47 GENIUS INTERVIEW James Dean
back in 2013 ESL, as a global company, was distributing content to millions of people without any kind of backup, redundancy system was crazy.
CREATING LEGENDS
Successful UK teams can now compete on a European and global level
FEED What is the future of eSports?
JD In the future I don’t think audiences will be paying for content. I’m waiting for that to be a thing of the past. I’m counting the days until Netflix becomes free! They’ll have some kind of advertising model instead. You could do it in so many dierent ways, once you have access to people’s data. I think we’ll see a time when each individual game is treated in its own way. Looking at League of Legends, which has reached that point of maturity, it has just landed a big licensing deal. The monetisation of that IP is no longer relying solely on the viewership of watching the League of Legends finals. People are now contributing to that IP in a multitude of ways – whether it’s spending money in-game, buying merchandise, responding to sponsorship or watching on a platform that has an advertising deal. I can imagine having these open studios with prime retail space where you can go play, watch, view and hang out around the IP of a specific game. You can see how Disney is doing it, lapping up IPs and monetising them in dierent ways. We’ve seen that happening in many dierent ways. We used to see a game coming after a film. Now it’s the other way around. If you like an IP, and you like the world of that IP, you’ll pay to spend more time in it.
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