SkullAssassin69: The Case for Branding Esports Pros
How do you pronounce XQC? What does it mean? Fans of the former Overwatch pro and now full-time streamer would have no problem with this but approaching pedestrians on the street and asking them to say this name would result in a spate of confused stares, reluctant mumbles, or rough guesses.
Gaming nicknames don’t have a well documented history, but popular belief says they came from usernames around the advent of popular online gaming. To maintain anonymity, players were known by their nickname for online achievements, forging a legacy behind a name that they came up with in 20 seconds when making their account.
Professional players are often known by their nickname, but in that lies a tremendous branding opportunity. Some players, like Doublelift, Biofrost, Faker, Khan, Profit, Seagull, Ruler, Rogue, Dark, and Licorice, have names that are made to be branded. Their forward-facing identity is ready made for logos, YouTube outros, T-shirts, punny gifs, or more. On the other end of the spectrum, players like IWillDominate (clunky, overlong) Spica (rings of a slur for Hispanic people) Nuguri (the Korean word for Raccoon, with pronunciation that vexes casters) SOFM (meaning “Style of Me” which isn’t correct English, nor is it easy to say) and AHAHACIK (Meaning Pineapple in Russian) have names that are hard to spell, hard to remember, hard to pronounce, or skirt the line between vulgarity and innocence.
Nicknames seem to be more or less left to the players to decide. In some instances, a player might change their name in order to better brand themselves. For example, Blaberfish of Cloud9 shortened his name to simply “Blaber” after the 2018 season. This could have been pushed from the marketing department at C9, but more likely than not the change was self-motivated.
Teams should sit down new players upon entry into their team organization and develop a personal brand with them. Taking into account their current username or the way they would like to be known, the marketing and design department at an organization should create a public persona for the player. Working out a clean, memorable nickname with associated branding has several key benefits.
First, it makes the player easy to talk about, which then spreads information through word of mouth. This can be a natural, grassroots boost to audience engagement and fan growth. If Faker was called JJX2 he might have suffered from less name recognition than his now emblematic nickname. It also speaks to his playstyle: reminiscent of his second, infinitely clunkier nickname “The Unkillable Demon King.”
Second, with research and branding the organization can ensure that the nickname they choose for a player is inoffensive and easy to say on broadcast. Go back and listen to play-by-play casters tripping over AHAHACIK’s pronunciation, or overly stressing Nuguri’s name so they didn’t accidentally broadcast what sounds like a slur over the air, or working out how to pronounce Spica. Names are brands, players are products, and organizations are companies that shouldn’t leave a product name up to the 18 year old behind it.
Third, more professional names are easier for known brands to sponsor and partner with. If a player was named SwampGoblin (or, god forbid, PowerOfEvil) you would be hard pressed to find a company with a wide public audience willing to sponsor them. Imagine, say, Microsoft sponsoring PowerOfEvil. Corporate lawyers would be hemorrhaging blood out of their eyes the second it was proposed. Clothing brands guard their image more carefully than most other companies, and a nickname that lowers that possibility directly translates to lowered revenue and partnership opportunities with known or global brands.
To longtime fans of professional esports teams or players, making a sweep through the names of players might seem shockingly corporate, soulless, or a drastic departure from the roots of esports as a cottage industry. While this approach can seem cynical, it’s one that should at the very least be considered. When new players are considering establishing their professional presence in the esports world, a clean, inoffensive, memorable, and easily said and spelled nickname should be of paramount importance.
