On December 6th the New York Islanders are holding an Esports night in collaboration with the Faze Clan. The Faze Clan is a group of individuals who run a lifestyle and media platform that is focused on gaming and video game culture for teenagers and young adults.
Islanders Esports Night will begin at 5 PM with European Gaming World Champion Eki taking on North American NHL Gaming World Champion Regs in an EA Sports NHL 23 matchup. Once this is complete the Islanders will play a regular season game against the St. Louis Blues. There are also some unique events such as a meet and greet with Faze Clan athletes and crossover merchandise that combines both the Islanders and Faze Clan logos and branding.
As someone who grew up playing all the EA Sports NHL games, I could have never imagined that sports gaming and esports could go mainstream enough and reach a wide enough audience whereby it is viable for an NHL organization to hold a virtual hockey game before an actual regular season NHL game. While this is certainly an interesting marketing strategy, it will be interesting to see if this event is successful and if other NHL teams follow suit.
It would certainly seem likely that we will see more crossover events like this in the future as Jordan Zelniker, Esports Lead at the New York Islanders said, “As part of our 50th anniversary season, we will continue to utilize gaming to expand Islanders causal and dedicated fandom, linking our past, present, and future.” Additionally, on November 22nd the NHL announced an expanded calendar and new brand identity for the Esports Championships. Thus, the future looks bright for fans like myself who enjoy both gaming and hockey.
An interesting story has recently come out, featuring Nintendo shutting down a relatively large Super Smash Bros tournament that was set to go ahead later next week. The story is still developing, but as of now, it looks like there was some sort of licensing dispute between the organizer of the tournament, Smash World Tour, and Nintendo. It also seems like there was a third organizer in the mix, Panda, who there have been allegations against of being granted an exclusive license for the game’s tournament scene. Nintendo denies these allegations, and has stated they will speak to Panda’s CEO after he had been telling people that Smash World Tour was going to be cancelled. Nintendo’s story as of now remains that they were simply not able to come to an agreement with Smash World Tour to be a partner for the tournament circuit for 2023. I found this news interesting from the intellectual property perspective that Nintendo owns their game and the corresponding rights to it and therefore seems to have full control over who can play it (at a tournament level) and who can organize such tournaments. I am curious about the broad implications and impacts this has on the players that had been preparing to be a part of the Smash World Tour and now may not be a part of Panda’s tournaments.
Earlier this week, Nintendo issued DMCA takedowns to SteamGridDB, a community site that hosts user-created images to be used in on Steam. Although the site is primarily meant to provide an aesthetically-pleasing alternative for fans, Nintendo games are not available on Steam and therefore would only be there as emulated ROMs downloaded without Nintendo’s knowledge or permission. The implication seems to be clear based on their selective use takedowns targeting artwork for only 5 games: these are games that Nintendo are still trying to actively sell themselves and want to curb piracy of them. Plus, the requests were targeted against the use of their own characters sprites, that left original creations and fan art alone; a decision that makes sense based on the potential
fair use and transformative nature of fan art in some situations.
But that’s not all! Nintendo was also responsible for setting off some drama in the Super Smash Bros Melee competitive scene that has everyone blaming each other. After licensing the right to host tournaments to Panda Global, they engaged in negotiations with another company called Smash World Tour. However, after failing to reach an agreement, Smash World Tour canceled their upcoming World Championships and the entire next season, costing the organizers hundreds of thousands of dollars. They claim to be blindsided by Nintendo & argued that Panda engaged in bad faith by preventing them from working out a deal. Nintendo refutes these claims and blame the decision to cancel the championships entirely on Smash World Tour (unclear whether they grappled with the issue of its subsequent legality without a license…). In response, Panda acted confused at all the blame it was getting, while admitting their CEO was vocal in support of their own interests (a little suspicious). And the fans have decided to boycott Nintendo & Panda tournaments as a result – a mess created by the inability to agree on the use of legal rights.
This is just the latest in a long string of interventions made by “The Big N” against those who infringe on their intellectual property rights – if you’d like to learn more, stay tuned for my video presentation releasing soon all about Nintendo & their exploits 🙂
I have uploaded my presentation on Videogame Emulation and Copyright here since it snowed out yesterday. All the best for your exams and happy holidays!
I came across this tweet from a Call of Duty news account. It seems the Code of Conduct is actually carrying some weight after all. Take a look (I’ve redacted the expletives).
You can find below the link to mine and Charis’ presentation! We hope you enjoy it and we would love to hear your comments. Feel free to comment on this post, the Youtube video, or even reach out to us!
However, I would insert a trigger warning here. There is also a trigger warning in our presentation, but we just wanted to warn you that our presentation deals with difficult topics such as sexual assault. Please do not feel obligated to watch our presentation if you feel as it will be triggering to you.
Similar to my last post detailing contract issues in LoL, the Valorant season has also ended and there is a lot of team restructuring going on. A fundamental change has occurred to the structure of esports within Valorant, in which Riot announced there will be three international leagues with 10 partnered teams each for the 2023 season. Due to certain organizations making partnership as a result of their brand as opposed to their actual play, there has been a lot of shuffling around of rosters, including multiple players from certain teams being brought out by organizations within the partnership. Riot recently released their contract database for these new leagues, which highlighted that players are on deals ranging from 1-4 years, with 2 years being the most common. In the context of preventing ‘contract jail’ situations from happening, as well as the fact that Valorant is a relatively new game, this seems to make sense from both the player and the organization perspective. I wonder how Riot, as well as the organizations themselves, have decided to structure their competitions and deals for players differently given that Riot is the developer for both LoL and Valorant and that many of the organizations exist within both the games.
The VG industry is significant in Europe; it is estimated to be worth more than 21 billion US dollars and it keeps growing every year. We know that a lot of the industry activity emerges from Pacific Asia and North America but let’s not forget that Europe is home for major tech companies such as French Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red, Gameloft etc. Moreover, the industry doesn’t only generate economic activity; no one can deny its cultural impact on the European society, especially on the youth.
However, national government in Europe kept giving more attention to the movie industry, putting aside – even ignoring – VG. And why was that? VG were simply considered as leisure activities, “nerdy hobbies”, when in fact it helped many non-English speakers to learn this language, improve technical and cultural skills etc.
Unfortunately, this carelessness from many national governments and from the EU itself led many tech companies to set sails from Europe. Let’s take for instance Minecraft, a Swedish-born company later acquired my Microsoft because Mojang lacked capital and investment for this type of activity.
But this story doesn’t end on this black mark. The EU, more precisely the European Commission, is currently trying to adjust tactics by recognizing the importance of the VG industry and granting it more attention. The Commission developed a major project quite transparent when it comes to its name: Understanding the Value of a European Games Society. Launched in January 2022, the project is aiming at understanding the industry in its core to identify and create future policies while creating a network of VG experts.
This comprehensive and long-term approach of the VG industry is making the EU a step closer to reconnect with the potential it has for its economy and its societies. And it seems to go well because the Parliament has just adopted on November 10 a resolution on VG and Esport in order to acknowledge their value and their growth potential.
Let’s now see how this initiative evolve and if the EU will keep taking the VG industry seriously.
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