Arhancet, 31, is the new director of eSports at Curse Gaming. He spent the past 12 years in the financial services business in Herndon, but as a lifelong gamer, he sees the future potential of eSports. He knows Team Curse first-hand, having built the team up from nothing and working as its manager since then. The new exec talks about the future of eSports and why corporate America is already taking notice in this exclusive interview.
What’s your background in gaming?
My father was a computer programmer, so at a young age I was surrounded by computers. I grew up on them and can remember back to playing the Original Civilization, Battle Chess, After Dark the original SimCity via Floppy via my stack of dos prompt command index cards (so I could remember the commands to my favorite games). I was the nerdy, but an entrepreneurial kid – running lemonade stands in summer, selling hand-made potpourri (a myriad of weeds in the back yard) to all the neighbors, and selling burned CD’s of .wav files and mp3 files that I would download from the underground AOL 1.0 chatrooms. My parents weren’t very fond of me playing video games, but then again what parent is right? I’m sure they had dreams of a future filled with classifieds of “pro gamer wanted” – but of course then in the ‘80s who ever thought that would happen.
I whizzed through school, attended James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA; graduated early - top of my class in Finance and Management and had inspirations of making a ton of money and running my own business. My first goal was money – I had to hit that six figure salary in something I knew I could be good at. Well, that turned out pretty well for me, just in my first year out of school I managed to achieve that and do pretty well for myself. I purchased my first house without parental assistance and built from the ground up a financial planning practice consisting of over 300 financial planning clients. I sold millions of dollars of insurance and was one of the highest grossing independent advisors in the DC Metro area for American Express Financial (later renamed to Ameriprise).
I was scouted out by MBO Partners, a company with an ingenious concept of providing an alternative to self-incorporation and I was in love with it. Even more, I loved the company – the leadership team and their mission. For the next six years, I worked all facets of the company – consumer sales, marketing, management, enterprise implementations (you can find my wonderful bio on their leadership page and my LinkedIn) – in-all becoming a guru on everything independent consulting. I helped implement some of our largest accounts, Whirlpool, Microsoft where I traveled the country implementing million dollar projects, I managed and ran some of our business to consumer initiatives – vital in the design of our site and marketing activities. I was hired on and worked directly for the CEO, having a significant impact on the growth of the company as the Director of Consultant Services.
How did you get involved in eSports?
In 2011, I started playing League of Legends, of course as a hobby at the time. I ended up being pretty good at the game and submitted an essay to the then biggest tournament organization running at the time – the NESL Pro Series. It was a tournament that had the best eight teams in North America and they reserved one spot as an entry (since the other seven teams were invited). All you had to do was write an essay on why you thought you team deserved to be one of the top 8 teams in the league. I wrote the essay on why my team was the best, meanwhile I had no such team yet… (something typical of my personality type) and I was selected. I quickly put together a team and we ended up placing second overall in the league. We were picked up by sponsors, we started attending major gaming events like Major League Gaming (MLG), IEM (Intel Extreme Masters) and dozens of other online and LAN tournaments. The biggest day in the teams history was when we landed our first big sponsor, Curse Inc.
Curse gave us the support we needed to land big sponsors and provided the assistance to travel and compete at international events on the world stage. If you’re not familiar with Team Curse, we are considered to be one of the best teams in North America. We finished 5th at IEM Hannover in Germany at the World Championships, yes the World! It was always just a fun hobby, taking vacation time from work to travel the world and compete.
When did you see eSports as more than just playing games?
I always saw it as a hobby, but something changed. With the advent of streaming technology, low bandwidth costs, advertising revenue and a game developer, Riot Games, who has committed to making League of Legends a true eSport, to one-day compete with things like Tennis or Baseball – has transformed what was just an industry about hobby and entertainment to a real business. I was presented with an offer from Curse that I couldn’t refuse -- an opportunity to take something that I was always passionate about and to finally make lucrative – it’s kind of one of those textbook American dreams.
With that – I made the very tough decision to resign from MBO Partners, a company whose growth is insanely high that will one day transform the way independent consultants work (something I wholeheartedly believe in) to an industry I’ve known since I was little that I never thought would one day become a career. I put my resignation in just last week and I’ll be starting as the Director of E-sports with curse on October 29th. I’ll be leading up all of their e-sports initiatives, managing the P&L, seizing opportunities and growing the revenue for this new arm of the company.
What are your thoughts on this new life direction?
I can’t be certain what will happen – but I know I’ll be doing something I love and while I’m at it – making some damn good money. I also feel like I’m entering the industry at just the right time – when companies are positioning for control, revenues are through the roof, viewership via streaming is growing rapidly and gaming is not just a hobby but a legitimate industry. My roommate is taking a gamification course at Wharton Business School and Microsoft’s gaming arm has posted Billion dollar profits. Yes, there are all types of gaming, social, cell phone, PC, console – there’s bound to become a sport – hence why I do believe in e-sports and to be part of that on the ground floor is just a dream come true.
My first and foremost plan is to have the greatest impact as possible given the resources I’m able to source and combine in a way to make a profit but also to extend to my personal goal of seeing eSports as a legitimate sport, one that is both business and entertainment. Much like the way Football and baseball are. If I can do that while making Curse’s eSports division a profitable division of the company and grow that a way that positions us well in this industry that is growing rapidly – I’ll feel very good about my impact to the company. More tactically, it’s going to be done through team management (I’ll be managing teams in EU, NA and Brazil). I’ll be working on sponsorships, advertising revenue and relationships with industry stakeholders like Riot and other entertainment companies and shows. If I look back in a year and see our teams preforming well, revenue growing and the eSports industry growing while we grow with it – I’ll feel I’ve achieved what I came to do.
How do you believe your background as a pro gamer and as a consultant will help Curse?
I have this really interesting background. There are not many pro gamers with the vast knowledge of gaming that grew up in corporate America. You usually choose one or the other and I’ve got this pretty cool skill set where I have the background of business, entrepreneurship, marketing, sales and finance but with this in-depth knowledge of gaming, the way it operates the access to key talent and you combine those things together and you really can’t find someone better for the job. I’m going to be able to leverage my network in a business way to help stimulate and contribute to my goals at curse.
It's a combination of two main factors. The first is at the control of the game developers. If they can produce and maintain a game that is easy to understand, easy to follow and enjoyable to watch – even if you don’t play it – then you have a spectator sport. Consider how many people love watching baseball or football but have never picked up a bat or thrown a pigskin. You can’t create a spectator sport unless you create a game with rules, limits that’s addictive and entertaining. I think Riot is really close – I think they might have some work to do on the ‘making it easy’ – for example my parents have asked to watch the games but they have never really come across some short video that explains the game and how it works. But I do they have something that follwable and entertaining. Secondly, I think it’s a matter of the environment we live in (a combination of technology and age generation). Technology has created streaming and bandwidth costs have reduced to the point where you can stream 1080p for peanuts in comparison to the advertising revenue. You can flip through stations on own3d.tv like you would your cable TV (and probably be a lot less frustrated and pay (instead of $150/mo). Technology has made online viewership increase and it’s only a matter of time until we get to a point where instead of buying cable, you’re watching on-demand content online that’s hooked up through an HDMI cable to your nice fancy TV (or your TV has it built-in at some point in the future). Secondly, it’s a generational thing. Kids are growing up on iPhones, iPads -- and yes, I grew up on computers, but much different than the ones the kids grow up on today. Gaming has become more mainstream – hence why eSports is a natural progression to serve that interest. You put the two together, a growing pool of people interested in gaming content and a way for them to watch it – bam – you have eSports a growing industry.
Curse has invested heavily in League of Legends. What role do you see StarCraft II, Black Ops II, Halo 4 and other games playing in eSports for Curse moving forward?
Many games are going to be competing heavily to get into the type of revenue you are going to see from major competitive eSports titles. I’m talking big money, from lifestyle sponsors. It’s a content war – who can produce a game that’s easy to watch, fun to watch and understand with huge numbers of viewers. I would say that Curse is invested in league because it’s the best preforming source of content – for our purposes I hope it stays that way, but if the viewership moves we of course will move with it and begin investing in other games as we see the opportunity. While we might not have other pro teams sponsored in StarCraft II or Call of Duty or Halo, I promise we have already been very far along in conversations with all the titles you mentioned. It’s important to diversify our involvement in the industry for a greater likelihood that one or a few of these titles dominate the eSports scene.
The opportunities will only grow. Let’s take for example Ocelote, with SK. He just landed a huge personal sponsorship for an undisclosed amount of money – but from what I hear, it’s significant. Just a few months ago, Riot the developer for League had icons of Ford and Butterfinger appear during the matches. This is just the start, and if lifestyle sponsors like those are getting into an industry where they can reach 20k, 50k, 100l, 200k concurrent viewers with their products, I know companies will be willing to pay a good amount of money for that. I’ve worked on the side of things in the corporate world. I get how marketing and advertising works – at MBO; we put a hefty advertising budget together to get our message across to our target demographic. The same holds true for many companies that have gamers as their target audience. If pro gamers can deliver scheduled quality content that is enjoyable, informative and fun – viewership will grow, and so will advertising and sponsorship revenue.
