



This series of features was born out of the awareness that eSports is composed of young, financially dependant people who are most often untrained and unqualified, who see the work as their passion, and who do it as their hobby. It’s common for websites looking for new recruits to suggest that at a later stage, the budding volunteer might earn material rewards and even become a kind of employee. For most people this will never be true. Most people will be defined by their enduring drive to volunteer.

Part one of this series featured an interview with veteran eSports journalist Lawrence ‘Malystryx’ Phillips.

When I approached Moritz Zimmermann he had just left joinDOTA, and Lawrence Phillips had begun the then unannounced restructuring of the website’s news division. Drafting my questions, I knew I had to account for a corresponding shift in distance. In his time Phillips was Editor-in-Chief, but Zimmermann was the Boss, a mover and a shaker of an entirely different scope, having run Dota websites for nine years. His was an eagle’s eye view, and my job was to find out what the eagle saw.

A good feeling

Getting older you try to connect events in the past with things happening in your present. In 1999, for instance, I was oblivious to a lot of things that would later have a bearing on my life. I didn’t know, for one, that just two years earlier the first ever professional gaming league had come into being as the Cyberathlete Professional League, and that shortly after that critical example, what we retrospectively call “the eSports scene” began to develop. More relevant is that in the summer of 1999, the original Counter-Strike was released and became a major player in that scene. This is where we get to the present, for Counter-Strike introduced Moritz ‘Moose’ Zimmermann to his lifelong preoccupation: eSports.

“I always loved 3D shooters and it was a ton of fun playing it with friends at LAN cafés,” writes Zimmermann. “My first experience in eSports was playing Counter-Strike 2v2 tournaments in the ESL ladder, but we never got really far.” Most people don’t, but Zimmermann’s interest in eSports was just getting started: years later, when Warcraft 3 entered the competitive pantheon and DotA rose to popularity, he was in a unique position to do something about the custom game’s meteoric rise. In 2004 he was approached by Martin Hermes and the brothers Markus and Marcel Blum with an idea for an exciting new project based on DotA. German born, Zimmermann had obtained a BA in media design with a focus on video and film production, but rather than pursue a natural line of work, he took up Hermes and the Blums on their proposal. Zimmermann says he had “a good feeling” about the game. He’s been operating Dota websites for nine years now. “If I hadn't gone for Dota, I would probably be sitting in the boring office of some marketing company, pushing pixels. Instead I got to travel to cool events and follow my passion.”

In his joinDOTA farewell post, Zimmermann writes: “The complete lack of projects around DotA in the early days of the scene gave us the chance to create something out of the ordinary.” Online matchmaking was a thing, and a few years earlier Warcraft 3 had brought a fully automated ladder system that would become a staple of online gaming. But no such system existed for the Warcraft-bound Dota 1. Hermes & Co. aimed to change that with a system they called “Single Instant Game (SIG),” a web based matchmaking service that allowed players to set up games in a matter of seconds. The platform for this system was Dota-league.com. While Zimmermann hands the credit for the idea to Hermes and the brothers Blum, calling them “the true founders,” in an interview with SK-Gaming, his contribution was not unsubstantial. Before Dota-league shut down, Zimmermann handled PR, marketing, design, news, and offline events.

In 2009 Icefrog announced that he would be leading the development of Dota 2 at Valve. The game was officially announced in 2010. The realization that the sequel would contain all the features that Dota-league had been created to provide for the original foreshadowed the end of the website, and in 2011, a few months after The International, the website was shut down. Just as the new game was sure to take over Dota-league’s audience, the other founders wanted to pursue other projects, but Zimmermann had been working full time on DotA for the past two years, and for him it wasn’t over just yet.

Joining Dota

Today joinDOTA is a premiere eSports community site. Between its resident shoutcasters, tournament league, and news coverage, the website gets in excess of a million unique visitors per month.

Zimmermann registered joinDOTA’s domain in 2010, and developed his ideas over the following year. In 2011, Berlin based marketing agency Freaks 4U Gaming contacted Zimmermann, and he shared his idea with them. “I decided to create joinDOTA because I was following one of my hunches and my idea would work out if I was able to convince TobiWan to join it and also have HolyMaster on my side as the two key people to make it successful.” Excited by the idea of turning his project into reality, Zimmermann put his entrepreneurial gears into motion. “When Freaks 4U Gaming decided to finance my idea, it was surprisingly easy to convince TobiWan to come to Berlin. Seems like he had a hunch that my hunch about joinDOTA was going to work.” Joining the initial trio was a throng old friends and acquaintances Zimmermann knew from Dota-league.

Where Dota-league was primarily a cheap, self-financed operation, with only server costs to worry about and a negligible amount of ad revenue, joinDOTA had the backing of Freaks 4U Gaming. The first version of the portal came just in time for the International, but it was a barebones realization of the future site. “In the beginning the website consisted of just a header, the embedded livestream where people could see TobiWan´s broadcast and a simple set of news items.” In anticipation of the beta release, GosuGamers interviewed Zimmermann, who reiterated his vision: “[Dota-League.com’s] beating heart is the Single Instant Game (SIG) that helped create the community around it, but this will be redundant in the future as DOTA 2 will have a matchmaking system included. So in order to be able to create a lively community website for DOTA 2, new ideas had to be formed. Broadcasting and shoutcasting in DotA was always great but didn't have any structure and consistency. I made it my goal to create a website that offers both: a constant flow of tournaments as well as daily broadcasts. [...] A new game, a new site.”

The rest is history, or rather, the present. In the summer of 2013, Zimmermann left joinDOTA. I ask what must be an obvious question for someone apparently retiring from the world of eSports: what are his plans? How does he feel now that he’s doing real life stuff?

“Everything I have done until today has been real life stuff. Even though they were all eSports/online related projects, most of the work behind it takes place in the real world, like talking to sponsors, marketers, designers, construction builders etc.” I’m taken aback at first, but of course Zimmermann is right. His work lead to a tangible good; something was built. Where can that edifice stand if not in the real world? “Since I gathered a lot of experience in this field and also made mistakes which I learned a lot from, I will of course take all this knowledge and use it in the future. This in fact can lead me back to eSports, just in a different way and the next logical step for me is to aim higher.”

I ask him if, having left Freaks 4U Gaming, he’s going to be working on a new eSports project, but Zimmermann is quick to tell me that everything is “still hush-hush!” I poke in another direction. Lawrence ‘Malystryx’ Phillips recently took over as Editor-in-Chief of joinDOTA. I ask Zimmermann what he thinks about the briton’s management. “Of course I peek over what joinDOTA is doing, why wouldn't I? It´s been my baby for so many years, so I am interested to see how it is doing and where it is going. Malystryx as EiC has brought a lot of great structure to the news section, which we lacked for quite some time, and I am interested to see where it will be in a year or two.”

A mean business

When I asked Lawrence ‘Malystryx’ Phillips about the state of the news scene, he said that too much emphasis on speed and quantity had propelled eSports journalism into a downward spiral. I put the same question to Zimmermann. “I fully support Malystryx right there. eSports is still small and young and I believe that the next generation, our kids, will experience it completely differently than we do today.”

Malystryx also said that eSports journalism doesn't exist yet. “The bigger the market grows, the more professionals it will attract. We are still in a state of building eSports and I personally think that it is still in a state where 'mass > class' drives it. But that is changing a lot these days and as more professional writers like Malystryx emerge it will turn into 'class > mass' over time, making it truly professional. But I also believe that eSports is a good 20 to 30 years away from being as fully professional as a common sport we see in classic media today.”

Some people would say that's pretty optimistic. “I wouldn't say it is too optimistic, it´s a reachable goal, given that the internet is very fast-growing and the needed broadcasting tools such as Twitch, Dailymotion and Youtube are getting bigger and bigger to enable a greater popularity. In 1958, American Football first started really taking off with the NFL Championship, when it was broadcasted via NBC nationwide, which is also just 56 years ago. Getting as popular as American Football? I don´t think that will ever happen, but eSports as a whole will grow very fast from now on.”

Having presided over the development of two very popular websites, it’s fair to say Zimmermann knows what he’s talking about. He projects a lot of growth for the industry in the next few decades, and the news scene is sure to flourish alongside it, but for the moment volunteers must still make do with gratitude. “Since eSport is not as financially stable as pretty much any other business and still primarily relies on voluntary work, it was just not possible. But I was able to help some of them get real jobs in eSports which makes me happy. Seeing eSports progress so nicely in the past years gives me hope that soon more people will be able to be rewarded for their voluntary work.”

When I ask him about his work with volunteers, he writes that Dota-league had over five hundred different volunteers during the website’s operation, with as many as one hundred people volunteering at any time. “I met so many great people in the past years with whom I am still friends with today, and it is truly refreshing that all of them were so loving and dedicated. One thing I am a bit sad about is that I was not able to reward each and everyone of them for their hard work and care.”

Some of them do get rewarded, but Zimmermann’s figure isn’t particularly encouraging. According to him, only one in twelve volunteers ever got a paycheck, depending on whether the money was available or not. With so few resources, the selection criteria were understandably harsh. “Once in a while there are people that work 10 times harder than anyone else and are always eager to help out. If these people prove to be trustworthy over a longer period of time (~8-12 months) and finances are given, deciding to pay someone as awesome as that makes it much easier. It is a very mean ‘business’ since it´s hard to draw a line between who gets paid and who doesn't while not making others jealous.” IEM might throw around sums like Katowice’s winner-takes-all $100,000 prize, but the eSports scene is still poor. The best way to gauge eSports success is not to look at the exorbitant figures that tournament marketing puts out but to look at the lives of the people at the lowest rungs of the ladder. So long as websites like joinDOTA rely on volunteers, we’ll never be able to say that eSports has arrived.

I ask Zimmermann how we can improve the status of volunteers, but he doesn’t have any magic answers to give me. “Just grow eSports in general so that there is enough money to pay everyone.” That’s it, no hiding behind policy, no inventing some structural failure. We’re just not big enough to be a real business.



My interview with Lawrence ‘Malystryx’ Phillips ended with a simple question -- what do you know for sure about eSports? Given what I know of Zimmermann, his answer didn't surprise me: “eSports is a true passion that is given life by countless caring and dedicated people.”

Art by Liza Miel