Esports Business Review
Nike Doubles Down on LoL exposure
As many of us remember, Nike signed League of Legends player Jian ‘Uzi’ Zihao in October to be a part of their “Dribble &” campaign with Lebron James. Now they’ve doubled down and inked a massive $144M 5-year deal with the Chinese League of Legends Pro League (LPL). Nike will be providing clothing, accessories, and shoes for all LPL players and representatives. This is similar to their relationships with the NFL and NBA. It has been confirmed that the Nike logo will appear on all 16 participating teams uniforms. In the LPL, teams buy into permanent spots in the league and share revenue so this is going to be a significant revenue generator for the 16 teams currently competing and will make any spots in the future more lucrative. Other big name brands who have been joining in on the LoL hype are KFC and Mercedes.
PlayVS raises $30M
PlayVS is hoping to bring esports infrastructure to to highschools across the country and has now closed their second round of funding in 2018. Six months ago they raised $15M in a Series A round led by NEA, and now they’ve raised another $30M in a Series B round led by the investment arm of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Elysian Park Ventures. Other investors, who were part of past rounds, include: NEA, Science Inc., Crosscut Ventures, Coatue Management and WndrCo. New investors into PlayVS include Adidas, Samsung NEXT, Plexo Capital, as well as angel investors such as Sean “Diddy” Combs, David Drummond, DST Global partner Rahul Mehta, and Michael Dubin. Their CEO, Delane Parnell stated, “This gives us much more stability and runway so that we can hire more senior employees and leadership. It also gives us a bit of a war chest to let the team go out and work their strategies.”
Fortnite Announces $1M Winter Royale Competition
Epic Games’, Fornite, continues to dish out the prize pools for their competitive tournaments. According to their press release, this new event will consist of two parts “the Winter Royale Qualifiers and the Winter Royale Finals, which will have a total of $1,000,000 in prizes up for grabs.” Anyone can play in the qualifiers for a chance to play in the finals. Everyone that is interested can join the Qualifiers and will be given several chances with your highest score during the event will being used as your submission for the Finals. The tournament will be restricted to the NA and EU and they will play separate tournaments but Fornite did mention that they want to have tournaments in other regions in the future. The Qualifiers will take place on November 24–25th. The EU finals will be November 30th to December 1st with the NA finals taking place December 11–12th.
RFRSH Sells Counter-Strike team
RFRSH, who owned two CS:GO team’s, Heroic and Astralis, has sold Heroic to Seranades. According to The Esports Observer, “As a part of the sale, Heroic’s player contracts, licenses, trademarks, and brand rights will be transferred to Seranades. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.” RFRSH built a solid brand around Heroic and did mention they were looking to capitalize on the investments they made into that team. According to RFRSH, “We have been very open in regards to the model and how we work with teams. In 36 months building the brand, building the culture, and ultimately selling off the teams — we’ve published that a couple of times.” This is a very interesting business model as they’re almost working as consultants or ‘fractional investors.’ RFRSH raised $11.4M last week from lead investor Danish Growth Fund.
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