Panel: How is Esports Filling the Gap of the Olympics? PG Connects Digital #2

coming up in a little bit though so don't go anywhere is our esports and influencers closing panel for the day one a.m obviously we'll be back later in for the second half of the tracks but this one's a really interesting one obviously we all know that um you know covered 19's disrupted the world of sport uh specifically you know football leagues have closed uh all sorts of sport are shut down and some of them have been filling the gap uh like i said to you i can't remember quite which league it was but i think it was one of the formula series has been doing all of their races actually as part of their constructors championship online and that was really fascinating to know that they're using uh digital and gaming solutions to keep the world of sport going really blending

sport and esports into one and that's obviously really interesting for the fact that everyone was looking forward so much to the tokyo 2020 olympics in the summer and we still don't know if they're going to happen or not and this panel in a little bit is going to explore whether esports uh already is filling the gap with the olympics but or whether it can fill that summer gap that we're all you know wanting with sports i say all some people might not be some people might be grateful for the uh break from the sports but you know is can esports fill that gap and as we move into a new normal that everyone keeps talking about is this an opportunity for you know sports and esports to blend together and really explode into the future we already know that in countries like korea you know you'll be able to watch you can watch starcraft on their live television prime time television that's been happening for a while so yeah is this a real turning point and leading that panel is going to be our very own danielle parties who is uh the award-winning

multi-award-winning as it turns out editor of uh influencerupdate.biz and one of our discord queens who's helping you all through discord so i think danielle is joining us now to help bring the uh panel together hi danielle hello it's uh good to have you with us again on this i mean obviously you're one of us so you're leading some of these tracks and moderators and doing these jobs as well but it's nice to have you and your expertise leading the panel here thank you thank you how's your morning been so far sophia good good we've had some really interesting talks um yes it's been a really exciting morning so you know we're looking forward to this one to close it off but i think it's it's just interesting to see how you know with covert 19 and everything that's created a lot of problems it's really creating new opportunities in esports and especially for influencers and everything else like that yeah i'm excited to dig into this because i i'm not super keyed into the uh the esports base so i'm excited to learn what people are up to

yeah exactly i mean and it's i think this is sort of seeing that little bit of that blurring between influence and esports as people are sort of clamoring for entertainment and everything like that so yeah thank you thank you for leading this panel for us and bringing your expertise to it and i i won't do any of the other introductions i'll leave you to that so uh yeah thank you very much have we got everybody in here that we need no i think they're they're slowly joining us we've got i can see brandon here from opera event hi brandon hey brandon now i believe how are you today sorry about that no i'm good thank you how are you i'm good thank you very much where are you based at the moment i'm based in san francisco california so it is currently 4 am here wow well thank you for being up early to join us yeah i thought it was bad enough be getting up at 8 00 a.m actually half seven 4 a.m no problem yeah and then i think we've also got uh maltol be back from bitcraft who we had

earlier giving us a talk and emmanuel from esports nigeria is joining us so yeah it should be a really good panel a really global panel as well like i know the benefit is digital we can get people from everywhere to just come and talk to us yeah definitely it's why i still have been opening with everyone is like where are you based at the moment because i think it shows that like we are literally all everywhere at the moment and that's that's really great and yeah this esports influence in the web i think it already is a global part of our industry so it's about just connecting us all up even better hmm some great opportunities yeah definitely well i will let you and brandon uh let i suppose while we wait for everyone else to join we can um introduce brandon and everything else like that and then we'll get started as soon as we've got all of our panelists here we're obviously still one minute ahead of schedule so uh you know it's uh yeah it's like we've got a few more people coming in manuel's in now there we go perfect i'll leave you to it then and i'll see you all afterwards lovely

okay uh good to see you guys today we're still waiting for a couple more people to uh to figure out how to get in i think that the problems with with working zoom are always prevalent people are still just figuring it out um so we'll start with you brandon if you just want to introduce yourself to uh to the viewers today sure hi um i'm brandon byrne uh i've been in uh esports for about 12 years now which i think in any other industry in the world would would be sort of like a pretty uh a pretty uh young career still but in the esports space has been around for quite some time i originally was an executive at a company called curse we were one of the very first esports teams in leagues uh in riots league of legends series and then i went to work for one of the largest esports team as the cfo team liquid so i did that for a number of years before i started opera event and a bunch of experience working in the influencer media space and more specifically the esports base

okay brilliant and uh you emanuel could you run us a little bit through what you do okay so i would say when it comes to esports it seems to be older than me but um i've been in gaming since 1991 i've been gaming since then uh but um fully into esports as the phenomenon that we have today i would say just about five or six years ago and um we just thought to use the gaming culture that we had had already in nigeria to build on that to elevate it to what is available worldwide and so that journey has brought me so far today i have an esports organization um called the league of extraordinary gamers lxg um i'm also privileged to be the president of esports nigeria and what we're doing is developing these sports in across the country and um what i do also extends beyond nigeria i um today i'm also the founding president of the esports federation of africa where we have an association of

countries that are about 30 and counting at the moment so all we're trying to do is to use esports the gaming culture is there already is to elevate the sport on the continent and also help our young people be able to achieve their dreams in gaming you know on that platform and um yeah that's it about me for now brilliant that's that's really awesome um being in the position to bring esports out of out of africa and nigeria to the to the wider world that's a really cool um opportunity and i see we've got uh malte joining now i think um you might have your mic muted there sorry for running late there we go election issues here no worries we were running a bit early so uh you're not too late uh we're just going through the interjections now so if you uh if you want to introduce yourself as well malte to the to the views at home yeah sure um thanks for having me i'm super delighted to be here i'm malta uh i'm one of the three um founding managing partners of bitcraft ventures we have a big dna in esports so started out as a software

engineer 25 years back you know when you're 16 you have a pc and you learn how to code you start building games and then you start playing games and then the first time ever i had access to connected computers was in our computer lab at university and that we turned upside down at night to make it a lan center and play doom don't tell anyone um and that was that was a lot of fun back then and we didn't know what we were doing but we were onto something big and that became like a hobby and then it became uh you know obviously over the years and you know fast forwarding 20 years or so now it became uh it became uh first of all a thing then it became a sport then it became business and i've been involved in various things and then 2013 the time came when this became investable and i was lucky enough to be able to invest into esports we acquired esl electronic sports league and dreamhack

and nine other esports companies to uh to essentially build the largest esports company on the planet which i then had for four years and had a good time growing and then in the meanwhile we were setting up a venture fund around esports called bitcraft um and this is what we're currently investing out of it's 140 million dollar fund we invest specifically into esports games technology and lifestyle companies to really drive the next generation of esports offerings and and companies well it's incredible it just it really gives a scope of how big esports has become now that you're making these kinds of investments and uh you know setting up these kinds of companies in the space um we've got our last panelist now who's just joined uh pascal are you there he's turned his camera yes i am there he is hey i had a few technical glitches earlier so i guess you are the intro stage i'm pascal clarice i've been in the

industry for 22 years mostly marketing and entrepreneur and the last year i've been working on a sports video game which has some ties with the whole olympic paralympic event and obviously as a marketing guy i've doubled a bit in esports and there you go i think that will be it for the late introduction okay brilliant well you joined a good time so uh okay we'll get started so just as a bit of an intro um with the obvious curvy 19 pandemics going on um it looks like the the tokyo olympics 2020 is going to not go ahead um and i looked into this and the the olympics has only been cancelled twice before which was um over the two world wars so it's it's kind of a big deal when when the olympics doesn't happen um since it's been going in its modern form um until unlike those times during the world we have this robust robust digital space now where we can um sort of you know give sports events

and personalities a place to thrive that's not out at a physical event um so how just to kick off how has the esports base adapted and changed during the the kovit 19 pandemic i'll just a question to the room so yeah i guess first of all the bigger physical events in esports also took a big hit uh i remember in iem cadavitza sort of it's been short notice without viewership obviously this was a massive shock because that was a big part on how the esports the core esports competition defined itself right but the beauty was then esports is not only happening in stadiums where people physically met esports was predominantly happening online but because i can i can i can you know play anyone with a pc and an internet connection almost on any game and then obviously the industry pretty much adapted to that and just switched over to online competition and

online viewership so that and that obviously took a huge huge acceleration i i think this fast forward our space at least by a year or two just overnight with a lot of people like having to spend more time online playing online advancing playing online viewing online engaging and also obviously paying on online for for esports and esports related offerings um yeah well i'll echo what multi was saying it's interesting because i think i think the key word here is adaptation so most of the esports that had been uh you know quite large around the world whether you're talking about the overwatch league or riots you know league of legends the lcs or the lec uh most of those were designed to be in person and so there was a lot of changing that needed to happen so just as an example you know riot uses a very controlled system of computers to make sure that there's no third party systems there's no cheating

and so when covid did strike it was an opportunity for esports to leverage its digital footprint to ultimately adapt and be able to continue forward that wasn't uh a super easy thing to do that wasn't like a a you know like a duh kind of a situation it actually required some effort but the the thing that's unique about this is that esports has the ability to do that whereas traditional sports does not of course um anyone else got anything spots or very it's okay i think i got those sentiments both of them first of all that it accelerated everything which as a marketing guy i'm super excited about because now i can book athletes and footballers who are instead home orders getting bored not getting training and they can participate in celebrity matches we've just did that a couple of weeks ago with thomas rodriguez and david ospina to welcome footballers from colombia and they did a charity tournament for

free fire um garena free fire had a tournament anyway and they they just added that celebrity gala match with distribution for charities and it was turned around in nine days i've never turned around a footballer to participate into a a an online tournament in nine days this normally is just to get the first call um so that's one thing and then you see that around like for example a company i was working for before eden games that has been acquired by torque esports darren cox the godfather of gta academy and all that and they finally have without revealing anything confidential they re they realize something that was in their mind for years and that had been resisted by the cars industries and by the drivers and it was to bring professional drivers to compete against esports professionals in uh simulators obviously online when i

say bring they didn't bring it physically but you had one juan pablo montoya retired drivers like emerson fitipaldi or mario andretti participating and then as it grew it got on to get picked up by tv and you had some professional f1 drivers who didn't have the grand prix who participated and spoiler alert it's a gamer that won against the professional drivers but that as well is something that was imagined and was in the pipeline for many years and all of a sudden oh we're all at home we have nothing to put on tv on espn this weekend because formula one is cancelled let's all stay relevant together so that was really interesting but then brandon said something that i'm worried about which is that the finals of the tournaments was also to secure the stuff and to prevent any acting any tempering and doing that online

is more difficult if not impossible for some games and that poses a challenge that in some cases the emperor is naked right now um do you have anything to add emmanuel you've got you're uh you're on mute again there there we go um yeah so i had a technical glitch along the line and uh i i lost track of what you were saying but i i thought you were talking about the olympics not holding and how um esports is bridging the gap am i right yeah yeah that's correct yeah so um one of the core values of the olympics is friendship and um because we are unable to come together for the olympics this year um esports is actually bridging that gap by bringing people from different nations together to meet but of course online and um over here in nigeria and africa um we are deeply involved with that to ensure that we are able to breed that gap and bring nations together

we recently had two major events one of them is called them lakota africana and it's the biggest um pubg mobile event so far in africa having over 900 teams and over 5 000 players and fantastic events you know we also had another one and intercontinental event between africa and the caribbean and it's called the afro-caribbean esports invitational seven countries from africa seven countries from the caribbean it was exciting two games fifa and um mortal kombat it was exciting so esports is bridging that gap and because of some of the things that we're doing even our government is so interested now that the vulnerable sports minister has officially endorsed his sports as a national sport in nigeria okay yeah that is that's a really significant thing to see um you know people just opening up and accepting esports as a as an actual sport um just leading in

from that point um do you think that sports companies are starting to take esports and gaming companies more seriously um now that we're in this conversation about how esports will bridge this gap of the olympics well they certainly should um there's been some really interesting uh data that comes out one of the things that sort of this panel is talking about is hey is is esports actually bridging the gap for that was left by the olympics and and the truth of the answer is there's there's kind of a cheeky answer to that the answer is no only because there are different people watching these different events if you go and look at traditional sports and the olympics is included in this the average age of the people who are watching these sports are in their 50s and 60s as a matter of fact the youngest traditional sport is actually the mls which is major league soccer in the us that age is 40. the average age of someone who's watching esports is 26. and so

what we're talking about here is actually two different demographics one of the things that's super interesting is that the olympics are going out of their way to try and engage younger people one of the things that i thought was super interesting was they're adding some new sports one of them is sports climbing one is surfing one is skateboarding in some cases you know obviously you guys know that snowboarding was added a little while ago and nbc is you know putting things out on snapchat they're really trying to engage this younger audience and at the same time can you can you really watch you know the olympics while streaming the answer is no unless you have a cable channel here in the united states and you can link it to that and so what you're talking about is actually two totally different demographics and i remember i was talking to somebody a little bit ago and they were like do you really think that the olympics will let esports in my response to them was really this the olympics need esports way more than esports needs the olympics the reality of the situation is is that

when you have an average age for the winter olympics in sochi it was 55 years old that is a you know an alarmingly older demographic when when you have advertising advertisers that are coveting this millennial gen z the spenders in our economies this is a really tough situation so you know i think that the the olympics really needs to find a way to adapt if it wants to stay you know relevant in a in a really rapidly evolving world i'd agree with that uh do you guys have anything to add yeah yeah i think go ahead malto no i i was i was just thinking uh i like the uh your um brandon your point i think every generation chooses their own disciplines right and so this is to me this is democracy you choose your disciplines you want to compete in and so for me like this is long gone like there was esports and it was out there there was

significant players and audiences having fun and we nobody needed a regulator nobody needed a global federation nobody needed the olympics we had our own olympics except we didn't get a medal and we made our medal ourselves so i was not asking like why would we need to have an olympics why is that right i think we long past that point in that sense at the same time i'm not saying like either or i think it's a nice coexisting that can be blend over and i remember when we work with intel who's been a large facilitator because they they are a significant contributor on on the olympic sponsorship roster they pushed it obviously they have a core interest with building technology stack that enables esports and stuff to like you know make the olympics more digital and so on and so forth and you know while at esl we were pushing sort of more like showcase events around the olympic sort of stuff but to be honest i i had a hard time seeing

that the olympic sort of management expertise could see what this is all about actually and it's just i think it's a complete different cultural mindset there at this point i think they will gradually over time through a dialogue get together and build something new and better but i i think this is just not this black and white sort of thing where you say like either on will it become it's just evolving that's my it's my sense yeah i think that there are two components that play um competition and fusion and when it comes to competition when i started my career in video games 20 years ago the video game industry was smaller than cinema smalling in music we were taken as the little brother of cinema like the licensed product that come late that changes completely we are now talking equals to hollywood sometimes taking the lead and they really respect us because we

are a bigger market than music and cinema combined now sports remains bigger than video games even if you add esports into video games sports as a general market really remains 2.5 times bigger it's the last entertainment market with tv that we haven't overcome but as we are going into covid you see that everything that was prepared and that that envy that was coming from the older traditional media for example is coming to light because now they have a lot of slots if you look at espn and all these sports channel it's empty right now they have nothing to broadcast except speculation about who might be transferred in two months from now let's make something up this is not tv so they need to fill slots and everybody has slots in their schedule to fill the stars as well have to stay relevant they cannot stay three or four months without going on tv their agent tells them

so they have to participate aguero is one of the top twitch channels now he just appeared two months ago and i think this is the acceleration of something that was in preparation and now you just have to do something you cannot be analyzing it you cannot be watching from the sidelines and wondering what do i do you just do something so that's the competition element where video games and esports are taking more and more market share including now from those older audiences that we're not watching before and as for the sports market yes of course they have noticed and they see that they have to adapt and they are jealous and they see that their audience is getting older and ours is younger like milton just said so they want us uh and we are very desirable and that's the fusion part if you look at the latest marketing campaigns already before coronavirus you have more and more soccer clubs who sign digital deals with roc nation for example that

represents jay-z or rihanna and the fusion happens before between consumer goods at a soccer stadium but then there's a video game component and then there's a star coming in and you don't really see who pays for what and it's the side guys the pop culture everything coming together and one little anecdotal proof of this uh is the same here in colombia uh same here as in uh you said in nigeria i think emmanuel you said the federer the paralympic committee so not yet the olympic committee but the paralympic committee is recognizing esports officially and i actually am since since friday i'm the head of the paralympic committee for esports here in colombia they all came very fast and there are three things first of all we are going to support the athletes who want to play video games and then we are going to support the gamers into going professionals

those with visibility there is a third thing we are integrating video games in the training of the athletes to improve their reflexes and i'm talking about athletes who go to the actual paralympic uh physical editions the sports edition not esports players but even for them video game as is proven by several studies in japan helps with the actual development and the reflexes and many other things neurologically there are many proofs of that um just to seg back to something that um that brandon said earlier um you said that the esports demographic and the olympic demographic is so different um is there a way to sort of bring these two demographics together so i'll be interested in the same thing i think to some degree it's it's it's happening when when you look into fortnight right which which which is an interesting phenomenon because it it for me it's that's the first time it sort of

brought an entire family spectrum together in the living room around an e-sport theme the kids were playing they were starting to play their dad and he got like beaten up by the kids and the wife was actually watching and they switched off mainstream tv at night so that was like this is like this is this is that kind of and it it that took one significant game and ip and stuff um to to bring the entire sort of spectrum of of generations together and you could walk i mean for me there was the other luck most tests when i walked any height street globally and talked about esports to like like like like let's say moms you know if i talked about them to like like league of legends they just didn't really know what this was in esports but you know since uh um fortnight hit you go to the same sort of high streets and talk about eastwood ah yeah that's fortnite yeah that's they they they took all my entire living room and it's a it's a drama and my whole

my my whole place is a mess because all my friends friends of my kids are over and we play it all night and we watch this sort of thing i think this is this is where this all sort of comes together that's the next level in an ip taking this to the main to to mainstream and that also also it has a lot to do with like platforms pc games traditionally that the way into esports and now with much much more consoles which are you know less so core driven but like in the living room family entertainment sort of stuff and then touch devices are big in terms of you know changes because they everybody has them it's an accepted mainstream sort of tool uh where you can easily socially share and mingle uh a cross-generational yeah i mean to add on to that i'll say this like i don't i don't think the issue is that the olympics don't appeal to younger people i think the problem that you have is that you have an older

generation of people at the ioc who don't understand how younger people interact with media and the example that i'll give is you know uh the ioc did something that was just kind of idiotic and funny they banned memes and gifts of the olympics uh with the press pool covering the olympics like this is just this is just stupid this is this doesn't make any sense right and so the other thing is as i mentioned before and when we were talking earlier about a different question i said hey look like you know the millennial generation the gen z's they're consuming content online they don't most of them don't have cable they don't watch you know nbc anymore they're they're in different places than where you actually can go you know if you want to watch the olympics i think the rule for for uh tokyo was supposed to be you could watch 30 minutes and then after that you couldn't watch online anymore unless you tied it to your your cable carrier which

most younger people don't have right so like i don't think there's anybody sitting around like i happen to be american when the americans win gold medals or silver medals or bronze medals of course were enthusiastic and everybody can find the thing that's of interest to them but if if you can't get the olympics where you consume content you know you have a real disconnect there and so i think that a lot of this doesn't have necessarily to do with the olympics you know not being interesting there's a ton of interesting stories whether it's you know michael phelps or whether it's a different you know a hero in a different country you know doing really well it you know i remember uh you know in canada they had a really fantastic speed skater back in the day and so it's really you know there's tons of ways the press can make this appealing to us and to into younger generations but if they can't consume it it doesn't make sense if they're going to do stupid things like ban gifts that doesn't make sense you're just going to get mocked for that and it demonstrates a

real disconnect of the types of media that are being consumed by gen z and millennials and i would add one other big big picture point to my mind when you look into traditional sports i think this is this is not equal at all like i mean just taking me personally i know exactly by like very early days of my life i know i'm not going to be a good runner i'm just too heavy first off it's not going to happen for me sorry i have a wrong skin color to be good in basketball sorry it's not going to happen for me in esports that is very different so you i mean it's much this is pure equal right everybody can race to the top and i think this is why the uh where the community is so much more engaged because the guys who win the world championship are like guys from next door i could be the next one next door winning the world championship i know in traditional sports sorry it's not gonna happen that disconnects me so much as a consumer

and athlete from uh consumer and and viewers so much from the athletes i kind of get that like even if i train the rest of my life and i can never get there first stop and that is very very different in esports and i think this is also the the engagement pyramid of like an amateur sort of level towards you know semi-professional towards professional is completely open it's it's very much community driven which is very very different in sports where you have very different layers of like governance and financing and blah blah blah on top of it where it's not equal and government doesn't give um you know equal chances to anyone out there i think the only barrier is your access to internet yes in a piece of hardware that's sort of the two criterias but that gives hope for an entire generation to my mind when it comes to sport one thing just real quick to add i know i've been talking a fair amount there is a big difference between esports and regular sports in that the ioc as a governing body has a tendency to just sort of do what it wants when it has basketball it makes its own

rules and has its own you know functioning organization right it decides we're going to do curling and we're going to do this and we're going to do that and the reason why they can do that is because nobody owns the rights to football or to soccer or to basketball now you know fifa owns the right to fifa but anybody could make a new you know soccer league if they wanted to this isn't the case with esports you have to go and you have to work with people who own intellectual property whether it's raya with league of legends or whether it's fortnite with epic games and you have to get them to agree in scenarios in sporting environments typically the leagues and the in the ioc have complete control and discretion over how to do these things and in esports that actually won't be the case this is a much bigger issue than most people think because now the publisher has to be gotten on board with ultimately what's going to happen and that is a huge departure from how traditional sports usually works

um just to quickly add to that i think note of what you said initially brandon about um we're having two different demographics the older generation and the younger ones um for me i think um the cultures are beginning to merge at least from what i can see you know from here in nigeria previously was young young people playing their games in their close eternal of those we're beginning to see the older generation take a lot more interest in what the kids are doing um we have run sports events in schools and we see parents the same way parents will go to and into house sports and watch their kids swim play basketball and all of those they play video games now you see the parents celebrating you know so the same way you would celebrate a goal if for instance sorry i'm a national fan so if i scored against another team the same of you would jump if you're watching the english premier league we're beginning to see the same set of people older generations celebrate their goals called you know on video games so we're beginning to see those cultures begin beginning to to emerge and so what i would say is

as to continue to push the esports um narrative and activities around the world it is inevitable that these guys will buy in i'm aware that the olympics also has the youth games and this is their way of trying to connect the younger generation because they realize that that's a demographic you cannot do without so i see a scenario where um there will be more um intense merging of those cultures but from the point of the ioc and also from the esports communities around the world i i understand i agree with you that they realize it that doesn't mean that they are executing it well because there's something we have to address is that the ioc exists for over 100 years and what you see a lot in sports is a lot of these old authoritative conservative organizations so they might have picked video games on the list as something they have to care about but they don't know how to and when they face the persons who know

how to maybe they don't listen uh enough which is a problem with a lot of federations around the world that inertia and that it's slow but that sports are taking a note and trying to adapt in the u.s brandon we've seen it i think 10 15 years ago with baseball when baseball lovers first said and uh started cutting um the way they they broadcast the sport and the way they put the music on the sport it was much more fast paced and you could tell it was inspired by video games and trying to appeal to that video game generation who was no longer watching baseball it was a fact in the numbers and the data and they were trying to address it but it's not easy the other way around though i completely agree i see it as well here in colombia where you have the the the fathers bringing the kids to a final event for free fire which is the big game of

the moment it's the fortnight that works on low-end devices it doesn't crash so that's what they're playing and the when the parents come they take the pictures with the youtubers as well and it's not for the kid it's for themselves and we know it as parents right you start getting interested into what your kid does and then one day he wins or he scores so you are now emotionally invested in it and so through the kids you get the parents through the parents you don't get the kids because the kids don't listen to what their parents say it's too old it's not cool i don't want to be on facebook with my dad and my granddad i want to be on the next new thing that is tick tock because they don't understand that's precisely why the youth want to be somewhere because mom and dad don't understand then mom and dad start watching let's move somewhere else but i think it's a case of yes merging in

some cases but competing in others there is these generational changes every 30 40 years in media and we're facing one of them and i don't think the ioc can ultimately capitalize from this they're gonna lose a few more mark they're gonna keep some sports fan and obviously we're gonna stay keep watching the 100 meters dash because we'll watch that but gymnastics ah maybe we're gonna plug fortnite and play or watching on twitch we compete for time right we're in the entertainment space 100 cool i'm just going to move forward a bit because i didn't realize how much we wouldn't be able to get through um so as you said earlier scale um you know companies like f1 are starting to embrace digital sports and uh well esports and companies like fifa are starting to do the same thing and i think um fifa has been quite an

established video game franchise for a long time and the f1 franchise is a really good um substitute for that but can we start to see or could we see a real sort of full-scale digital recreation of the olympics with you know all the olympic sports included or are there just some things that we can't recreate digitally first of all do we want it second of all racing has an advantage so racing is a repertory particular breed and that's why it was of at the very beginning in birth of esports already in the early 2000s the skills you need in a racing game are very similar to the skills you name to race a car the only change is the risk you can crash into a wall so you have to manage that risk and that's a psychological skill but apart from that the reflexes the turning the curves the eye the way you see the curves this is this translates very well and we've seen

a lot of esports players become professionals on the truck and when you go into simulators there is like a level playing field between the drivers and the the people playing on simulators i don't think it's the same the same can be said about any other sports when you play fifa you pl you don't play first person and you don't play one player you play 11 players so this is already not soccer you are playing you are playing a reproduction of soccer um at the end of the day the question is a marketing one maybe we could have an olympics with league of legends street fighter and just the best games but again do we want that because as brandon said earlier right holders street fighter maybe doesn't want to share the stage with league of legends for one month if they can have their own competition in their own event in which they shine and and also what is the olympics it's like the world cup it's like every four years we all get together

but all sports have that national league all year long and i think that's more desirable and we already are getting that esl dream act thank you malta uh for everything you've done you know we're seeing it i think we are looking at the the olympics is the cherry on the cake if we get the cake in the icing i'm not too interested about the cherry and yeah it's funny funny you say that i mean we we with uh with the intel extreme masters tour when i described this to like new prospects or partners or whatnot it's like you it's it's a it's a bit like a circuit like it's a formula one sort of circuit but mixed with olympic games and so it's it's multi-discipline it has two stops and evolves into one global final and so i would wonder like if you ever redesigned olympics now for the next for the environment be the

in the culture and the generation via and how would you be designing it you would not be designing it the way it's currently designed just it's just it's yeah it's great and it's awesome and it's there because it's it's a piece of culture and it's amazing i'm not saying that's not great but if you would reinvent it from scratch it would not look like the way it's looking right now and i would it would would look much much closer to what we were able to to create with let's say intel extreme masters i'm not pushing one product here but that that for me like was much much more like five continents continuous content activation points one combination and one global world championship why would you do it every four years tell me what's the point because it was a world without media yes exactly and so so so media technology uh consumer habits and whatnot if you just started olympics from scratch you would do it very differently um i i have an opinion about that and um i i think can actually achieve that we

have seen multiple nation um events um i don't know if i'm prominent to mention the name here but there is a particular organization that has been trying to organize um and olympics equivalents you know of um esports activities and they extended an invitation to us in nigeria um it was supposed to hold in august in japan but for obvious reasons due to the pandemic that has been moved now so i think it will be a very brilliant idea to actually bring that event together like the olympics also each country is expected to send several players you know so they listed about five or seven games you know that different countries will take part in and um you would have ten uh 50 athletes from each country you know coming to gather to that destination you know to to hold the olympics styled um esports events so i think doing that first and foremost um it's a way to capture the young people then also because it's a national event

you can bring your governments you know to support you can bring brands you can bring them influencers to influencers to support you and doing that also i'm sure it would be a matter of time before the olympics movement the iuc themselves to come and say okay let's take this over since there is a template since there is a foundation being laid we can run it up i'm running on from here you know so i i see that happening and it will be a very good thing for the esports community young people all over the world who want to be able to play against people from other countries meet new cultures meet new people like i said the olympics about friendship you meet new friends new athletes the same thing happens at the actual olympics there's a games village where athletes are able to interact with one another and so if this happens also our young people are able to also integrate and mix up with other people which i think is a good thing for us just real quickly to add on to that that there is a huge difference between the types of events that you see in the traditional olympic games versus uh you know esports right so when you're playing uh an esports

uh game a a video game that is you know big and for public consumption the bar for that needs to be two things one the game needs to be fun which is hard enough but then two the game has to be good to watch right and so right now what the ioc is debating back and forth with the esports community is hey uh call of duty or cs go or even street fighter are relatively violent from the perspective of what you traditionally see in the olympics the olympics were mostly tests of endurance physical strength coordination physically from that perspective the games that are the most successful in esports whether it's overwatch or whether it's you know league of legends or whether it's call of duty or whether it's you know going all the way back to starcraft have a tendency to be about something different and so the chances that i think that you would see sort of like a oh there would be a virtual track and

field or there would be a virtual hammer throw like this this seems highly unlikely because those wouldn't be super compelling to watch it's up to the publishers of these games to not only make a game that's fun to play but also one that is good and enjoyable to consume as uh you know as as as for recreation right and so you know i think i think maybe auto racing is one that could maybe pull it off a little bit but i think there's a lot of olympic games that uh in a virtual world just wouldn't translate very well from that perspective um yeah i would agree with that something i thought about with the the virtual track and field thing you know the virtual discus and pole jumping is just not going to be the same to watch um so just to round off um when the pandemic is over and things largely return to normal will the interests in um esports sporting events fade or let's stick around and should the olympics work with the industry to make esports an official part of

their event yes so so first of all yeah it'll still be around one of the questions that i get all the time is hey when do you think esports is going to surpass or catch up to traditional sports and the answer believe it or not is it already has in the united states it's past baseball it's past hockey it's not quite to the end the nba or obviously to football american football which is you know the biggest sport in our country um but it's already arrived there um and so um the issue here like really i think i said at the beginning like the olympics need esports super badly and and here's the truth like i i answered one of the q a questions with this they said hey you know do you think that professional sports will continue to do this yes the the average watcher event of american football is 44 years old but the average player is 23 and 23 year olds play video games right so you're gonna have this

this base of professional athletes that grew up in a world playing video games and they're going to enjoy doing it the professional leagues have already made big investments and maybe malta could talk a little bit about this i think they see this as like hey this is a this is marketing this is pr this is an opportunity to sort of introduce our sport to a younger generation i think the olympics need esports five times as much as esports needs the olympics and that's just my take um i'll quickly add to that and give you some figures and some of my experience here in nigeria post pandemic i believe that esports will even grow bigger already we have seen some trends happening um like i said earlier on the honourable sports minister has endorsed esports at unofficial sports in nigeria thanks to kovid i hate to say that but i mean it's a reality but we have that in place now and we're beginning to have esports teams and organizations you know put themselves together tournaments are happening everywhere we have brands saying oh we love this how can we come in so what it means is

that ecosystem that has been created now will not die off postcoved rather it will grow even bigger i'll give an example in nigeria at the moment we have um almost 140 okay so our population is about 200 million people and our online population is about 140 million that is a lot and thanks to the mobile penetration in nigeria we have um um about a hundred yeah 830 people who are on their phones now and we have many telcos who are competing against themselves and they are crashing their prices so what it means is you have more devices in the hands of people you have more um data on your phone you can go online you can play online this is an industry that is not going away anytime soon and if you know nigeria um very well for instance um talk about our movie industry is the second largest in the world even ahead of hollywood sorry brandon you know but by volume anyways you know but it tells you that when it comes to the tournament you know this part of the world music movie

even gaming gaming is beginning to you know rival them as it continues to grow in nigeria and so postcoved the spotlight that has been shown on the esports industry in nigeria and africa as a whole will not go away because people are now seeing what they never saw before the pandemic has helped them to see and they're like oh wow this has been there all along what have we been doing and so at the moment we have a lot of people who are making inquiries asking how they can be part of it i'll just stop for them there for now uh anyone that's got anything to add yeah so i think it's i completely agree it's i even had this in a meeting the other day we are talking with the biggest um tv station of colombia to start the league here and it's accelerating it was in talks for a year now it's going to be made within months and at some point getting out of the meeting some of like of my partners asked me do you think they are going to do season two really quickly after the season one and do do you think we can maintain the ratings

and i said yes of course because it was already growing without the tv station with so whether they pick it up or not it will grow now that they pick it up it's because they have a a free slot in their in their in their schedule right there if there is no sport to show that's the opportunity but now that they're going to show it they're going to see the numbers it's going to beat their expectations yes of course they want to have they want to have a season 2 and that season 2 is going to beat the expectations again and i told them that they told them it's not easy for me it's not hard sorry for me to predict that i've been in video games for 40 years as a gamer and 22 years as a professional there's not one single year when video games hasn't grown a note grown something the story is video game grows keeps growing and surpasses everything and eventually it was even something

that we knew would happen because it's the interactive medium all the others are not so there is an intrinsic unfair advantage that makes video games the most fun entertainment medium out there it's only a matter of time before it picks up and and and beats everything else just take years but every year is going to keep growing there's no reason why after the pandemic it would be different i've been through sars in hong kong in 2003. video games didn't decrease after the the the epidemic of cells they kept growing video games keeps growing through everything including the recession by the way if you look at 2008. yep and it's only the beginning it's very early still even though it feels big already okay um if that's everything we've got to add i will wrap up there because we have run over a little bit um i've just let it run into chaos

um but thank you so much guys for for coming in today and sharing your expertise on this it's a really interesting thing and it's it's very specific to what's happening in the world right now so it's it's great to have the opportunity to to really dive into it from all perspectives globally and talk about what is going to happen um so thanks again for joining us and i hope you enjoyed the rest of your pgc thank you so much for having me brilliant see you later guys thank you for your time thank you bye