This post is the second part of a mini-series discussing scaling up the Fighting Game Community (FGC) [1]. If you missed it, in my first post, I discuss the FGC’s historical ambivalence towards e-sports and some other community proposals to get more money into the FGC. The different approaches are all problematic in different ways, and I want to suggest a solution that resolves those problems. I have a couple of goals in mind with my idea:

1. I want to preserve the “soul” of the FGC – the community-run events, the open tournament scene, and the dream of any player being able to play against a pro in an open bracket or casual games.

2. I want to find a way to let the FGC chart its own path – we will never be free of the whims of developers. But we need to think about ways that allow us to chart our course and not rely on the largesse of others.

3. I want to make sure that resources flowing into the FGC do not consolidate at the top. We ought to pay volunteers, bracket-runners, et cetera. The FGC does not function without them.

4. I want any such solution to be robust. We don’t want a situation where we are leaning on a single person or organization, no matter how competent and well-intentioned they may be.

So, without further ado, I will lay out the framework by looking at the Evolution Championship Series, or Evo.

Evo is the undisputed largest competitive event in the FGC. Throughout a weekend, Evo 2019 clocked in at 5.73 million hours watched, with a max concurrent viewership of 223,000. It is the one time that fighting games enter the mainstream gaming media’s consciousness. At first glance, in a vacuum, those look like fantastic numbers that you can trot out to a sponsor and have them hop aboard. Yet Evo rarely gets traction from non-endemic sponsors like, say, Overwatch League. There are likely three reasons for this, one obvious, the other two less so. The obvious one is that the FGC is not as big as Fortnite, League of Legends, et cetera. At the 2019 LCS World Semifinals, concurrent viewership peaked at around 4 million. Compared to that, the FGC is small potatoes. So it isn’t surprising that non-endemic sponsors would go after the bigger fish. The other two reasons need a little more digging – from a mental bandwidth point of view, Evo has a lot going on.  Unlike the Overwatch League, there is not a single contact point for the FGC.

Evo takes place over three days, with eight games showcased on the main stage, and numerous other smaller side tourneys. Developers like to surprise die-hard fans with reveals and hints of future content. Between that, you have the myriad endemic sponsors looking to spread awareness of their products and services. All of this means that there are a lot of voices competing for your attention in a very short space of time. One can say the Super Bowl seems to suffer from the same issues, but I contend that the comparison is misleading. Evo has multiple streams, each with their independent schedule of games and ad breaks – the Super Bowl is a monolithic entity. The kinds of ads we see in the Super Bowl tend to be one-off and expensive, to better stick in your head. Evo cannot command the premiums that the NFL can. It is also unlikely a non-endemic sponsor would devote the same level of resources to such an endeavor.

The second issue relates to the fragmented nature of the FGC. Unlike something like the NBA, NFL, or even Overwatch League, there is not a single point of contact for a sponsor. If Nike wants to get some ad space in Overwatch League, it can call up Activision-Blizzard’s (ludicrously successful) sales team. Now, non-endemic sponsors can reach out to developers, as Nissin did with Bandai-Namco for Tekken. But that ties back to an issue I discussed in my earlier posts. Such sponsorships mostly benefit the Tekken community. We are trying to find ways to help the whole FGC. Though we like to think of corporations as bottomless pits of money and resources, the reality is they face limitations too. I suspect the due diligence for any single event is unlikely to be orders of magnitude different. Indeed, if the non-endemic is new to esports, the amount of time and resources spent understanding the market might make it even bigger than usual. Unless, of course, we sell FG ad space very cheaply, which brings up a different problem. Nike spent 1.8 billion USD in 2018 on US advertising alone. The effort to look at each FGC event when it ends up being less than .1% of your overall budget is not worth it.

With that out of the way, I will now present my proposal for growing the FGC. Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape, once said that there are two ways to make money in business – bundling and unbundling. Each FGC event is too small and concentrated on luring larger non-endemic sponsors. But if you combine the CEO, Combo Breaker, Evo, Big E events, et cetera together, the scale is there. The idea is that there would be a formal association or body that would be the point of contact for any non-endemic sponsor. Those sponsors would get exposure to all the events over a year (or however long they wish to sign for).

 The mechanism is neither new nor untested. It works in fields ranging from finance to retail to software and more. To use a hypothetical example, CEO, Combo Breaker, Evo, and Big E come together. They will form a working group we’ll call the Fighting Game Association or FGA. They would establish how much ad space they are willing to spare, share their internal demographics and non-endemic (or endemic) sponsors with which they have connections. They would also have to deal with the ever-contentious revenue share. With all that, it is now possible for the FGA to present a unified sales pitch to sponsors. It will offer something that did not exist before in the FGC – the ability to engage an attractive grassroots demographic over a long period. 

A couple of potential issues immediately come to mind. First, there is the fear of homogenization. What makes Combo Breaker or CEO unique is that they each have their unique culture and vibe. Such a fighting game association must have the major players from within the FGC involved. They need to have those hard discussions about how much control they want to cede. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a fear of balkanization. What of the organizations that are not part of this association, either out of choice or because the FGA does not ask them? I do not have any great answers for that, but I would hope that this association would be more than an economic one [2], which brings us to the third issue – economics. How would the association share revenue? Would they split it based on viewership and/or attendance? Would there be a “pool” to fund other activities? TO’s are already cagey about publicly discussing numbers [3]. This may be an example of putting the cart ahead of the horse, but that is one of those thorny discussions that the community heads of the FGC hammer out.

But the beauty of all these problems is that we have the opportunity to solve them as a community, within our power. Contrast that to what is happening with the Japan eSports Federation (JESF). There, people outside the community are making many, if not all, the decisions. The people who built the community are left out because they waited for an outside entity to establish “legitimacy.” With the money flowing around, it is inevitable that at some point, some group will try the same with the Western FGC. The outside investors may stay, or they may bailout. Either way the result will likely be the same for the community. Many of the original builders of the community will leave, willingly or not, and the vibrancy of the FGC will be poorer for it. To misappropriate Benjamin Franklin’s line, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”   

We should not view all the outside money flowing into esports as an existential threat, but neither should we sit around and assume it will somehow all work. My proposal is harder than some of the other solutions mentioned. It involves the coordination and sharing of information on a larger scale. These are not things the community has historically excelled. It will also force us to address hard questions that we paper over under the bromide of “we’re all part of the FGC.” But it is a necessary step and the best way to grow the FGC so that more people can pursue a living in something they are passionate about.

Additional Reading/Sources:

https://esportsobserver.com/evo2019-twitch-viewership/

https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/1191028871237378049?s=20

https://www.statista.com/statistics/463063/nike-ad-spend-usa/

https://hbr.org/2014/07/marc-andreessen-and-jim-barksdale-on-how-to-make-money

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