Marcel “Dexter” Feldkamp is a German esports professional player, caster and analyst, most known for his tenures with LemonDogs and Counter Logic Gaming. Having spoken for years about wanting to help esports grow as an industry, Marcel recently took a personal step towards this goal by opening his own company – Prime Talent.

The Esports Observer spoke with Marcel about how players can transition beyond a career as a fulltime pro, as well as his thoughts on the upcoming changes to the EU League of Legends Championship series.

Marcel, you have a background as a professional LoL player. Can you please introduce yourself and summarise your experience in a couple of sentences?

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”Most players have to find out for themselves what they want to do with their life…”[/perfectpullquote]

Long before I even got to play on a big stage I explored my love for the competitive side of video games in Counter-Strike 1.6 and World of Warcraft, but only with LoL did I breakthrough to a successful international career. Overall I think my professional player career could have gone on a lot longer, and I even did a break in between splits to come back, which not a lot of players do.

I think I just stopped at one point because the environment in which you have to compete is really not the same than it was a couple years ago. I have a distaste for gaming houses and think that they are unproductive for player’s mental health and cause faster burnouts. I would prefer if each player had their own apartments and life outside of the game. Newer players often just do it for the love of the game, but after competing for 2-3 years everything changes.

You just announced the launch of your agency. What made you build it?

I have built my own company, Prime Talent, with my partner Ferris over the last eight months and while we only had limited resources we built a small foundation for players that were in dire need of help. I was always advocating of player rights and think everyone should know how much they’re worth before entering the negotiation phase, and understand what they are signing. We helped out over 40 players before we decided that this is a scalable business and we need to expand and build it up with more professionalism. The professionalism lead us to the Press X team of which we merged with, and I think our vision for esports and gaming just lines up perfectly.

I’ve read in interviews that you’ve had experience putting together squads yourself. Do you think pro’s are better suited to talent scouting and representation, or does it depend on the individual?

To be honest I don’t believe a majority of the pro’s are suited for talent scouting or representation. I would say that I was lucky to have found the right group of people with the right values that teach me a lot. There are obviously some pro players who have done incredibly well for themselves; be it a Snoopeh who now works at Facebook, and Ocelote who runs G2 Esports, or Deficio who now is one of the best, if not the best, caster in League of Legends. Most players have to find out for themselves what they want to do with their life – most of them think they can just become coaches if they stop playing but this is definitely not the case for everyone. The biggest enemy of the players is still their own ego in many regards.

We have seen an increasing amount of investment for player and talent agencies. How do you differentiate from your competition?

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”Current players or streamers are most of the time very underpaid for what they actually offer.”[/perfectpullquote]

Especially with OWL and NA LCS being franchised, coming up there will be a lot of work to do and educating players about their true worth. As our space progresses and more money comes in, contracts have to be a lot tighter.

We differentiate ourselves from our competition because we are not an outsider group coming into the space and spending dumb money. Press X as a company isn’t started by a group of kids that have money to throw around and buy themselves in, they have been studying the space and realized that the most important thing to do business is over valuing relationships. The majority of my partners are professionals with decades worth of experience in their respective fields like media buying, digital marketing, talent management, business develop and more which covers a lot of areas that other talent agencies in this space currently do not have.

Were you able to manage yourself legally across your career? If not, what kind of help did you receive?

Funnily enough I had my current partner Ferris help me out with some contract language and some good esports lawyers have become close friends over the years. Whenever I needed advice I could always turn to them for an outside opinion or legal counsel. I believe being very open and active on the networking part has allowed me to be in this position where I could rely on others to teach me or advise me, to a point where I can be in a position to do the same for others now.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”I have a distaste for gaming houses and think that they are unproductive for player’s mental health and cause faster burnouts.”[/perfectpullquote]

Individual player sponsorships are reserved for the most famous players or streamers. If the opportunity were to arise, what would you advise a player to be most cautious about when negotiating a sponsorship deal?

Three simple words: Know your worth. Current players or streamers are most of the time very underpaid for what they actually offer. Most of them think they make good money but economically speaking they are being underpaid for their work and services and exposure they bring to brands. I believe we will see a shift in that very soon and players and streamers will be making a lot more money. I am fortunate enough to have partnered up with one of the best sales departments in the whole esports industry that truly understands the business from an insider perspective with the outside expertise in the real world.

This time last year, overall player salaries in esports weren’t high enough for most players to hire an agent or lawyer. Do you still believe this to be the case?

No matter how big or small your salary is, you should always hire at least a lawyer to look over the documents you are signing. Esports as a whole still has terrible contracts flying around, and I would absolutely hate to see a young upcoming star being abused by people who sell them a dream of becoming a pro player for a signature under a shady contract. Agents can help upcoming talent find a home and make sure that top tier talents receive what they deserve.

The EU LCS regional change will open up the LoL professional scene to a larger influx of European players. From a talent agent’s perspective, do you see this as a positive or negative development?

The more teams there are, the more players are needed, so from a talent’s agency perspective it’s a fantastic thing. We have more work to do and can help even more players find homes to play for teams. Since I’m the European guy in our new company I can imagine that I will have a lot of endless nights with not enough sleep, but I do what I can. Esports is a business that is so fast moving and never sleeps but I absolutely love it and really can’t wait to bring this job to life and go full-time with an (almost) 24/7 availability to players.

Do you feel there’s any potential way to fill the increased number of slots, without dramatically lowering the quality of matches?

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”It’s a short term sacrifice for a long term gain. Riot Games is thinking ahead and is convinced that the game will still be around in 5, 10 or 20 years…”[/perfectpullquote]

I don’t think that this is possible. It’s a short term sacrifice for a long term gain. Riot Games is thinking ahead and is convinced that the game will still be around in 5, 10 or 20 years so I believe them. I think it will hurt Europe a lot in the very near future, but we will come out on top of it eventually after. It was a necessity to activate more players and I think the way Riot handled Europe is actually great in the bigger picture. I’m a bit sad that we did not include a single Nordic country considering that all the top tier talent is coming from that region, but I’m sure that this is not the only change Riot is bringing to Europe for the definite future.

Lastly, where do you see the industry going in terms of player resources and representation?

We aim to be a leading example in this industry for players resources and representation and hope that we can help out players a lot on the talent side of things. This space definitely can’t lose from more good quality content. In some cases we represent the most entertaining Twitch streamers that were players before but could make a good transition. We will try to aim to be the full package and provide resources to everyone who is willing to put in the work so they can focus on doing the fun things, like playing games, while we take care of the business side of things for them.