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XForget Going Pro, Los Angeles eSports Pivots Toward Amateur Leagues
Two companies betting on the Los Angeles eSports market aren't throwing in on glitzy, state of the art stadiums or sinking big bucks into the pros: They're banking on the average Joe.
The video game industry has been red hot, surpassing $120 billion last year. Many in the marketplace think the next area for growth is in the amateurs; a vast pool of recreational players who can, if provided the infrastructure, make hay for investors as competitive players.
Southland stalwarts like Blizzard Entertainment and Riot Games both have investments in the unpaid ranks, building programs around blockbuster offerings like Overwatch and League of Legends.
But companies without game development programs have found a way in.
Santa Monica-based Super League wants to anchor its tournaments and one-off events with geography, drawing crowds to local sites set up for tournaments at the local Buffalo Wild Wings, or maybe even a Dave & Busters. The company already has, launching the program four years ago.
In the age of wireless internet, any place with a strong connection is a potential tournament site.
Matt Edelman, Super League's chief commercial officer, wants to convert the millions who watch competitive gameplay on Twitch or YouTube gaming channel into Super League community members.
Think recreational league sports at the local YMCA or community center.
"Super League is not in the pro eSports business. We have really focused on the fact that every viewer, every player is a participant. And that's not the way it is in traditional sports," Edelman said. "Every single person who goes to a League of Legends event also plays the game. How do I get to play in person? That's where Super League comes in."
The cost structure includes games for as little as $5 or leagues that cost about $80.
Newzoo, a games and eSports analytics firm with offices in San Francisco estimates there are more than 2.5 billion gamers world wide.
Gaming has long offered the advantage of remote competition, allowing communities to grow nationally and even overseas. But Edelman wants to capitalize on the lure of local community, and the chance for digital friends to share a laugh and a high five in person.
The company also streams these events on services like Twitch, offering packages that beam the most captivating gameplay moments to a user's computer screen or television. It's like NFL Red Zone for gamers.
Super League is playing with the on-location model, holding 275 events in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The company announced last month that it had partnered with Chinese-based Wanda Media to bring its model to more than 700 locations in the Middle Kingdom. Super League has not invested in brick and mortar locations, but has amassed a hoard of users, and sponsors who advertise through signage or commercials on gaming highlight videos.
The pro ranks are also sinking more focus into physical locations. Blizzard's Overwatch League will require teams, like the Los Angeles Gladiators, to play more games in their chosen city.
Nerd Street Gamers wants in on the Los Angeles market, too. It finished a round of funding last October, bolstering it with $12 million to help it bring its gaming centers, branded Localhost, nationwide. Fellow Philadelphia company and discount retailer Five Below provided the capital, following a long line of investors including Comcast, SeventySix Capital, Elevate Capital, and angel investor George Miller. The deal is a bet on the value of amateur eSports.
CEO and founder John Fazio said the appeal is largely because of its high school district, which is ranked the largest in the country.
"Those schools are full of kids who would love to take advantage of these kinds of opportunities," he said.
Fazio's company plans to build a massive gaming center where players can compete, and friends can watch. The facility, located in Hawthorne, is a planned 26,000 square-feet or, as the company reports, the size of five-and-a-half NBA regulation basketball courts. Loaded with 375 gaming PCs, it would have capacity for 120 teams and has planned its opening for summer 2020. It's the gamer equivalent of a basketball court or a soccer field. The company announced the arrival Feb 12 of a Southland addition to its previously established foothold in Huntington Beach located at 1524 Transistor Lane.
"I think the growth has accelerated. Right now is what's kind of crazy is we've seen growth with really just investment at the professional level," Fazio said. "We're taking hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of students and turning them into esports fans, if not future professionals."
He noted that developers have closely controlled the leagues they've created for college eSports teams, of which there are more than 250 nationwide. The casual gamer with competitive aspirations, he said, is where his company can find opportunity.
Both companies have their eye on the high-school market, too, but Santa Monica-based PlayVs has focussed their efforts on cornering that market. The company has been raking in investments, including $50 million in funding announced last September, designed to spread its platform to all 50 states.
Sari Kitelyn, director of eSports and project development at Full Sail University, a for-profit college with a focus on eSports, is keeping her eye on the unpaid ranks.
But the market remains in flux. Super League is still growing, recording year-over-year growth in of 350,000 or 129% during the third quarter. Nerd Street Gamers doesn't release financials because it is privately held, but received seed funding from Major League Baseball slugger Ryan Howard and is backed by Comcast.
Whatever the growth potential, Super League and Nerd Street Gamers have already made the commitment, investing in the amateurs in hopes of making big league dollars.
"I think this is the biggest area of market opportunity," Kitelyn said.
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TikTok Content Moderators Allege Emotional Distress
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Content moderators reviewing TikTok videos have experienced psychological distress after exposure to graphic content, Business Insider reported Thursday.
Current and former moderators employed by Telus International, a contractor used by Culver City-based video-sharing app for content moderation, told BI that they were often assigned long, consecutive shifts overseeing graphic content—including beheadings, child sexual abuse and self-harm—and that requests to be reassigned to less demanding roles were often denied.
TikTok’s parent company, Chinese tech firm ByteDance, uses artificial intelligence to filter and separate inappropriate content into various categories, with human moderators assigned to review the content within those categories. As TikTok’s platform has grown—it is currently the most downloaded app in the world—employees said they were pressured to keep pace with the increase in content and were often denied discretionary wellness breaks, according to BI.
Additionally, while ByteDance has an emergency response team tasked with handling videos reported to law enforcement, one employee told BI that neither that team nor TikTok’s wellness team provided support to the moderators who reported such content. A Telus International spokesperson told BI that its own wellness team supported moderators, who have the option to skip difficult content. Telus employees, however, told BI that skipping videos resulted in disciplinary citations.
In a lawsuit filed against ByteDance in December, former content moderator Candie Frazier alleged that her work resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder and symptoms of severe psychological distress. Two other content moderators have since filed a lawsuit with similar claims.
The lawsuits are part of the growing legal pressure facing TikTok. In California, a bill that would allow parents to sue social media companies for addicting their children to apps passed the State Assembly and awaits the State Senate. The company is also facing renewed pressure from federal regulators over data privacy issues.
TikTok has also been scrutinized for its corporate workplace culture—with severalemployees claiming they were pressured to work long hours and accommodate the schedule of ByteDance’s China office.
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Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Relativity Space Surpasses $1 Billion in Contracts, Inks New Deal with Satellite Maker OneWeb
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Rocket maker Relativity Space soared past a milestone today, surpassing $1 billion worth of contracts for launches on its 3D-printed Terran R rocket.
Long Beach-based Relativity agreed to a multi-launch agreement with broadband satellite maker OneWeb on June 30. CEO Tim Ellis posted on Twitter that following the deal, Relativity now had over $1.2 billion in binding launch contracts secured by five different customers — even though the startup still has yet to send a rocket to orbit.
Ellis called the deal a “huge vote of confidence and we can’t wait to deliver.”
Relativity aims to send the OneWeb satellites by 2025. The OneWeb launch could be one of the first commercial launches sent into space by the rocket maker’s reusable Terran R craft.
OneWeb was previously using Russian Soyuz rockets to launch, but sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine forced it to look to other alternatives. Ellis told TechCrunch Relativity was already looking to court OneWeb as a customer before the war, though, noting the deal “has been in the works for quite some time.”
OneWeb wants its broadband service to be operational by 2023, and to do that it has to launch at least 648 satellites into orbit. Relativity has two rockets under construction – Terran 1 and Terran R.
The smaller Terran 1 rocket has already secured a $3 million contract to launch small satellites for the Department of Defense. The Terran 1 will make its first flight in a mission nicknamed “Good Luck, Have Fun” (GLHF) which is expected to take off this summer and won’t carry any payloads. Assuming the GLHF mission is a success, Relativity will then launch the DoD mission.
The Terran R is Relativity’s 95%-reusable rocket and its answer to competitor SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with which OneWeb is also launching payloads.
In an interview with ArsTechnica earlier this year, Ellis said the craft could take off as soon as 2024, though it’s still being built at Relativity’s 1 million-square-foot factory headquarters in Long Beach.
Last June Relativity raised a $650 million Series E funding round led by its backer Fidelity Management & Research. At that time, Ellis told dot.LA the Terran R rocket was still under development and added, “Ever since Relativity's early days in Y Combinator, we've planned to manufacture a large reusable rocket.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Goop’s Noora Raj Brown On Having the Hard Conversations That Make Change
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
On this week’s episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, host Yasmin Nouri talks with the executive vice president of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, Noora Raj Brown.
Brown started working at Goop when the company was still in the early, hectic stages, moving from a weekly newsletter Paltrow would send out to her friends to a multinational publishing and lifestyle brand.
At the time, Goop’s advice, guides and features about beauty style and wellness, were tackling difficult issues like divorce, sexuality and health in very personal terms.
“So much of what we do at Goop is to push conversations into the mainstream and to talk about things that, frankly, people don't always want to talk about,” she said. “And these are hard conversations, right?”
Brown, a daughter of immigrants, grew up in Silicon Valley and always considered herself a creative, even though her parents were hopeful she’d take a more conventional professional route. “It was like, very much medicine and tech, and I wasn't interested in either,” she says. Instead, her interest veered toward fashion.
After earning her degree, she moved to New York City to work at a fashion magazine called Details, where she got to learn quickly about how designers function and how garments are produced and promoted — but the job didn’t come easy.
“A lot of it was really like finding your path, feeling really lost for a long time. And I think I also had this idea that I would come to New York and I would start interviewing and get a job,” says Brown. “And that would sort of be it. And I didn't realize how insanely competitive it was.”
Brown moved on to work in talent PR where she organized photo shoots, coordinated the angles of stories and then at a fashion and style publication called InStyle during a time when it was in the process of being sold to a new owner.
“There was a feeling of like, you couldn't win,” Brown says. “You're operating from a place of fear; you're not able to be your best self, right?, and you're not able to produce your best work.”
In 2016, when Brown made her way to Goop, there was no in-house communications or legal team, no HR, piles of debt and, from Brown, terror. “I sort of felt like, I was the first line of defense for anything negative that happened to the business,” she says.
The experience left her feeling unqualified, but she said Paltrow’s confidence in her made Brown more confident in her own abilities.
“I think we all just need to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt a little bit,” she says.
Brown’s personal journey, in many ways, mirrored Goop’s mission to push unconventional conversations into the mainstream. Brown says Goop has faced some backlash for its stories, but she says she feels strongly that important topics shouldn't be taboo, and adds that it takes honesty and courage to make change.
“If you're really going to, as we say, [...] milk the shit out of life, you need to do that,” she says. “As I said, operating from a place of real pride, but also real bravery is super important.”
Engagement and Production Intern Jojo Macaluso contributed to this post.
Hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast. Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radioor wherever you get your podcasts.
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Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
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