there are models in traditional sports casting that just don't fit into eSports and the primary one I'd like to flag here is that media rights in traditional sports account for 31% of the revenue in traditional sports broadcasting whereas in eSports it accounts for 4%. So they're relying on completely different sort of methods here and the media rights kind of bidding war that started and I'll just give a quick tidbit that the NFL sold his broadcasting rights in 2011 through the 2020-2021 season for $20 billion and and that all started back with P. Rossell an NFL commissioner who kind of got the teams together to negotiate together originally teams would sell out their their media rights to specific outlets but P. Rossell got them together and then made the the outlets come to them so you have NBC, CBS, Fox coming to the collective of NFL and having to negotiate a kind of group contract which started back then with the it went from about $75,000 for broadcasting rights to a few million in just a few years and we're now at a point where they're selling it for $20 billion each of the three big networks are paying an average of $1 billion per year just for media rights in the NFL alone leaving alone the rest of their sports content and eSports can't really replicate that because you don't have franchises that have organized together into a kind of negotiating body so you don't have a standalone league or standalone group of franchises that have come together there was an attempt at this early on called the G7 which was an organization of teams that was focused on really bringing making better rights for the teams in general and also proliferating eSports but since then it's sort of defunct and not really spoken about so what happens is teams end up having to go to the other two models which I'll get into for eSports right now and you have one model where an eSports company comes in so you have your MLG major league gaming or ESL which is the eSports league both of them take a publisher's game and then run events for it so they'll create a league or create a structure they'll invite teams and they'll go through that together with a game that isn't their own the other model is work for a publisher to go out and go ahead and show out that money themselves to create a whole production the events and everything on their own with the money they make from the game itself and these two models don't really leave room for the teams to kind of form their own group to negotiate so if you look at riot games for instance they run the league of legends championship series that's an example of the model where you have a publisher creating a game and then creating the eSports branch for it and they cover all the costs and just in prize money alone in the third season they spent eight million which is unheard of in this area to spend on eSports and they've also acknowledged that it's not a profit point they're not making money off of spending into the lcs what they are getting is an ancillary benefit of deep connection and bridging a gap that keeps players interested but also viewers interested the other model the esl and the mlg are entirely dependent on publishers so if you look at this flu text here publisher relations and sponsorships account for the majority of the revenue in eSports and the issue here is how do you define media rights is is play derivative or is play a transformative object so if a professional player plays who owns the rights to his media is he creating something unique something individual and something he could sell himself does he own that broadcast does the platform he's on own it or does the game developer get to come in and say well you know what it's our game our thing so you know what I'll own that too so you have a really sticky situation here where eSports are in constant kind of precarious position because at any moment a publisher would say I don't want you broadcasting my game anymore we're we're done after this contract and then you no longer have that sponsorship with public publisher relationship and you've lost out on that entire segment there so it's a really interesting battlefield around ip that hasn't really come up too much yet there's one example of the korean eSports players association kind of signing out media rights in contracts to a game that hadn't come out yet and when the game eventually did come out the publisher said you know what why you did that we don't want you to be handled this sort of thing and they cut off ties with the company entirely so then they were in a horrible predicament of having contracts signed on something that no longer belong to them so the the models that are apparent in traditional sports just don't translate because you don't have that kind of league association you don't have the commissioner or the owners of franchises being able to step in also in traditional sports you have a little battle between is it cheaper for me to buy it out of franchise and get the media rights from franchise directly or to negotiate with the organization as a whole and that's a constant struggle that's going to happen in traditional sports that's not really apparent in eSports right now so what we're looking at is that traditional sports probably isn't providing the model that we want for eSports and they should maybe move to a different model one more like a music festival that subsists almost entirely off of sponsorship money and funding through other means than media rights because it's just not going to work and there's going to be difficulty in the actual execution okay so to sum up just to give you some takeaways here things I want to talk about are that the next generation of of shout casters and the primary signifier of sports in eSports is turning away from traditional sports they're kind of creating their own thing and they're going to keep running okay so you're seeing an industry kind of being pulled in multiple directions one is all of the one thing I didn't get to mention in the last slide that I showed it is you have a huge influx of television producers coming into eSports and dictating the way that eSports are looking and feeling and also offering up sponsorship models so the thing you're running into is these television producers saying we want to make it look more like television if you look at the lcs which is currently the the top watch g-sport in the u.s and europe that is run by aerial horn who is an emmy winning producer from mvc and their work in the olympics and the cgs was actually done by mike bergs who had won emmys for his productions in nhl nba and nfl so you're seeing these tv producers come in and dictate the direction that the broadcast looks and also talking to the casters saying you need to you need to do it this way i'm used to doing it a certain way we're going to do it that way but you have the casters kind of cognizant of the community that they've created and are feeling responsible for that and maintaining it so you have this interesting separation of where the production wants to and where the casters are kind of already heading while still maintaining that relationship with the traditional sports feel um so then the the live streaming as a medium has these difficulties to figure out especially around media rights so each medium has faced a difficult transition phase we're now seeing the emergence of eSports broadcasting identity within the medium of live streaming so instead of looking to create its own thing it's almost kind of backtracking unlike the other sports and other medium it's it's kind of becoming an earlier medium it's becoming more like television instead of branching off on its in its own direction where it has this really really awesome uh potential to become its own thing it's really unique thing it's actually going backwards and finally uh traditional sports medium models are not easily replicated especially the nfl one thing i might point out is that there are multiple models including fifa and uh f1 racing which which follow a different trajectory but are still not not replicable in eSports one that might work is actually the ncAA but you would have to have teams come together and create kind of organizations that bid out their media rights as opposed to the current model where you have the eSports companies or the publishers dictating what's going on uh so with that thanks everybody do you have any questions eric hi so i'm curious what the media rights issue can talk about and do you remind me of something about eric recently um with i mean nintendo being well known for going after a class and growing up with people on youtube because their videos are trying to monetize those and nintendo's also not known for their sort of eSports you know they don't have really eSports presence yeah unfortunately yeah so i think we would be we would be able to see i'm wondering if there's a case we make then if the media rights system won't work the same way as we did in the team there's a case we made in two cultures to be very open about the use of their material and that they can get sort of and so they might have to improve just you know becoming a popular person in this you know becoming eSports that gets you a bigger a bigger fan base of the nintendo and how it direction that are already popular yeah so you're seeing that happen already because oftentimes publishers aren't aren't really making money through investing in eSports what they are gaining is that insularly benefit that exposure and that community basis which is really important in eSports it's it's almost entirely community based if if the people don't like their game they're just going to stop playing it because they have a million other options to go to you now so i would get i would argue that publishers do need to be open and kind of allow these eSports companies to pick up and run with their product to help them create that community and so far you're you're seeing that they're they're relatively open i mean the cuspa case is the only one i know of at this point where it's become an issue but as things get more complicated and more money floods into it you might start seeing some weird things happen especially twitch being the primary platform it currently has a relationship with all of these different publishers and it has a relationship with the eSports companies but at any moment if they if they chose instead to not just let this happen and not proliferate on their own and instead charge to host content on their platform or make a much more prohibitive model then you would see an entirely shaping of the industry for sure i was curious about this style of broadcasting that they're doing yeah absolutely a really new upcoming eSport is actually a card game or a virtual card game but the the casting tone and that has to be different because it's a lot of downtime and a lot of like well what does he have what could he do so that it's still far was that uh two casters situation where you have one guy kind of giving you like this is what's going on this is the the play by play and then your second guy there's really high level um player or or somebody with a lot of experience to explain to you like why he just did that and give the flavor to it so um yeah there are games coming out with different styles um and if you if you look across traditional sports too and if you look at um german football they usually have a single caster with that with no play by play slash color commentary it's just one guy giving the cast saying like oh this this is the guy with all and what just happened um so you have different variations and also regional variations maria will sometimes go up to six casters on on one game and league of legends in in america has started doing triple casters for their kind of finals and stuff they they found out that that style works and it's something that they've innovated themselves so you're gonna you're gonna see ships as as more games come out and cast it to become more comfortable inspiration initially sports and uh from other cast and i'm wondering about uh what's the conversation like between other forms of like i said around the game play that you're not into the sports at all let's say on the e-build style okay what what what what people play are kating very different from the sports and i'm a bit curious is that conversation happening or are they still like he's a such completely different form of engagement that's not a mystery to me i would i haven't looked too much into the let's play and the the solo casters other than uh kind of e-sports players sitting down at a broadcasting their gameplay where they'll once in a while say what they're working on doing i would say that they're radically different in that the solo caster the let's play guy isn't it's it's not formalized in any way and also that they have a very individual style some some talk a lot some joke a lot and i think it's a very different feeling like you might you might see as one becomes more common it there might be bleed over there for sure so i'm always uh reminded of the difficulty it was it was for me to learn how to watch cricket i didn't know what cricket was i was exposed to it another time and it's only when i finally played it that i actually understood why something like that so it seems to me that in the various genres and so forth the games you have many many different varieties and lots and lots of uh sort of uh requirement for people to be up to speed in order to understand what's going on on the screen as your initial shot shows um how does this factor into this this question that you're looking at and uh maybe the second question would be just what is the most popular esport today and you know why is this so common yeah so to answer your first question about uh kind of the expertise needed and how that factors into the esports broadcast you're you're touching on something that a lot of the casters do too in the idea of their audience and they all have this kind of formulation of the audience they're going out to and they all kind of assume that they're talking to people who play the game a lot hardcore players if you have uh so there's almost this expectation and this this barrier of entry that the caster is going out to a hardcore player if you're not a hardcore player this broadcast really isn't for you uh they've run into certain issues where if they know that oh hey this is a really big event it might be on ESPN3 or oh we're going to be on TV today guys and they they actively dumb it down and they try to explain things as low as they possibly can without using any jargon but they end up finding out like the producer will come to them afterwards and say like yeah I need you to tone it down even more because nobody knows what an AWP is like just bring it down a little bit more so I think that's an issue that they're coming up against is the the audience but you're starting to see a K2 and Ryzey I know I'm messing up that pronunciation but they actually in their investigation of esports live streaming we're saying that it's actually become more of a spectator sport than it is just players so most not most many people who are into these games and into esports prefer to watch these high level esports over playing they'd much rather see some high quality players go at it than they would play themselves so the audience is shifting that's for sure what's the most popular the most it's hard to say that the most popular I would say right now is League of Legends and that's top down it looks a little bit similar to what I showed earlier but it's a completely different type of game it's a five versus five your same team team games are becoming much more popular what really made esports blow up especially in South Korea is Starcraft which is a one versus one battle of wits almost it's almost if you imagine chess at an ultra fast pace that's what Starcraft is and that's what really blew up in South Korea but right now the most popular shooter over in Asia is called Crossfire and that's a that's a one versus one first person shooter that goes way back to the origins of esports with like Quake and other one versus one contests so it varies by region but overall League of Legends is on top curious so I've got a question from Sean cool um and he's wondering whether your analysis is located solely within the U.S. in your game chat past player in your communities or whether your game models decision models are different uh and so uh in what ways are you different sure um I'm focused and I should mention I am focused primarily on North America and Europe the Asian scenes both Southeast Asia and Chinese scenes are very different and South Korea has long been this kind of like Shangri-La of esports and and it's really difficult to photograph your head around because it is so ingrained in the everyday that it's it's lived entirely different the political economy behind it is is different and it is I mean people joke sometimes that Starcraft was the national sport of South Korea but there are that many people into it and following it that it is on mainstream television it it's been on cable television since 98 right maybe the early 2000s being the earliest but it has many many appearances on television it is successful on television in South Korea which has been shown not to work here so I haven't really focused on that model as it is so specific so specific to South Korea and I would plug Dalian Jing's book South Korea's online gaming empire here and he does a fantastic analysis of the political economy surrounding esports in South Korea. Anyone else? All right, thanks guys.