In-Depth
World Congress 2020: Mark Coughlin
Chief Revenue Officer, Envy Gaming
On how esports is doing business amid the crisis:
Our focus now is to try and deliver value to those that are supporters of our team, that are partners, that have sponsorships in place. … Now it’s a matter of determining what are the assets that we can provide them in a time where there’s not a lot of consumerism going on.
CoughlinMarc Bryan-Brown
We were going to do six events this year, and we’ve had one, which was sold out and a great success. … And now, at least the next three are canceled; and whether they are postponed [or] they’re canceled indefinitely are subject matter that’s being discussed almost on the hour with the league, between our fellow owners and with our players.
We’re very bullish on esports from a spectator standpoint, from a city-based model standpoint, but we’re all going to have to deal with this.
On the opportunity for esports:
It’s a huge opportunity, right? I mean there are a lot of people that are cooped up. I don’t know if you follow gaming stuff, but Battlenet, which is Activision Blizzard’s network where you go and you want to find friends to play with, was having outage sufferages because they just released this new war zone with Call of Duty. So you got like 15 million downloads in a day. The play is out of control because everybody’s stuck at home.
You see NASCAR doing it with the iRacing now. Some guys did it in Formula One over the past weekend. … So listen, everybody’s been checking the box on esports. That you’re conspicuous by your absence if you don’t have some sort of presence in some online competitive gaming.
