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Summary:

How to Make Billions in E-Sports

There’s a gaming gold rush on, with companies cashing in on competitions, sponsorships and merch. But it all comes down to signing the best players. Today there are generally two kinds of professional video-game players — competitive pros and “lifestyle” gamers. The former can be thought

of as pro athletes, competing on teams in games like League of Legends, Call of Duty and Overwatch, the way teams compete in baseball or soccer. Excelling in that world involves coaching, training, hours and hours of daily scrimmaging and, of course, raw talent.

Fortnite : the new phenomenon of E-Sport

Lifestyle gamers, by contrast, are entertainers. They ply their trade through digital channels like YouTube and Amazon’s live-streaming service Twitch. They seek to build fan bases in the millions; perhaps the best-known streamer is Ninja, a.k.a. Tyler Blevins, a former professional Halo gamer who shot to crossover stardom playing Fortnite. The most successful streamers can earn seven- or in some cases even eight-figure incomes. To get to this level, it helps if they are very good at their games, but they aren’t necessarily elite players. Above all, lifestyle gamers need to be compelling to watch — some combination of funny, attractive, edgy and skilled.

Four decades after the first Space Invaders Championship, the world of professional gaming remains a strange and unsettled realm. In fact, there’s no concise way to define what has come to be called “e-sports,” even as it is quickly becoming one of the world’s biggest entertainment industries. According to Newzoo, a games-and-e-sports analytics company, competitive e-sports revenue last year was approximately $1.1 billion, an almost 27 percent increase from 2018. A dizzying array of entities worldwide are buying in: Michael Jordan, Drake, Jennifer Lopez, Steve Aoki, the Kraft Group (which owns the New England Patriots) and Sequoia Capital are all e-sports investors. Last September, Louis Vuitton announced it would be designing clothing for characters in the League of Legends World Championship.

By Robert Capps, Feb. 18, 2020, New York Times

Gensler Faces Big Challenge in Tackling GameStop’s Wild Ride


There is broad agreement that the capital markets have been distorted but less consensus on what, if anything, the S.E.C. should do about it.


WASHINGTON — During his last regulatory stint in Washington, Gary Gensler focused on reining in big Wall Street players that he believed were manipulating markets and assuming huge financial positions to the detriment of other investors. If confirmed to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Gensler will have to confront an entirely new spin on that same game: Thousands of small investors who have banded together to amass giant stakes in GameStop and other companies with the aim of toppling big Wall Street players.

The frenzy around GameStop, whose stock has soared 1,700 percent in the last month, presents a huge challenge for Mr. Gensler and the S.E.C., which will have to reckon with a fundamental shift in the capital markets as a new breed of investor begins trading stocks in unconventional ways and for unconventional reasons.

Gary Sensler, new chief of the SEC

Rather than snapping up a company’s shares because of a belief in that firm’s growth potential, the investors who piled into GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry and others did so largely to see how far they could drive up the price. Their motivation in many cases had less to do with making money than with causing steep financial losses for big hedge funds that were on the other side of that trade and had bet that the price of GameStop and other firms would fall.

“GameStop is just the latest ringing of the bell that we have a real problem on Wall Street,” Ms. Warren said. “It’s time to fix it.”

By Deborah B. Solomon, Feb. 1, 2021, New York Times

Jeff Bezos to Step Down as Amazon C.E.O.

Jeff Bezos: Background on the Amazon Founder Who Bought The Washington Post | The New York Times

Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon’s cloud computing division, will become chief executive, while Mr. Bezos, the company’s founder, will become executive chairman.

SEATTLE — When Jeff Bezos founded an online bookseller named Amazon in 1994, he said the question that he was asked most frequently was “What’s the internet?” Mr. Bezos answered by building Amazon into a $1.7 trillion behemoth that sold so many different items online it became known as “the everything store.” In the process, he upended the retail industry, turned Amazon into a logistics giant, and expanded into cloud computing, streaming entertainment and artificial intelligence-powered devices. For a time, he was the world’s richest person.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bezos, 57, said his run at the top of the Seattle-based company was over. As Amazon reported its latest set of blockbuster financial results, Mr. Bezos said he planned to hand over the reins this summer and transition into the role of executive chairman. Andy Jassy, 53, the chief executive of Amazon’s cloud computing division, will be promoted to run the entire company. The change will be effective in the third quarter, which starts in July.

“As much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition,” Mr. Bezos wrote in an email to Amazon’s employees. As executive chairman, he said, he intends “to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives.”

By Karen Weise, Feb. 2, 2021, New York Times






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