SAN FRANCISCO — Jace Hall, the CEO of esports organization Echo Fox, works closely with NBA types. Former NBA player Rick Fox co-founded Echo Fox in 2015. Among the employees that Hall oversees is Jared Jeffries, a former NBA player and front office executive who is now Echo Fox’s team president.
With the NBA set to dive into esports in 2018 with 17 NBA teams participating in the inaugural season of the NBA 2K esports league, Hall is among the esports veterans curious to see how the intersection of traditional sports and esports works out when it comes to creating new leagues.
“Video games that are sports games — that are duplicative of an actual sport — the viewing proposition for a non-player is challenging because you’re like, ‘Am I going to watch the NBA 2K or am I going to watch the NBA?'” Hall said last week at Streamlabs’ Expanding the Stream conference.
“I want these leagues that are coming out to work really well. I think they’ll be great for the players. But the jury’s out for me on the viewership of it because it literally has to compete with actually the same sports.”
This season, the NFL launched the Madden NFL Club Championship, enabling casual gamers within the fanbase of each of the NFL’s 32 teams to compete. For the NBA 2K league, tryouts are coming in February to determine the top 85 NBA 2K players in the world before they are drafted onto five-player squads by the NBA teams and paid salaries. The start of the inaugural season is coming in May.
“Our measure of success will be audience size — how can we get global as quickly as possible,” NBA 2K esports league Managing Director, Brendan Donohue, said at Leaders’ Esports Live last week in London. “If we get that right, the revenue streams will come.”
Donohue said last month on SiriusXM Business Radio: “It’s kind of hard to predict specific numbers, and what I would say is we did an NBA 2K tournament that led into last year’s All-Star game in New Orleans, and that Finals we had 2 million people that actually watched it. So we expect that to be an indication of the type of appetite we have for the league and hopefully even greater than that.”
How viewership will be for a 15-week regular season schedule of NBA 2K league competitions remains to be seen. The 5-on-5 competitions won’t feature virtual LeBron James vs. Stephen Curry in the games, with gamers relying upon their own skills. Watching the action could seem similar to watching a real NBA game; Donohue told SiriusXM Business Radio that the league has gotten a “great response from potential media rights holders” thus far for distribution.
“If games don’t have a decent spectator mode, it’s difficult for that to translate into esports beyond just someone watching it for a fixed period of time,” said Kurt Pakendorf, Chief Strategy Officer for online multiplayer game competition platform FACEIT. “A lot of the games that you traditionally see that are in esports are developed in such a way that it’s easier to do that.
“The (sports) titles you’re talking about right now, there are changes coming to some of them I believe, but traditionally that’s not been the case. And that’s what’s made the adaptation the hardest for people to come out and say I’m going to run a league around this game which is a sports title. You need the ability from the technical perspective when you’re distributing the content that you can view that in different ways.”
Donohue has said that NBA 2K has an engaged audience already among those who play the video game, citing 9 million copies sold for NBA 2K17 and 34 million registered users in China for the free version of the game.
“So we have an appetite for the games,” Donohue told SiriusXM Business Radio. “So I think it’s building the right setup, building the right game, and then just talking to that audience and giving them exposure to the game and the league. I actually think we have a great environment to be successful in, and now quite honestly, it’s up to us to make sure we tap into it.”
Facebook, which has seen its platform stream NBA and NFL esports competitions before, is following what is going on with traditional sports getting into the esports space. Guy Cross, Facebook’s head of games partnerships for North America, noted that there was an opportunity since viewers of traditional esports competitions go to certain video platforms, and that might not work for sports titles.
“Like there’s casual game play, and then there’s hardcore game play. Where’s the casual gaming video watching?” he said. “Like if I’m not going to study how to go deep into MOBA but I can follow a lot on a FIFA game pretty easily if I play that game kind of casually on my console. I think there’s an interesting opportunity that no one has really explored yet. The hardest part is to get the eyeballs to your platform. We’re in a luxurious position where we have a lot of eyeballs that are self-identified as fans. I don’t know if it’s going to work out. I really don’t.”
Cross and others did note that traditional sports organizations bring expertise on how to build fanbases and franchises, so they’ll have to learn how that translates in esports.
“I love the idea that they can broaden the base,” Cross said. “I definitely think that having these digital games brought into kind of the analog ball-and-stick sports world is going to help widen the consciousness of people that this is a real thing and it’s really fun and exciting and there’s really interesting people doing it.”
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Mike Lee, head of partnerships at management house Everyday Influencers/Press X, also sees a big opportunity with traditional sports entering esports.
“For us to really become a billion-dollar industry, I feel like this is needed,” he said. “I’m sure all of us know, even hiring in esports, the talent pool isn’t there. And so esports in general just has to grow. And if traditional sports can help us grow, if more people like MSG, AEG, and Monumental are all going to go out and hire esports people…that’s just going to help our community grow. What the NBA and the NFL are really great at are the non-endemic brands. They’re the ones that can get the Coors Lights, the Pepsis, the Samsungs, and so when their own sales teams are going out and providing incremental packages to their sponsors and non-endemic partners, that’s just going to help us grow.
“Although it’s very different, although I would not compare…traditional esports to a traditional sport trying to become an esport, I’m excited about what they can bring. I don’t know if it will be as successful as League of Legends or as Counter-Strike, I’m excited about the talent pool they’ll bring and them making esports into a more traditional sport.”
Donohue has spent recent weeks not just speaking at esports conferences, but also listening. He told SiriusXM Business Radio that he respects that esports is a space built by the community and that the league will ensure that it caters to that community when it comes to creating playing formats and building up the league for players.
“We can’t assume that we know that just because we’ve run the NBA previously,” he said.
Pakendorf said because engagement is driven by the community in esports, the challenge for leagues and publishers for traditional sports titles would be how to build in esports layers, maximize opportunities and further engage with the community.
“Just because it’s a sport in real life doesn’t make it an esport,” he said. “There are challenges. I don’t think it’s impossible. It’s going to be interesting to see how that’s done.”
If successful in new esports leagues, the NBA and NFL could do a lot for esports as a whole.
“From a player perspective…to me, the legitimacy that comes in when you actually have NBA teams coming in and saying, ‘You know what? We’re basically extending our brand. We’re going to extend it right into the virtual space,’ Hall said.
“I think that is very important and actually like a very good thing, and it’s going to create more and more mainstream acceptance and understanding of the activity, which is what I’m a very big proponent of, of getting that out there.”
NBA 2K18 – Get Shook Trailer – YouTube. 2k is the best. Great game, great music. Cant wait for the Nba 2k league. https://t.co/iueSlPBpN5
— Brendan Donohue (@BDeagles) August 17, 2017
For the NBA, its big splash in esports is coming soon. Rather than LeBron vs. Steph, it’ll be avatars of esports players on the court. Players fly in to compete at a central location. The league will have its content promoted, broadcast and consumed. Will it work?