ESL Gaming’s Nick Vanzetti on youth empowerment and job prospects in eSports. In a recent interview with ESL Gaming‘s SVP of Asia Pacific, FortuneZ‘s Content Lead, Tania Perera, dug deeper to understand the significant impact the eSPorts industry has made on youth empowerment and career prospects.
eSports is a huge industry. Its huge in countries like the United States and Europe. It’s an industry that’s popular among the young people. What are your thoughts on eSports empowering young people?
So the first thing is that there are definitely more opportunities for young people to shine on an international stage and realise their potential as world best. There is whole range of career opportunities for young people to potentially go into. Not just as a player, they can become a professional like becoming the country’s best or world’s best and represent the country. But also as an industry of jobs, it is like a sport so they can work in a support network of professional teams and players. They can be coaching staff, managers of the team or they can work at a company like ESL where we organise tournaments.
There are projects management, events management, live streaming, multimedia off-air video production editing. IT skills are also a requirement. There’s the business side as well. There are roles in sales, partnerships. Another thing which is really cool for eSports among young people is character building traits – teamwork, communication, leadership, resilience. These are skills that are important for young people and eSports can enable that.
What about kids in the urban poor areas that aspire to be gamers. How can the eSports industry support kids from the urban poor areas in helping to share their career in the eSports industry?
The first thing to acknowledge is the eSports industry 20 years ago. Video games were expensive so you would need to either go to the arcade or buy an expensive computer to play all these games in particularly at the top level. But we’ve seen how accessible video games are in today’s day and age. So anybody with an smartphone now is able to get content from all around the world and also play video games and compete in eSports. The beauty of that too is that the technology has come so far that the computer in your smarphone can do so much. And game developers have really gone on top of this in making sure that alot of the best eSports games today can work on phones that are 5-6 years old. You don’t need the latest and greatest technology. Accessibility is reallt important to everyone and we’ve really made sure that our tournaments are accessible to all walks of life.
There are alot more charity matches happening in eSports and we couldn’t do that without the growth of eSports as asn accepted medium. Bigger brands are looking to appeal to a young demographic and they’re looking to sponsor those tournaments and to potentially give money back to those who are in underprivilege situations so then they can continue to develop and follow their passion in eSports.
The All That Matters event is coming up on Monday. What is it about eSports that matter to you?
I got involved in eSports because i was a player. The tournaments options that were available were very grassroots. When it got to a national scale competition, nobody really knew how to organise tournaments at a professional level that were catered to the players. So we would have this big game companies wanting to launch a new game or a title and the people that were organising the tournaments would be more from a marketing and PR background and they did a great job with promoting the tournament and the new game that was coming out but they just didnt understand the rule sets, competitive integrity. Pretty much for me back then was to bridge the gap between competitive marketing and the game and there was alot missing and alot to be desired in the middle and we just made sure that the tournaments we were involved with and we were running were really true to the core audience.
The clock is ticking to All That Matters Online 2020 with it being just 3 days away. The fully virtual event showcases talents from the music, sports, digital, gaming and marketing sphere. This is an event you don’t want to miss out on so come and learn as much you can. Tickets are up for grabs at allthatmatters.asia
