Esports, Time To Start From A Clean Slate

“The sports industry has plenty of flaws and you have the benefit that you can start from a blank sheet of paper”. This was said by David Castleblanco, Partner at Redbird Capital.

He said this to his fellow panelist, Christine Jiang of Monarch Collective, who invest in women’s sport. Why did this statement resonate with me? Because the same can be applied to gaming.

In the esports ecosystem, we tend to look at sports as the be-all end-all. The absolute pinnacle. The name “esports” says it in itself with how obsessed we are with being a sport. However, as Mr. Castleblanco said, sports is riddled with issues, intricacies and outdated thinking.

With gaming, we have a chance to start from scratch and become the frontrunner of innovation in entertainment and competition. A place where other entertainment verticals come to learn how to apply our thinking to their industry, rather than vice versa.

And if you really look at it, gaming is a hotbed of innovation. I always like to use that OpenAI created a DOTA2 bot that could beat pros in 2017. Most people hadn’t heard of OpenAI until 2023.

The reality is, though, that we often fail to apply our own innovation appropriately and efficiently because we are too busy looking to the outside. For an industry with an abundancy of data, why do we use it so poorly? For an industry driven by stories, why are we so poor at telling them?

With the “esports winter” starting to thaw, we have the opportunity to start from a blank slate. Let’s look at who we are and what we can do, rather than what everyone else is doing and how we can copy it. It’s time for gaming to lead innovation, so the world can follow.