/r/dota2 in a nutshell.

Ok fine I will step up.

I will be the Skip Bayless of ESports

ESports are now being constantly broadcast on my government controlled (tax payer funded) TV stations, so why would I need MLG?

I'm sure it will be fine guys, Mr. Kotick was in "Moneyball" after all. *eye roll* What could possibly go wrong?

What an amazing and totally not gross decision that could never backfire in any way.

If eSports meant less COD / Halo and more Mutant League Football / Tecmo Bowl, I'd be all in... but alas.. outside CS:GO.. the games played as "eSports" have very little appeal to me.

@notnert427: All of this and then some. These are the reasons why many do not take espn seriously anymore or simply have stopped watching myself included. Emulating a brand that is continuing to diminish in credibility is a bad move.

@homelessbird: You got me man.

I have to imagine they just gave him a press pass right and let him be on a volunteer panel or something? I doubt he was paid by the event but I don't know. I think the writer has previously been with a more legit outfit and had been established on the esports scene for a while. I dunno if his politics or career reasons led him to breitbart

@slag: Breitbart is infinitely more reputable than any of those other outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Huffington Post. Unlike them Breitbart doesn't purposely omit details from reports or ignore stories that don't fit their agenda. I hate to end your Conservative media bashing but the actual fact based reporting far exceed anything from those rags or MSM.

Candy Crush now this? Activation...vision has more money than cents.

@slag: I got the impression that he was being paid, but I haven't looked into it in depth either. Oh well. I guess even businesses live and learn.

@grumpymoose: lol. Nice profile pic.

Oh my god, this headline is freaking hilarious. I didn't even know MLG was a private company to be bought.

I hope this works out.

@homelessbird: Richard Lewis was an "esports" reporter/journalist/personality long before he worked that. He actually only started working there very recently.

@e30bmw: I guess that makes it more understandable. He'd be off my list of hires anyway, personally, but I don't run eSports events so what do I know

Look to see Blizzard trying to squeeze every penny out of this by being as greedy as possible.

Taking the Riot route and buying yourself into competitive gaming is the worst.

Companies need to look at Capcom, they were very smart about how they injected their event into the competitive scene making it entirely seamless so it boosted both the popularity of their product as well as the community built around it.

@matthewgm: Right and ESPN has been dropping viewership for some time now. I'm fairly certain none of us have any idea what else came along with the purchase, whether that be technology, users, user data, potential casters etc. Also, even though World of Warcraft has been shedding subscribers like crazy 46 million is still only one month of subscription fees for that game. It'll be interesting to look back on this in a year.

Maybe the ESPN 8 of eSports.

ESPN doesn't broadcast the Super Bowl either.

Depending on where MLG is organized business wise they definitely did commit some law breaking here. Majority owners of corporations are supposed to protect the minority owners of corporations and do what is in the best interests of the corporation. As well most states have a business law that says before a complete buy out happens a large number of the owners have to vote for it. Not having a vote at all is a big big problem. I expect there will be a stock owners lawsuit here.

my thoughts exactly..

I got fucked on stock.

This has to be the 2016 quote of the years. Haaaaaaaaaaa!

They bought all of MLG? That's a lot of Xbox 360 gamer picture packs...

And they have to choose capitalization and hyphenation first. "esports"? "e-sports"? "E-sports"? "Esports"?

It certainly isn't "eSports," unless sports is suddenly a proper noun, or it's being brought to you by Apple, Inc.

EDIT: Probably, the most acceptable format would be "e-sports," which would be de-hyphenated after a few years to "esports," just like "email"'s path to validity. And as you can see, I have no idea how to make a word within quotes possessive.

@longmasterwolf: There is a difference between forced eSports and eSports. CoD and Starcraft have been played competitively for a really long time and HoTS and Hearthstone are developing a strong scene of their own (especially Hearthstone).

Just curious, but why would you expect them to explain the terminology in most casts? You don't turn on baseball game and have them explain to you what a bunt or sacrifice is.

@baronsamedi: Are you just ignorant or dumb? Buying their way into competitive gaming? Starcraft has been one of the biggest eSports for over a decade and CoD has been going strong for 5 years.

@fatalfirecrotch: Shhh shhh shhh....it's Activision and esports they're the devils killing videogames etc. etc.

The scary part might be that MLG was on the ropes trying to get backers or a buyer. But, nobody wanted it! Nobody cared at all about saving it, so EA actually stepped up to provide the money. Those stockholders were going to get nothing anyway because MLG was/is dead/dying.

Well, they stepped in to do 'a solid' if you believe MLG was offering something worth saving.

I'll just say, for me, I think MLG is 99% dudes playing shooters. And that is interesting for 10 minutes only. In fact the whole eSpprts category seems shaky to me. Keep in mind 150 years ago competitive rowing was as big as basketball is today even without tv, stadiums and teeshirts sales....now its gone. And 100 years ago boxing was huge...now that is (pardon the pun) on the ropes. Fifty years ago professional bowling was huge....now its dead. I'd say eSports are on a much shorter trajectory. In 20 years people will say, "Those strategy games and shooters were a sport? lol"

This is the most compelling argument for the ESPN of eSports imo.

The investment seems too small for it to be a bad move. That's without factoring in whatever operating costs we're talking about.

@amyggen: I volunteer. That job seems easy, and I never had that much use for friends anyway.

I'm sure it's been pointed out, but ESPN has never aired the Superbowl. It's always on network TV.

@lawgamer: I can't speak for other games but the casting in Dota is pretty straightforward and on point- the biggest problem with it is, is that the game is so ridiculously convoluted and complex that there's no way someone could even begin to explain things to you over the course of a 45 minute game. At the International (basically the dota superbowl) they do have a newbie stream to help out newer players and they explain things much more clearly.

The real problem is though if they actually took the time to EXPLAIN the shit that was happening thoroughly you'd be there longer than the match. It's sort of like football or baseball, the announcers are doing play by play and analysis of what's happening with the understanding that you get the basic rules and tenets of the game, if they had to slow down and walk you through each hoop it would be a real boring cast and take forever. I completely get where you're coming from though- if you're still curious about anything else lemme know.

So if it's the ESPN of E-sports, how will they work in LeBron James?

What a ridiculous house of cards this industry is built upon.

I'm surprised that they did this, considering they pretty much killed the Starcraft 2 scene by doing jack shit with it.

My least favorite thing about gaming in general is seeing so many people try to take parts of the hobby and, in one way or another, try to turn it into the way some other medium, or some other hobby, does things. "Why can't game awards be more serious like the Oscars?" "Well movies do this, why can't video games?" topped with "We need to make the ESPN of gaming!" Like, ugh.

I feel at constant war with blowhards and rich fucks who want to remold anything interesting and unique about games into something pre-packaged and cookie cutter. This all just sounds terrible.

@bicycle_repairman: It's not very different from Fox owning Newspapers, TV networks, film production and distribution businesses, and numerous other entertainment and journalistic properties. At any one point, newspapers and websites owned by Fox review the content created by the TV and film divisions. Or, you might argue it is not that different from the beast that is Time Warner, owner of dozens of print and internet newspapers and magazines, alongside multiple TV channels, film distributors and producers, music producers, game publishers, and literally hundreds of other divisions, many of which critique and report on the actions taken by various other parts of the company. Really between Fox, Time Warner, and Comcast which owns NBC Universal, all of your news comes from the same people who manufacture the content the news is covering. And in the case of Comcast they also own the means of delivering that content to your home. Conflicts of interest are everywhere in the world of news. ABC, NBC, Fox, and CNN are all owned by mega-corps, and most newspapers and magazines are owned by the same handful of corps.

Bad people do bad things, and don't stop.

-Kurt Cobain

I don't see the issue here. It probably would have cost more than a bit to build their own infrastructure, so they just bought their own. Seems smart enough to me.

@raven10: Cool let's just roll over and accept it then.

@amirite: If you want to get indignant about massive multinational corporations then there are plenty of great options. Comcast comes to mind with both a vertical and horizontal monopoly on film and TV distribution and creation in certain locations if you want to stick to entertainment companies. Nestle and their behavior regarding the drought in California. Any major bank in any major country in the world. Any of the descendants of Standard Oil. PMC's. Pharmaceutical companies that sell pills that cost pennies to make for tens of thousands of dollars. Really the list could go on and on, but if I had to choose a list of companies to protest, the only game company on the list would be Konami.

I'm not going to say that I love massive conglomerates or that they are a great thing. But I can tell you that considering the state of MLG's capital going into this deal, they were never going to amount to more than they were and they were likely going to get swept under by better funded and better managed organizations. Meanwhile, Activision has neither the history, nor the experience to build an MLG style service. This merger makes sense then for both companies. MLG gets the funds of a multi-billion dollar corporation that has remained profitable for every year of this century when all other game related companies were taking heavy losses. Activision doesn't have to worry about the growing pains that come with starting an eSports league.

In the end the world runs on money and running any sort of sporting event, network, or league, requires a lot of the stuff. Hundreds of millions if not billions of the stuff. And no small, independent company has those types of funds to spare. Plus Activision has a proven track record on the production side of things. Their games are always released on time and on budget and they are always incredibly well polished despite very strict timetables. Regardless of the quality of the games themselves, there is no better run company in the gaming industry. Their production pipeline is as close to flawless as it gets in an industry where year long delays are the norm and you are supposed to allot double the proposed budget to any game if you actually expect it to see store shelves.

I'd love to live in a world where all you need is a dream and some crowdfunding to make anything you desire a reality, but that isn't the world we live in and certain things require the backing of a corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars to potentially lose. Without either developing their own, in house eSport, or signing an exclusive contract with an already major eSport, MLG wasn't going to survive. And the company didn't have the money or the connections to do either of those things. Activision already makes several major eSports titles, and they have the connections and loose change to secure exclusive deals with third parties as well. If MLG was going to make it big it would have happened. The fact that no angel investor came in to fund what I am discussing proves how difficult a market they are in, and how much you need a company that has both a distribution system and content for that system if you want to make a sporting network.

it would be nice if the culture around games was a little more self-assured and less steered around by marketing buzzwords, but at this point I can't see that aspect of it ever changing. the american games biz (the biggest and most infleuntal) comes mostly from a place of big corps dumping marketing dollars and doing lots of cocaine in the 80s, so when that's the culture your new medium for art comes out of, it's easy to see why games are this way and probably always will be

@austin_walker What is Activision gonna do now that ESPN is the ESPN of e-sports?