Esports Leader: Why Wait for Paris Olympics?

(ATR) A world-leading video games developer tells Around the Rings the IOC should consider holding an esports event well before Paris 2024.

Last week, IOC president Thomas Bach told a press conference that esports would not be considered for the Paris Olympics under a new process, which sets a September 2019 deadline for the addition of new sports. The IOC Session in Milan will rubberstamp the program for Paris 2024.

With the esports industry and Olympic stakeholders meeting for the first time at the Esports Forum in Lausanne last Saturday to discuss common values and share experiences, the IOC says the Paris 2024 Games would be too soon for any integration.

But Mark Rein, vice-president and co-founder of U.S.-based Epic Games which makes Fortnite, disagrees.

He told ATR there’s no reason why esports needs to wait until the Paris 2024 or Los Angeles 2028 Olympics if the IOC works in cooperation with the industry. Rein says the esports industry can mobilize at speed to organize a global event with the IOC’s blessing.

"Esports is the opportunity for the IOC to break out of bureaucracy," Rein told ATR in an exclusive interview.

He cited the staging of the Fortnite Celebrity Pro-Am at the LA Convention Center in June. Rein said from the time the decision was made to stage the event to the running of it was just 88 days. This included work on renting a stadium, organizing athletes, figuring out prize money and tickets, and putting on a big party to close it.

"Esports can be organized quickly and easily unless you are trying to add it to the Olympic Games," Rein said.

Echoing comments he made at the Esports Forum in front of around 150 guests and livestreamed on YouTube, Rein suggested an Olympics for video games players could be held in the third week of an Olympics. A completely separate event billed as the Esports Olympics was another option.

"But there’s no reason to wait until 2024 [Paris Games] or 2028 to run an Esports Olympics. We could run it this year. If you invited us to hold an Esports Olympics in November, we are ready to run our event," he said.

What’s the Moral Red Line?

The developer of shoot-em-up game Fortnite Battle Royal, which reported 125 million players worldwide after less than a year on the market, was among gaming industry executives at the forum who questioned the "moral red line" that IOC chief Thomas Bach spoke about in discussion of Olympic values. It was a pointed reference to gratuitous violence and discrimination in video games.

That seems to be one of the biggest challenges facing the gaming industry – aligning their values with those of the Olympic Movement, if the IOC was to endorse an esports Games.

"I think they just need to be clear on what the red line is so publishers can figure out if their game is in or not," Rein said.

"And if they’re not in then they don’t have to be part of the conversation, if they’re in they do. They just need to be specific, what constitutes the red line."

Rein and other gaming execs said the industry didn’t need the Olympics for commercial growth to maintain longevity.

"No, I don’t think that by itself can because you can easily screw up a game and make it not fun. We don’t need an Olympics to help us make mistakes, we can make plenty of mistakes on our own," he said.

"I think games will have longevity if the publisher is smart about keeping them fresh and fun all the time for the players, and the players will ultimately decide how long a game gets to be popular."

Esports Olympics Ideas

Rein said the popularity of games might inform the format for any IOC-championed esports event.

"I do believe that if you run an Esports Olympics you have the freedom to much more easily add a number of games," he said.

"So if a game isn’t popular, you can’t field enough players or enough countries aren’t interested you just exclude that game and maybe it comes back in two or four years.

"That’s the beautiful thing… it’s a very dynamic business. We don’t have to build a special stadium. We don’t have to build special equipment. We could have the qualifiers online. There’s so much that we can do. Broadcasting is built into the game," he added.

"That’s my point, you could do an Esports Olympics this year if you wanted to. You could do one next year. As long as you divorce yourself from bureaucracy it’s not a difficult thing to do."

Mike Morhaime, president an CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, makers of StarCraft, told ATR there were plenty of questions that needed to be answered before his industry partnered with the IOC.

"The question about esports as a category versus individual games I think is a really important one," he said, adding to the debate about the viability of a global umbrella esports federation.

"We need to think about the right structure. Definitely I think some standardization makes sense, the way we talk about things, the way that we measure things," he said.

Asked if he’d welcome some form of esports integration into the Olympics, Morhaime said: "I think the Olympics has such as history and it’s one of the biggest sport stages in the world. It’s very exciting to us having these conversations."

Reported by Mark Bisson

25 Years at #1: Your best source of news about the Olympics is AroundTheRings.com, for subscribers only.