(Photo: Twitter Source: LinkedIn)

Your Wednesday July 6 eSports News

COUNTER-STRIKES’S INHERENT BRAND CHALLENGE

[Update 4: As I expected, more fallout from the Counter-Strike Gambling scandal]

YouTuber JoshOG Beaver admitted to owning equity in CSGOLotto while also failing to disclose “his sponsorship” from them on his YouTube videos — which in current fashion has been removed

YouTuber PsiSyndicate — not to be confused with ProSyndicate who was one of the two that was at the center of the recent mess — revealed that he also was cheating with a CSGO Gambling site although the winnings were a paltry $3200 compared to the MASSIVE amount won by the streamers via the Gambling sites themselves. It’s admirable PsiSyndicate revealed his involvement before others dug it up — although he maybe injured today from all the patting on his back in the video.

E LEAGUE IMPACT

(Photo: E LEAGUE)

My Take: I’ve more than enough covered the Brand opportunity to leverage eSports as I’m now tracking 20+ Non-Endemics (Fortune 100, Fortune 500, Private and Startups) that have invested in the space in the first 6 months of 2016 alone.

It’s great to see new Brands engage with eSports; however E LEAGUE has had it’s challenges in attracting many others. Turner boasted that they would sell out all eight Ad categories For E LEAGUE at $2M each. As quixotic as that may have sounded, it clearly wasn’t close with only three categories closed. There are two main reasons for this:

I don’t care how big or experienced your Sports Ad Sales team is. If you’ve never spoken to Brands before about their Gaming and eSports Education needs or strategy, let’s use a Sports analogy — It’s a whole different ball game.

Counter-Strike is a violent, First-Person-Shooter plain and simple. With in game sounds like “Terrorists Win” and game objectives that include defusing bombs; there will be Fortune 500 Brands and Media outlets that refuse to partner with this content. I won’t even start with the current political climate.

Now take all that and throw in underage gambling, bribery, match fixing and scams and you expect McDonald’s to get onboard? — Not happening.

I still applaud Turner on closing three Brands — although I’d like to get more deal details than the ones I have before final judgement. To show the challenges of Counter-Strike are not limited to Turner, here’s a quick snapshot of its leagues and major events:

COUNTER-STRIKE IMPACT

ESL COUNTER-STRIKE PRO LEAGUE

(Photo: ESL)

6 Sponsors, 0 Non-Endemic

FACEIT/TWITCH ECS

(Photo: ECS)

6 Sponsors, 0 Non-Endemic

ESL ONE COLOGNE

(Photo: ESL)

9 Sponsors, 0 Non-Endemic

DREAMHACK ZOWIE BUCHAREST

(Photo: Dreamhack)

6 Sponsors, 0 Non-Endemic (Monster doesn’t count)

That’s 20+ Sponsors across two leagues, two major events and three Ad Sales teams and 0 Non-Endemic Brands.

BRAND IMPACT

(Photo: Twitter)

My Take: Yesterday I reviewed the potential revenue that YouTube, Twitch and Streamers were making off of Counter-Strike Gambling related videos. While both YouTube and Twitch haven’t commented on their stance on profiting from these videos, the other potential impact is Brand Sponsorships:

TmarTn Sponsors: Monster Energy, Astro Gaming, Kontrolfreek, BarkBox

Monster Energy, Astro Gaming, Kontrolfreek, BarkBox The biggest one I’d estimate is Monster Energy as they’ve long invested within eSports. The most surprising — and kudos to you for being early — is Barkbox, the monthly subscription service for your canine (Hint: eSports Fans and Viewers over-Index on Pet ownership)

Syndicate Sponsors: None clearly listed*

None clearly listed* I use the term clearly as there are no listings on his YouTube page or elsewhere. However as I showed yesterday, one of the CSGO Unboxing Videos was sponsored by Razer, however Syndicate is not listed on Razer’s Sponsor site.

MEDIA IMPACT

My Take: I’ll go ahead and make another prediction: Counter-Strike won’t be there for E LEAGUE Season 2 or at least not alone. Turner has said that E LEAGUE would be distributed in 80 countries — although I’d like to see the full list as my tracking shows less than half of that — and most recently would be shown on the new 24/7 eSports channel in the UK, Ginx (More on Ginx below).

As new eSports channels are mushrooming on a weekly basis, the value of League content starts to get more valuable. What happens to Leagues that are associated with Counter-Strike? There maybe some impact, however in the near term these league broadcast deals are minimal at best so not much here.

[I’ll be on SiriusXM’s IGN eSports Show (Ch 83) today Wed July 6th at 7:30ET to chat further about the Business impact on Counter-Strike’s Gambling scandal]