Esports Nutshell News | July 8, 2016

Welcome to Esports in a Nutshell having fun with the world of Esports one week at a time. I am your host Mark Register. I have a delightful show for you with this week’s top stories: The effect of roster locks and fines on players’ careers, the CSGO Skins Gambling Exodus, the

Esports Integrity Coalition, and then a rapid fire rundown of everything in Esports. Now… Our main story for the week, Players’ Careers…a Far Side comic come true. This week alone Valve increases their roster lock from three months to six not allowing

Teams to change their rosters as frequently. Causing players to be locked into a team for a minimum of six months. Last March, team members of Luminosity signed a letter of intent with Luminosity then signed contracts with SK Gaming consequently going against ELeague’s rule book of changing

Their rosters after submitting their final roster to the League. This leads to ELeague’s decision this week to ban Luminosity from the rest of the season, then the rest of the teams in the ELeague sign a petition to get SK Gaming removed as well.

Astral Authority benches player Equinox for the rest of the season in hopes to make money on his buy out being so generous as to cut his buy out fee in half. Equinox expresses he just wants to get back to playing. Optic Gaming’s Karma gets suspended complaining about playing players who were using light

Machine guns and that a game was called off due to poor connection in the Call of Duty World League. The Call of Duty World League player rules prohibit public criticism of the league with fines and suspensions to enforce it. Aches & Phizzurp also get get fined for

Being critical of the League on social media. The fines and suspensions Activision doles out are not publically released like what Riot does. Riot follows through on their transparent penalty tracker by warning Keith & Slooshi for account sharing, banning Brandini for two matches due to “extremely negative in-game

Behavior.” Part of their penalty system includes fines just like the NBA. NBA proslike Shaquille O’Neal paid over $145k in fines throughout his career, but he made $291MM from his player contracts alone so I think any player would welcome fines like that with

Open arms as long as those fines came with the paychecks to match. More rules are being implemented by Esports Leagues that restrict career movement and issue more suspensions and fines for players and teams, is this helping Players’ Careers? These rulings are helping the Players’ careers of the future, at its worst it’s ending

And stunting careers now. Starting from the macro zooming in, ELeague & Valve are restricting organizations from swapping players like tinder dates and are making organizations and players commit to each other for a minimum of six months. Which happens to be the world record

For the longest tinder relationship. In traditional sports players sign multi year, multi million dollar deals, in Esports the majority of players make a few thousand dollars a month and have an even shorter window of time for potential earnings. That said, Valve & ELeague’s ruling

On roster locks will create more stability for players and the Leagues as a whole so it’s a very good thing for Players’ Careers. Until you hit exceptions like Astral Authority sitting on Equinox’s contract benching him trying to squeeze out cash for trading him not letting him play the game. Clever Girl Astral Authority.

Zooming into individual player rulings. Getting suspended and fined for bad mouthing the League you’re playing in is bad on both sides. Yes there are some problems with the League and the best way to resolve those issues are to deal with the League directly not get your

Twitter followers on your side and complain about it publically. To be fair to the players, it’s up to the Leagues to make sure they have a fast and effective feedback loop for fixing problems like lag issues which affect the outcome of the game.

And finally fines for negative in-game play. Yes. Absolutely. Fines, you so fine you blow my mind. But they should be proportionate to salary. Shaq made 14.5MM per year over 20 seasons equalling $291MM in his career just from salary and paying $145k in fines

Equalling 0.04% of his total salary, one of the most fine fined players in the NBA so let’s be generous and say a top player makes $200k a year over a lifetime of 10 years which is generous as well making $2MM. Then using Shaq and his fines from the NBA as an example…over

A ten year span that player should be fined a maximum of a thousand bucks. And now the Counter Strike Skin Gambling Exodus…The end of Buffalo Bill’s favorite past time CSGOWild which allows users to convert their Counter Strike skins into emeralds, gamble

Using them on coin flips and roulette then exchange the emeralds back to cash, is no longer allowing American accounts to gamble. Fantasy Esports betting site Vulcun who raised $13.3MM is shutting down and pivoting to Twitch chat games using their recently acquired TwitchAlerts.com company as a springboard.

But not everyone is making a graceful exit from the Skin Gambling scene before Justice Beaver lays down his legal damn. Trevor Martin, Tom Casell, and Josh Beaver no relation to Justice Beaver, failed to declare their ownership of the betting site CSGO Lotto which they were using on their channels to

Promote the site also face allegations of rigging their games so they appeared to win big on camera. Out of nowhere Lewis Stewart PsiSyndicate willingly came out after this debacle saying he took part in rigged gambling site promotions without full disclosure and causing him to

Get a Valve ban but wins over most of his fans by getting ahead of it. But things are not looking as good for CSGO Lotto founders Tom Cassell & Trevor Martin who have finally been told to stop talking publically by their attorneys. Before they stop…

Tom Cassell tweets out quote: “I apologize to anyone who feels mislead regarding the ownership of CSGOLotto. I will always be more transparent from here on out! I do however stand very firmly behind the fact that CSGOLotto has never & will never scam/steal from players.

I’ve always disclosed that my CSGO videos were sponsored & even asked a YouTube employee if anything more was needed & they said it wasn’t. Transparency from here on out!” end quote This is not Tom Cassell’s first failure to disclose information as in 2014 he received

$30k to make 2 positive videos for the game Ryse without disclosing their financial arrangement. Trevor Martin echos Tom Cassell’s statement in 2 videos that are now private. Unfortunately for him the first video he posted talking about CSGO Lotto he said “a friend” introduced

Him to the site and that the site offered him a sponsorship, and he was thinking, he was going to take it. Sometimes I write love letters to myself too Trevor. Trevor Martin is a part owner of Team Envyus who just secured a few million dollars from

SierraMaya360 to build an Esports venue in North Carolina so as not to jeopardise their growing investment, Team Envyus releases a statement saying quote “Trevor has never been involved in the operational or decision making process of our team or company. He

Is not a managing partner, does not sit on our board and has a very small, minority stake in the business that operates Team EnVyUs…We gave a small amount of equity to Trevor in return for his advisement and support of our video content on the YouTube network.” they

Went on to say they had nothing to do with his website CSGO Lotto. Valve has since followed suit blocking CSGO Lotto from their API. Is this the end of the Counter Strike Skin Betting Industry? It’s the beginning of the end. There’s smoke, there’s fire, there’s a video of

Tom Cassell & Trevor Martin with the matches in their hand proving Billy Joel wrong, as infact they did start the fire. CSGO Wild got out of the American scene, Vulcun got ahead of it by pivoting to something else but the reason the industry is going down

Is because you have people who know enough to game the system but don’t know enough to cash out before the law uses them to establish a precedent. And now the Esports Integrity Coalition…because we needed another organization to enforce rules no Game Publisher will adhere to

The ESIC announces their existence to the world of Esports with their official mission statement to quote “be the recognised guardian of the sporting integrity of esports and to take responsibility for disruption, prevention, investigation and prosecution of all forms of cheating, including, but not limited to, match manipulation and doping.”

The Coalition’s founding backers include ESL, DreamHack, Intel, SportRadar, Unikrn, Betway; with directors Bryce Blum, Anna Rozwandowicz; and commissioner Ian Smith who’s spent the last 12 years as the Legal Director then Chief Operating Officer for the Federation of International Cricketers Association.

The Coalition will appoint a Management Board for its first Annual General Meeting for July 2017 Will this organization be more effective than the other acronyms like KESPA, BESA, WESA and any other organization with their acronym ending with -ESA in the fight to become the FIFA of Esports?

The Coalition is missing out on any game developer publishers and is not the first organization coming into the Esports space on a crusade to make things better as ESL’s World Esports Association came into the space in May as the champion for Esports players’ in establishing

League policies, player transfers, and rulesets, and it did not go well. To be fair ESIC has one specific problem they are setting out to solve with a very specific tool to fix it. That tool ESIC founding member SportRadar who specializes in using data to detect fraud

Like match fixing will be able to sift through the $7.4BB handle in skins to pass on the red flags to Bryce Blum who if given the budget and staff could build cases against individuals and organizations fixing matches or allowing minors to gamble without the proper checks

In place bringing them down to meet Justice Beaver, the crime fighting beaver. But…it’s the game developer/publishers that are the owners of this world and all the -ESA’s are playing in their world until the developer/publishers decide to step in and take over or in the

Best case scenario for ESIC adopt and support their Coalition. In the meantime we will keep getting new town sheriffs every few months. And now here’s the rapid fire rundown of everything that’s happening in Esports to give you a table of contents if you’re feeling scholarly or just the cliff notes.

Dream Team puts their Call of Duty World League spot and team up for sale Rocket League hits 5 million copies sold and $110MM in revenue across PC, PS4, & Xbox One. ESL announces CS:GO Pro League finals will be in São Paulo, Brazil, on October 28th-30th.

South East Asia’s MEASAT Satellite Systems launches their 24/7 Esports channel Every Good Game The FaceIt tournament app launches at the end of the month automating tournament organization Iranian iCG Esports Summer announces a $60k prize pool across 12 games taking place August 7 – 13.

Manchester City signs FIFA player Kieran “Kez” Brown…that’s 8 football clubs with an Esports division now. ESL’s CSGO Valve Major sells out their 14k tickets for their multi day event with a $1MM prize pool running July 5 – 10.

Christian Baker for DigiDay reports the cost of reaching an Esports fan is ⅛ the cost of reaching a mainstream sports fan. South African Evetech Champions League announces their $10k Counter Strike tournament culminating August 15th. Missouri’s Columbia College announces they will begin competing in League of Legends

This fall with their 12 scholarship supported players. ESL partners with Ubisoft and Xbox to launch their Rainbow Six Pro League with $100k prize pool running from July to August 21st. Activision Blizzard make their console game Skylanders into a Netflix TV series called Skylanders Academy…Futurama’s showrunner

Eric Rogers will help produce the series. China’s Dalian Wanda will co-produce and distribute with France’s ZED & Canal Plus, Herve Martin-Delpierre’s Egaming documentary “Game Fever” in 4k costing $1.3MM to make. Forge’s CEO Jared Kim closes a $4.5MM Series

A led by True Ventures after getting a $4.5MM seed round four months ago. Forge captures gameplay and allows you to bookmark it for highlighting after your session. Esports school PowerHouse Gaming opens up in France for pro gamers, leaders, streamers, bloggers, journalists, and event organizers. The courses will run between $2k – $7k.

UK’s GAME announce their competitive gaming zone where players can compete in Esports titles such as Rocket League, Minecraft, and Counter Strike. Ferguson Mitchell from Esports Observer points out that the largest LCS Facebook fan base comes from the Philippines but suggests that they are fake accounts bought and paid for

To inflate their numbers knowingly or unknowingly by Riot. Gfinity cashes in on that Esport money raising $4.7MM to develop their proprietary media player, tournament builder application, events, and working capital. ESPN will broadcast EVO’s Street Fighter tournament but not the others & EVO’s Street

Fighter 5 tournament sees their entrants double from last year’s 2,200 entrants to 5k fighting for a piece of the $100k prize pool. Super Smash Brothers WiiU & Melee have 5k entrants but split between the two games. Variety reports AT&T & Chernin Group announce

Their video subscription bundle focusing on anime, video games, and niche action sports content. The platform is being built by Ellation apart of AT&T & Chernin’s Otter Media which owns the 800k subscriber anime video platform Crunchyroll and Multichannel Network Fullscreen.

Well that’s it! I hope you learned and laughed a little and I’ll see you next week.