How Ben “Fishstix” Goldhaber is helping people discover esports they’ll love
Discoverability in esports is flawed. Steam is uniquely positioned to help people discover new games. Twitch is there for the discovering streamers and creators. And now, Juked is here to tackle the centralization of esports.
An esports veteran, Ben “Fishstix” Goldhaber joined Justin.tv as its first ever gaming hire, and helped launch Twitch back in 2011. Today, Ben is the co-founder of Juked, an esports discovery platform. We sat down with Ben to talk esports industry, partnerships in gaming, and the upcoming open beta of Juked. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Below is an edited version of our conversation with Ben
You’ve been around gaming for a long time, can you give us a brief overview of your career in the industry so far?
I’ve been involved in esports and competitive gaming for essentially my entire life. I started playing first person shooters competitively at the age of 11 and 12; eventually I transitioned to more of a commentator role, and that’s when I was first exposed to live streaming.
Before the early live streaming platform, it was incredibly expensive and technically difficult to produce a broadcast. When platforms like Justin.tv came out, I was immediately infatuated with the idea of live streaming gaming. It was almost as if the minute I saw it, it became so obvious, I said to myself, “this is how we’re going to grow esports”.
I started looking around the industry and saw a distinct opportunity to make all these different streams more readily available. So a few of my peers and I in the industry came together and created GamesCast.tv, which basically aggregated esports streams from the existing platforms (Ustream, Justin.tv, Livestream.com, Own3d) into our website. At the time it was three of us: an engineer, a designer, and myself, so as head of partnerships and marketing I got to gain valuable contacts and experience in partnerships and marketing.
Launching GameCast.tv and being a part of the community helped me make some amazing connections, one of whom was Rod “Slasher” Breslau. Slasher put me in touch with Kevin Lin, the then COO of Justin.tv. Kevin brought me in and grilled me about the gaming industry, and explained to me they were considering pivoting Justin.tv to be a gaming-focused streaming site. While this was initially just an information gathering meeting, they called me up two weeks later and asked if I wanted to come in and interview for a job. I interviewed and got an offer on the spot. I ended up joining Justin.tv in early 2011 as their very first gaming hire, and four months later we launched Twitch. The eight years after that went by very fast.
Alongside the great work you’ve done in esports, you’re someone who’s well regarded across the gaming industry. What do you think has allowed you to build the following & connections that you have?
When I look around the industry, I think I’ve found success because I’m one of the few people who truly gives a shit about every single game out there. Most people have a few games they love, and maybe a few others they follow for fun, but for whatever reason I think I just have a passion for competitive gaming in general. It was one of the things that drove me to originally work on GamesCast.tv all those years ago, I wanted a platform that made it easier for me to follow every single competitive gaming event that was happening at any time.
What do you think is different about building partnerships and connections in gaming as compared to more traditional industries like finance or tech?
I think the obvious answer here is passion. When gaming was getting started ten years ago, you didn’t have people with MBAs or 5+ years of experience; most of us were just doing it because we loved the community and wanted to make it better. With the influx of investments today, that’s definitely changing a bit, but there’s still that underlying spark of passion in gaming that hasn’t disappeared yet.
Esports feels different from so many other businesses I’ve encountered. Some of my peers in the industry are like family to me. We all came up together, in this tiny 2010s era where esports was small. A lot of the leaders you see across the industry have been on the ground floor at some point or another, either as a competitive player, commentator, content creator, subreddit moderator, whatever it may be. While some of the new folks may be a bit more on the traditional business side there’s still a healthy amount of hardcore fans driving things forward behind the scenes. That’s what makes esports so unique.
Let’s talk about the industry today. Clearly things have changed, there’s more money, more eyes, publicity etc. With all the context that you have, what are the big trends you’ve been keeping an eye on as the industry has developed over the last few years?
The biggest thing to me, as someone who came up in the more grassroots era, is developer involvement in competitive gaming. 8+ years ago we had a handful of small independent tournament organizers running the show, and no one else was even close. Now, it’s more likely that a serious esport has developer involvement than not, and that has brought some massive change to the industry. Suddenly you can have marketing for esports everywhere: in branding partners with drinks like Red Bull, on social media, even in the launcher for the game itself. But not all developer involvement can be effective. If you look at the fighting gaming community for example, you have developers for Street Fighter and Marvel vs Capcom step in, and it hasn’t necessarily resulted in better viewership. What’s important about managing your community is meeting people where they’re at, otherwise you run the risk of creating something your hardcore fans actually don’t want.
Speaking of risk, let’s discuss that a bit further. There have been a number of articles around the idea of an “esports bubble”. We’ve spoken to a few people in the industry about this, what are your thoughts on the topic?
The goal from the very beginning was to get more people involved in gaming right? So it seems almost inevitable to see esports move closer to the traditional sports model, with things like partnerships, franchising etc. When I talk to many of my friends on the inside though, many of them are worried about the rapidness with which the industry is scaling. You can only put so much money into something, eventually the demand will outweigh the supply.
Effectively what that means is that we’re looking at a likely course correction in the industry, most likely in the form of a consolidation of orgs. It’s just the nature of the business, especially considering we’ve seen more money invested into esports in 2019 then the last eight or so years combined. You have teams being valued at $200M+ and the revenue behind these orgs just doesn’t justify that.
The best investments are being made with the teams that are going to exist after the eventual consolidation, we’re talking on a ten-year horizon. What has me a bit relieved is the sustained year over year growth were seeing with both top and mid-tier esports titles. It’s also easy to forget that every year new esports are coming out too. I have faith that despite a course correction, we’re still on the right path for esports as a whole.
It seems like you’ve done a bit of everything in the esports world. You could really do whatever you wanted next, what led you to found Juked?
So I had previously mentioned GamesCast.tv, my project focused on creating a discovery platform for esports. While that didn’t originally take off, I’ve always had this idea in the back of my head to build GamesCast.tv 2.0. Throughout my time at Twitch I earnestly tried to convince them to build an esports portal, a better way to follow esports, but we were never able to get the resources for it, and it’s something that’s holding back the industry from growing in a massive way.
It is so hard for the average fan to follow even the top two or three titles they care about. You need to be following the right people on Twitter, or be on specific subreddits or community sites. On top of that, there’s no way to figure out what’s coming up. No specialized calendar to track upcoming events, no easy way to rewatch broadcasts of your favorite events. These are the types of problems we’re trying to solve with Juked.
Something that I’ve fought for in my 10+ years in esports is the idea that there’s always more people like me, people who care about esports as a whole, not just one or two games. What we consistently hear from our users is that they have a few games they follow super closely, but they also commonly dabble in 3, 4, or as many as 6+ additional titles. You can have a Counter-Strike fan who watches a bit of Smash Bros on Twitch, or Dota on YouTube. Some people just like watching the biggest events, even if they don’t have a strong interest in the game itself. With Juked, we want to make it easy to stay on top of the games you love, but also to push the boundaries and expose people to content they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
So Juked is almost like GamesCast 2.0. What has changed since the last time you tackled this problem, and what will make Juked successful?
Besides the big name games of course, where we fell short with Gamecast.tv was the value we provided to users. The platform was as simple as it gets, it had a few games, and a few streams, live on the site. With Juked, we’re bringing value to our users beyond just the streams themselves.
When you come to the site, you can see all of the matches that are happening, in real time. But what about upcoming events, or details about ongoing tournaments? Juked has all of that information and more. For the average viewer, it’s tough to know when the next big event is, or how your favorite team is doing over the course of these multi-day tournaments. What’s even worse is that the most valuable resources for games are often the toughest to find. Take Counter-Strike for example, tons of people love the game, but there’s so much happening it’s tough to follow. Sure, the most devoted fans know to go to sites like HLTV.org, but the majority of people just lose interest if the information isn’t available at our fingertips.
It sounds like you’re building something super special for esports fans. I know you’re launching into public beta soon, what do you want potential Juked users to know before you launch to the world?
If we could tell our potential users one thing, it’s that they shouldn’t underestimate the value of convenience. Lots of people in gaming are set in their own ways, sticking to platforms like Twitter or Discord for all of their esports info. What we’re building with Juked can give you esports information whenever you need it, and people undervalue that. We understand that changing behaviors can be a big undertaking, but as massive fans ourselves we know that if you give Juked a shot, we’re going to expose you to parts of esports you’ve never heard of before. We think we’ve got something really special here for esports fans, and we’re excited to get it into the hands of the people we think it will benefit the most.
This article was made in conjunction with my weekly gaming newsletter called The Pause Button, which explores the intersection of innovation, entertainment, and socialization in games, and their impact on society.
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