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Report: Activision Buys E-Sports League's Assets (esportsobserver.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Major League Gaming (MLG) is one of the biggest e-sports operations out there. Or it was, until Activision Blizzard purchased most of its assets for $46 million. MLG's CEO has been removed, and nobody's quite sure what will become of the league once Activision is done with it. MLG has been struggling for some time, and it's expected that most of the sale's proceeds will go toward paying off debts. Shareholders are not pleased.
Analysis at Forbes notes that "MLG has been most closely tied with Call of Duty for a long while now (though recently Activision partnered with MLG rival ESL for a new COD league), and has a history with Starcraft 2, both Activision Blizzard titles. It could make sense that in order to bolster their eSports division, Activision would assimilate MLG, though parts of this sound more like a liquidation of assets rather than MLG continuing to operate under its own banner, just with a new owner." Others note with skepticism the idea of a game publisher buying an e-sports league, which could lead to concerns about how games from other publishers are treated.
MLG hasn't succeeded as well as they'd hoped, and Blizzard really, really wants esports to take off, and are willing to put serious resources into it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's really only half true... The value of the shares is tied to the company's value. The price of the share is separately tracked for public (or private, but that's more irregular) trade.
It seems MLG was privately held, so we only really care about what the shareholders can get from a buyback, not public sale. That puts the shareholders' investments at greater risk, based on what happens to the company's value. They have a piece of paper saying they own a certain percentage of the company, but the company itself had an awful lot of debt. Any cash or assets they may have been entitled to are instead being used to cancel out those debts, effectively making their shares worth far less.
A more profitable scenario for the shareholders would be for Activision to keep the company functioning as a separate entity, debt and all. Then the company, under new management and with more professional connections, could turn a profit, pay off those debts, and still have enough value in reserve to make the shares of stock worth something. Of course, that depends on MLG being a viable business, which may not be the case.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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I guess it's not ad-light then.
Oh well, I didn't need to read that after all.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
And not just "suits" as in executives who traditionally wear business suits. It can also mean lawsuits if Activision starts using the copyright in its games to take down streams of rival leagues. At least Capcom,[1] Nintendo,[1] and Sega[2] have been known to use copyright against fan videos and streams, and Activision had a TV rights dispute with KeSPA a few years back.
[1] Kyle Orland
[2] Tony Ponce
[3] Wikipedia
What "lifeblood" is there to be sucked? E-sports has no lifeblood to begin with.
E-Sports is a niche curiosity that everyone inside, from stakeholders who want it to be something akin to real sports venue with merchandising revenue and ticket sales to the participants who'd just love to be paid like those real sports "heroes" (I'll use the term loosely now), want so badly to take off, while everyone around shrugs it off with a "meh" because, frankly, outside the circle jerk, nobody gives a fuck.
Football and basketball are billion dollar money machines because Joe Average doesn't want to play but watch people who're really, really good at it play. It's exactly the opposite with computer games. And as long as that doesn't change, e-sports is simply not worth a dime.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think this holds true that there is no life blood. Gamers seem more than happy to part with money for hats/skins/donations to streamers, and are even more happy to park themselves in front of ads during official matches. There's money to be made with eSports and a strong community with even casual observers behind it. League of Legends, regardless of what your personal opinion may be, has a huge casual following; they may only queue up for non-ranked modes or play one or two characters, but the amount they will spend on the game and their willingness to be part of the audience for the game is undeniable. Riot, for all of its faults, has done a good job of catering to non-hardcore players with the skins, stories, and community events.
Hell, there's a reason Riot hasn't done IRL give aways through sponsors in a long time and it's because every time they do, the fans pretty much destroy whatever website or product has the freebies. People were stealing codes from magazines when they had a skin give away years back. Razor did a rune give away and couldn't handle the volume of traffic at all. Coke had Riot Points (the pay-for in game currency, as opposed to Influence Points which you can earn in game) in Coke Rewards for about a day and they ran out of stock instantly. Diabetes rates would skyrocket if Riot put skin codes underneath some bottle caps. There's a very strong and eager market willing to keep these games running, and the game companies have been surprisingly reserved about doling out sponsorship deals and advertisements.
Though I'd personally argue they're too into the whole fan-zine stuff with their characters, having seen how riled up people get over lore events instead of patch notes kind of tells me that Riot knows how to meet their audiences' expectations.
I will agree that the Joe Average probably won't tune in unless Joe Average already plays the game being streamed. DotA and League just have a bit too much going on to really follow well without knowing more than just the core rules of the game. However, this isn't going to kill off the events and the potential in these games because honestly, the audience that exist is absolutely rabid for pretty much everything related to the game.