Page 74 - Sharp Spring 2021

“TRADITIONAL SPORTS AREN’T GOING AWAY EITHER. BUT THEY’RE A LITTLE LIKE ROCK MUSIC TO ESPORTS’S HIP HOP.”
year, with the total audience climbing 11.7 per cent to 495 million people.
Pro leagues are slowly readying a re- turn to “offline” competition — beginning with the Dota 2 Singapore Major in late March — four decades after the first of- ficial videogame competition saw 10,000 arcade wizards facing off in Atari’s Nation- al Space Invaders Championship in 1980. Nine years later, The Wonder Years’ Fred Savage starred in The Wizard, an actual movie about kids running away to compete in a Super Mario 3 tournament.
The Japanese gamemaker would also prove an undeniable attraction to Menashe Kestenbaum, a rabbi turned impresario whose Enthusiast Gaming empire began as a Nintendo fan blog. It now boasts 300 million unique visitors and 4.2 billion pa- geviews monthly for its media wing, as well as an events business and an esports division with seven teams, including the Vancouver Titans.
Kestenbaum, who comes from a family of Jewish day-school rabbis, initially followed the same path: he moved to Jerusalem to study in a theology yeshiva and then teach. “But secretly, all along,” he says, “I was a huge gamer.” Or not so secretly, considering he’d been contributing to IGN, the world’s biggest gaming news site, since he was 13.
Then, in 2011, Kestenbaum launched his Nintendo Enthusiast blog, which “quickly blew up.” Soon, he was bringing on other writers, growing forum communities, and attracting advertisers. Once he reached a million people a month, Kestenbaum fig- ured, “there must be a way to monetize this so I can make a full-time living.”
Returning to his hometown of Toronto in 2013, he started throwing gamer nights at a pub to pay his bills, which turned into LAN parties with gamers battling on networked computers and, eventually, conventions like the annual Enthusiast Gaming Live Expo. Known as EGLX, the event grew from 1,700 attendees in 2015 to 30,000 in 2019; 2020’s online edition reached 12 million.
After Enthusiast Gaming went public in 2018, Kestenbaum’s investment bank sug- gested expanding into esports. “They said, ‘Look, the Aquilini family is one of the most
respected families in Canada, it’s worth $10 billion, and they are getting involved heavily in esports right now.’” Already owners of the Vancouver Canucks and Rogers Arena, they’d launched Aquilini GameCo to acquire esports org Luminosity Gaming, which was merged with Enthusiast in 2019.
The impact was immediate, says Kesten- baum. Sponsors and advertisers started tak- ing esports seriously, with traditional sports team owners snapping up franchises. Inves- tors matched a surge in attendance numbers — like those of the 2018 League of Legends World Championship, which attracted 99.6 million viewers, rivalling the Super Bowl.
But the industry was evolving even pre-pandemic, with American outfits like FaZe Clan and 100 Thieves, which double as lifestyle brands, repping a “second wave,” says Kestenbaum. “Esports nowadays is not just about competitive gaming. It’s about building communities around personalities. So,wedohavealotofteams—wecom- pete in Call of Duty, Overwatch, Valorant, Fortnite, Madden, Super Smash, and Apex Legends — but we focus more on the content creators.”
Speaking of: Canada’s most famous con- tent creators are also into esports. After Drake broke Twitch records in 2018 when 628,000 people streamed his Fortnite session with Luminosity alum Tyler “Ninja” Blev- ins, the Toronto rapper became a co-owner of 100 Thieves. (Other boldface investors range from Post Malone, Ashton Kutcher, and Pusha T to David Beckham, Steph Curry, and Michael Jordan.)
The Weeknd similarly bought into Over- Active Media, which owns Toronto Defiant of Overwatch League and Toronto Ultra of Call of Duty League, as well as several European teams and a live events division.
“There’s a magnet from gaming and es- ports to celebrities who want to be associated with things that are cool, and obviously we benefit from having cool people associated with us as well,” explains Adam Adamou, who ditched his career in venture capital and investment banking to co-found OverActive after his kids showed him a televised match. “The demand is coming from the celebrities who want to be involved and, by and large,
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