Adrian Montgomery was a big cheese in professional sports. As CEO of Aquilini Entertainment, he oversaw the wealthy Vancouver family’s sports assets, including the Canucks. Then, in 2018, Dota 2 came to town.
The video game competition, held at Aquilini’s Rogers Arena, opened his eyes to the $200-billion (U.S.) global gaming business, already twice the size of movies and professional sports combined and projected to almost double by 2025.
Now, as CEO of Toronto-based Enthusiast Gaming, he runs North America’s largest online gaming platform. With the first Olympics-sponsored esports competition starting May 13, will gaming finally cross over from the domain of pimply boys to the entertainment mainstream?
I have a gaming-fanatic son whom I pumped for information to prepare for this interview. No matter how massive this industry is, for people over a certain age, video games just aren’t part of our world.
That’s the perception for sure, which is so curious because it’s the dominant form of entertainment in the world. It’s because the only reference point for people like us are games we played 30 years ago and we remember that as an inherently anti-social activity.
Older people have no conception that video games are these organic, social experiences. When you’re playing Fortnite, you’re part of a community interacting with thousands of other people playing or watching others play Fortnite.
Enthusiast is a public company. Does that generational disconnect have an impact on investor interest?
It did and still does a bit. A year ago, when I talked to investors about Enthusiast Gaming, four out of 10 said, “I don’t get why anyone would watch someone else play a video game,” and they’d laugh and I’d leave dejected.
That person might have happily watched Martha Stewart baste a turkey for an hour. Then, during COVID, all those middle-aged people saw their 15-year-old kids lock themselves in a room and watch other people play video games. Having focus groups in every home certainly chipped away at the stigma.
So video games are as much a spectator sport as hockey or baseball?
Very much so. The personalities that game every night on YouTube or Twitch.tv are not necessarily playing competitively, but entertaining their audiences. It’s a whole phenomenon. Three out of four Gen-Zers don’t watch television and don’t care about traditional media, but they flock to gaming communities to create and share experiences.
It sounds like your company is essentially aggregating influencers. How is this form of social media different from others?
Ten years ago, when people started to migrate from traditional media to social media, that gave rise to Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Today, there’s a similar mass migration happening from traditional social media to the new social media, which is gaming. I would bet my mortgage that your son doesn’t use Facebook.
I don’t think he ever had a Facebook account.
Right. But it’s probably still the best-known social network. That’s fuelling a rethink about how other businesses engage with people and launch new products.
Take the music business. If Beyonc could perform either a free concert at an NFL game or a virtual concert in Fortnite or Roblox (gaming platform for kids), as a savvy person she would choose the gaming platform 10 times out of 10 because she can get a highly engaged, massive audience with literally no marketing. When Travis Scott and the DJ Marshmello held concerts within Fortnite, they almost crashed the servers.
Parents fret about their kids spending too much time on video games. As a parent yourself, do you worry about that?
I worry a lot less after I’ve seen the crucial role gaming played in giving my kids a social outlet during the pandemic. When playdates were cancelled, my kids could still go on Roblox and hang out with their friends.
You’ve said that every time a major-league baseball fan dies, two esports fans are born. What did you mean?
I don’t think I’ll be allowed into the Rogers Center, but yes, I stand by it. A Bank of America study on Gen Z found that 60 per cent prefer esports to traditional sports. As you pull that statistic forward, it’s going to have a seismic impact. The biggest esports tournaments are massive events that take place in stadiums and have viewership that rivals the Super Bowl.
At the Dota 2 tournament in Vancouver, the prize purse was over $30 million (U.S.). And esports fans are older than people think: on a median basis, they’re in their mid-20s. All the professional leagues would trade for esports demographics in a heartbeat. And esports fans are multiplying while the average age of a major-league baseball fan is in the 40s, so you have to think of that as a declining business.
Do you see a growing merger between sports leagues and gaming?
Here’s something interesting: Who owns esports teams? Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots. The Kroenke family, which owns the L.A. Rams and the Colorado Avalanche. Comcast, the McCourt family — there are many traditional sports owners who see the future the way I do. That’s why we got into owning esports franchises. Our team Luminosity was the most watched esports organization in the world on Twitch last month.
How do such teams work?
We have Luminosity teams for different game titles. It’s as if Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment had the NHL Leafs team and named their basketball team the Leafs and their soccer team the Leafs. esports organizations field teams in different game titles under the same brand, but the players are typically specialists, like in hockey or basketball.
Do you envision top esports players becoming mainstream celebrities?
The biggest esports influencer in the world today is a guy named xQc. He’s from Montreal. More than 100,000 people are watching him every second he’s streaming. People like you and me, we have a perception of what “mainstream” is and we try to fit other reference points into that paradigm.
But the top gamers make over $10 million a year. Lazarbeam, an Australian gamer, is one of the world’s biggest YouTube stars and I don’t understand why Lorne Michaels doesn’t invite him to host “Saturday Night Live.” The moment those crossovers happen, this thing will go on steroids. Look, if you go to Twitch.tv and look at popular channels …
OK, I’m on it.
You see Nickmercs there at the top? At this moment he has 175,000 concurrent viewers. That’s not aggregate! At this precise second, 175,000 people are watching this guy. When you add that up over a six-hour stream, that’s millions and millions of people.
I’m literally watching him eating his lunch with a video game playing behind him.
And look at the chat stream on the right.
They’re talking about chicken tenders, maybe because they seem him eating?
Yeah. That’s an example of what I mean by gaming being the new social network. This is not passive media consumption.
“When I talk to investors now, I say, ‘If you think I’m full of s--t, ask your kids.’ ”
ADRIAN MONTGOMERY
CEO OF ENTHUSIAST GAMING
Why don’t hockey or baseball stars do the same while streaming a live game?
I think that’s where this will go. But the business model of traditional sports can make you lazy because leagues divide up the world into neat geographical pieces and you can monetize your geographical radius to your heart’s content. But the sands are shifting under everyone’s feet. When I talk to investors now, I say, “If you think I’m full of s--t, ask your kids.”