As someone who ground up his teeth on esports and is a core gamer, I am so happy to see general interest and excitement around multiple esports and gaming content AIPs.
This is also why I felt obligated to spend an entire day to research and post these criticisms, even if it negatively affects my run for facilitator (since criticism is most often taken negatively). Please do take this as just direct criticism, not a personal one. I do not know Dante or any of the team, have no reason to not like them, etc. I am only looking at the data, numbers, and statements from the point of view of someone who has extensive experience in esports.
Details re: My Experience
I’ve played games since shortly after I could walk and watched esports since ~2005 (CS 1.6).
In late 2014 started my own esports org, Gankstars, in a mobile moba called Vainglory. Three months later we were North American champs, and by Aug/Sep 2015 - 1st world champs. Young me holding our 1st trophy:
I landed our first 6-figure sponsorship and we took off, mushrooming from one game to seven (Paladins, Fortnite, Overwatch, Vainglory, Critical Ops, H1Z1, and Bullet Force). At our peak we contracted 35 pro players simultaneously + a few dozen staff. London, Korea, Dubai, Singapore, every US city of note - we played all over and never placed below top 8 worldwide. For 5 years, I breathed esports 14 hours/day - creating content, competing for and winning franchise slots, playing in 2-3 major tournaments every month, hiring and coaching players (and staff), landing sponsorship deals. Everything.
I also directed and produced a ton of content, from educational to team trailers to over-the-shoulder. We traded wins with Cloud9, TSM, Echo Fox, Rogue, Misfits, Fnatic, and other top names. Here’s me with Jack from Cloud9, Rick from Echo Fox, Frank from Rogue, Monte Cristo (a legendary esports caster and a friend), Dr Disrespect. at first Overwatch Worlds, at 1st Fortnite big tournament, visiting Seattle Seahawks, winning Critical Ops 1st World Championship, being featured in Motherboard, presenting to investors…
I’ve experienced esports on every level from spectator to player to content aggregator and producer to team owner to sponsorship recipient/biz dev to franchised leagues participant to winning world championships.
1: Spelling
This undoubtedly may seem like a minor thing, but allow me to explain why, specifically in esports, it is not.
When esports was becoming a buzzword in the West in late 2015/early 2016, we started seeing “eSports,” “ESports” and “e-sports” consultants everywhere. It was our version of “web3 marketer” with a mutant pfp, except on LinkedIn. It’s gotten so bad, and it was so strongly tied to the spelling of esports, that it became a meme in the community as strong as pepe meme is in this community.
We made t-shirts about it, wrote blogs, and joked about it on esports broadcasts - it was literally THE meme for years among players, org owners, and tourney organizers, i.e. anyone and everyone building in esports. It became the easiest way to identify outsiders, boomers, and “consultants.” This giveaway was as instant as when our dads ‘try to be cool.’ Eventually, Associated Press adopted grassroots community spelling of “esports” as the official spelling in their style guide in early 2017 and the world started healing.
So it is therefore with extreme surprise that, 6 years later, I stumbled upon not one but two misspellings of the word in this AIP (ESports and E-Sports). This is equivalent of spelling “pepe” as “peipei” or “pypy” unironically. It simply isn’t something that anyone - and I confidently repeat, anyone - who has had any touch with esports community would ever do. Much less defend themselves when told about their mistake. I don’t know anyone in esports who wouldn’t consider this to be a red flag.
2: Numbers
The only relevant stat, imho - and which isn’t presented here - is # of concurrent viewers for each player on this roster (and ideally only when they stream content similar to what this AIP proposes). So I pulled it up. Last 30 days:
Ops: avg 98 concurrents
Innocents: avg 124
Here’s how Ops and Innocents compare to 5 other random “fastest growing” channels I saw on SullyGnome (the site for Twitch stats):
The channels of players listed on this AIP aren’t just getting 2, 3, 5, 10 times less concurrent viewers compared to other active channels with similar follower counts, but 60 to 150 times less. And I was generous to not even count the 0 average viewer count for Innocents in the last 7 days; it seems he hasn’t streamed at all in almost a month.
I see many irrelevant numbers in this AIP, like total prize pool of this or that tournament. But prize pools have as much relevance to this proposal as the market cap of Ethereum has to any given NFT project.
Note: I’m not making any judgement about the players or their character. I assume they’re great people. I am simply saying that data shows their channels as dying/nearly dead. Even without comparing Ops’ channel to peers, you can just zoom out on his channel’s history and see:
It stands out as a red flag to be hiding this most relevant data and presenting these channels as big/thriving when they’re anything but.
Esports context/history
Another known meme, though more among the team owners, organizers, and investors, was that of fake, irrelevant, and/or old numbers. Lots of drama about this to reference.
This reached its peak (arguably) when people caught Overwatch League cheating and counting embedded views as “concurrent viewers” for their first world championship in 2019. Basically, they pushed the player inside ad space to many websites and so even though the web player was muted and people were just scrolling through the site and cared not for some muted video playing inside the ad space, Activision counted it as an engaged viewer. Clever, but not cool.
3: Treatment of others
In web3, we come from different social backgrounds and are of different political beliefs. But we mostly set that aside and focus on our common goals, common beliefs, and try to work with peace and respect towards each other.
I saw Dante’s posts on “competing” AIP’s thread. I use quotes because imho it’s preposterous for any of us to even assign such judgement; only the DAO as a whole can decide if two AIPs are competing (DAO will only fund one) or actually complimentary (DAO will fund both).
An attempt by one member of the DAO to cancel/stop/intimidate other members’ proposal is, imho, abhorrent and in direct violation of the forum’s guidelines.
Not sure how many others agree, but this stands out to me. You don’t see good NFT founders trying to shut down other legitimate NFT founders.
4: Mismatch between budget and timeline/work
This AIP was originally asking for $2.5M. Then, after Demi and team posted their AIP asking for just under $200k, and they refused Dante’s “duel to the death” on Twitter Spaces, this AIP’s requested amount suddenly changed to $200k (+ staking rewards):
Above you can see that the bulleted list / amount of work hasn’t changed, yet the cost inexplicably dropped from 900k to 200k + $ape yield. Yet the AIP also says that $ape yield would be used to fund tournaments in perpetuity, so what would that leave for items on this list?
But even if ALL of $ape yield was used to fund items on this list (and none was used for tournaments, as this AIP claims it will be), then even assuming 100% APY (which is generous), $130K ape / year is, at today’s prices, at most $500K, so that’s 700K total vs 900k of previously requested amount.
Except now you’d be getting this money a whole year later. And yet, the timeline says “Month 6 - Finalize development and audits of the ACE DAO.” How can this be true if the yield won’t be ready by month 12, and even then the total will be 200K below originally-requested $900k AND then you’ll have $0 left for tournaments?
When I see major changes to funding without proper changes to timeline/other parts of the AIP, and all (seemingly) just to keep up with a different AIP - it feels wrong b/c it shows that the proposal itself is a pawn in some game that must be won.
5: Lack of relevant experience
Dante, I’m looking at your LinkedIn and it shows that so far your experience is working at your dad’s non-esports company, is that right? Esports is brutal and hard enough for people with several years in it. Tournaments specifically require a ton of experience, connections, practice. I watched VC-funded game dev companies screw up tournaments despite $millions of investment and many people on their team who did content for years.
I have a friend who now runs all of Riot’s Valorant esports in EU, but when he (and another friend) started… man, it was rough. They started with $0, ran community tournaments, learned on that for over a year, and then started doing small sponsorships. It took 2-3 years and dozens of tourneys for them to be okay at it.
Knowing what it takes to do tournaments (and especially to manage players/content creators), the author having no esports experience makes this proposal far less likely to succeed imho.
6: Every buzzword in one AIP
[quote]…we aim to establish ApeCoin DAO as a key player in the Web 3 ESports arena…[quote]
So - tournaments/league, esports team, “a marketplace for boosting services”, AND a DAO. These are three entirely separate things, and each of them is super hard on its own as a centralized org; adding DAO component just makes each so much harder to pull off.
In general lack of focus is a top reason for any business / project to fail. Here the AIP says you will build everything and the kitchen sink with a budget that isn’t enough to build any one of these things. This very much seems like just throwing every buzzword at the problem without corresponding math, budget, research, or even team.
7: FYRE festival-level ideas/statements
This is beyond impossible with the financials presented in this AIP. Each of these locations is at a very minimum $500k-$1M just for location. This is before paying the team to run the event, equipment rentals, flying players out to event (and lodging them), prize pools, etc.
8: BFC claims
I believe the largest Fortnite esports league by viewership is the one Epic runs. After them I’d guess Dreamhack, then Twitch Rivals, then WSOE if they’re still around, then maybe ESL, though I admit I’ve been out of the loop past few years.
Reading this extraordinary claim re: BFC, I went to dig for data:
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BFC website has expired security cert, so I had to force Chrome to even load the site.
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Twitter account banner shows that there was no separate channel built for BFC, instead existing streamers’ channels were used (hisandherslive for Apex, fatuity for Fortnite). These streamers get far better viewership than Ops (despite far lower follower counts), true, but 600-700 concurrent viewers is still a far, far cry from what Tim, Doc, and other streamers get who organized Fortnite tourneys before (usually in tens of thousands concurrents). So it just makes the claim of “becoming the largest Esports league in the world for Fortnite in regards to viewership” even less believable.
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BFC’s YouTube channel’s best video had 22k views, but if I average out viewership across all videos, I get about 1500 views/video. I can think of many leagues whose native channels get better viewership on that platform.
- Every time I focused on a claim presented in this AIP and tried to find supporting data, the data came up far short of the claim.
- In it’s current form, the AIP talks about building three entirely separate businesses (tournament organizer, esports team, and a marketplace), all made that much more difficult by introducing a DAO component to each.
- Right now, the team is Dante with no experience in esports or tournament organization, plus primarily Ops and Innocents, whose channels are on life support, yet are presented as large channels with millions of followers as if to suggest large viewership.
- There are grand claims of future events/locations/ideas, but all without budget or forethought of implementation.
- The AIP was significantly changed seemingly just to compete with another proposal, yet timeline and workload were not properly adjusted to reduced budgets.
- The author went on to pick a fight with other DAO members, attempting to interfere with their inalienable right to submit a proposal to the DAO.
- The “biggest Fortnite league by viewership” has just 6k YouTube followers and used a few mid-size streamers (with existing viewership) to stream its content and is now taking credit for the viewership.
Hope this is helpful to people in analyzing this proposal or at least in identifying areas to more closely scrutinize. Apologies for the directness/dryness; it’s an incurable illness I suffer from.