Call of Duty eSports has had a rollercoaster ride these past 5 years. For the most part, it's flourished. Albeit a little later than I'd have hoped, but CoD eSports has been booming in recent years! I remember talking about LAN support back in 2008 while working on Call of Duty: World at War, and getting laughed out of meetings for "not having my priorities straight." Which is even further from when my clan was competing in Team Warfare League back in 2004 for a few hundred bucks and bragging rights.

And yet, there seems to be more discontent than ever among pro players and fans alike with the state of CoD eSports, and it probably has some folks at the 3100 block of Ocean Park Blvd in Santa Monica scratching their heads. Activision has invested millions of dollars into its eSports programs, and funded some of the biggest prize pools in gaming -- what could possibly be going wrong?

The problem isn't with how much money Activision is investing. It's not with how passionate the dev teams and studios are about eSports these days (because they're very passionate). It's simply a people and operations problem at Activision that is manifesting in a few very predictable pains for pro players and their fans.

Here's three things Activision could do tomorrow to start alleviating those pain points.

1/ Invest In A Player Relations Group

Pro players are your athletes. They're your champions. You have a Media Relations team to manage relationships with the journalists and press, right? Because they're the loudest and most influential champions of your core products right? Pro Players are your loudest and most influential champions for Player Engagement. Which also contributes to user retention and touches a whole host of other verticals within publishing. It's super valuable to get right.

It is critical these pro players are happy. You need a communications-heavy division that knows how to negotiate difficult and complex social issues within the professional players' space, and one that can build loyalty and retention among those pro players.

This unit can also help tactically with all sorts of other needs of pro players; sponsorships, affiliations, partnerships, merchandising, etc. But its principal duty should be to identify those areas it can make these pro players' experience better.

2/ Build-Out Your Tournament Support Programs

When it comes to putting on regional LAN events, they're extremely expensive. It's difficult for Activision to justify that kind of expenditure when eSports simply isn't generating enough revenue yet. I completely empathize with the business case -- if that's even the reason why there are so few competitions around Call of Duty each year. Maybe there's all the money in the world to put on events, and it's just simply there aren't the right people planning these things, in which case that should be an even simpler fix!

But what's stopping your people internally from creating programs and policies that would allow for others to host and monetize regional LAN events? At the end of the day, fans (and players) just want a more robust series of events, and more aspirational paths to compete and to watch. There's a very expensive way of doing this (entirely from internal investment), or by creating an ecosystem whereby event organizers are properly incentivized to host these events themselves.

There are low-cost, smart means to ensuring quality and overall attendee experience for such events without breaking the budget. It just requires a lot of hard work and leadership within your organization from a couple of key hires.

3/ Rethink Spending

At the end of the day, every dollar of investment into eSports can be (and is) accounted for. For every new broadcaster feature that's developed, for every new celebrity endorsement, for every new tchotchke that is designed, for every new dollar put into a prize pool -- that's another dollar that isn't being spent somewhere else.

Will it really matter if the prize pool is $1 Million or $1.5 Million? It's still a huge purse, and of course every pro player would tell you "the more money the better!" -- But would not increasing the purse one year result in a bunch of eSport organizations going bankrupt? Of course not. So where else could you spend that money this year to make the overall experience better?

Do pro players *really* need a diamond-crested ring? I mean don't get me wrong, it's BAD-ASS. But that's another employee's salary, maybe even three once you count the cost it took to pay a firm to design the ring itself. And with those hires, you could smooth over most of the player relations issues you're currently experiencing.

I suspect, and I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that there's a certain degree of un-focused spending going on over at CoD eSports. Lots of flashy things that incrementally may make the organization look better to an outsider, but are leading to some festering pain points among your pro players and their fans.

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We've seen it time and again across multiple companies in the industry. When you don't put player experience first, your overall brand loyalty and brand suffers because of it. That's why EA's mantra for the last few years has definitively been player-first. It's why Riot's has always been player-first. And in CoD eSports' case, pro players have to come first. The people, not the things. Their experiences are what matter most, and how they convey those experiences to their fans are of the utmost importance.

Yeah they can breed drama. Yeah they can be loud-mouthed. Yeah they can have huge egos. But at the end of the day, these pro players are professional competitors. I think they'd agree, their competitive experience comes first. Tournament formats must be fair. There must be enough tournaments to truly define a champion. Tournaments must run smoothly. Gameplay must be balanced. Customer Service must be existent.