This will make the difference in the market, out of the box venues brings value to the table. We can see it on Cercle innovating in Djs live set by investing in exotic venues. Hosting a tournament in a yacht will crash the space, good luck.
Happy you see the vision thanks for sharing your thoughts, we certainly have the potential here to break the internet!
1 Like
Two esports proposalsâŚ
One DAOâŚ
Only one will survive.
THE APECOIN ESPORTS WARS ARE HERE⌠donât miss part 1 this Sunday with @dante.x âŚ
3 Likes
It will be funny 
They could team up and build something together tho
2 Likes
Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,
@dante.x has responded to our questions and they are in our review once again.
Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments.
Kind Regards,
-Amplify
1 Like
ty for update champ.
-Mr. Hype 
1 Like
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
Iâve 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. Hereâs 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 investorsâŚ
Iâve 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 âeSports,â âESportsâ and âe-sportsâ consultants everywhere. It was our version of âweb3 marketerâ with a mutant pfp, except on LinkedIn. Itâs 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 âconsultants.â This giveaway was as instant as when our dads âtry to be cool.â Eventually, Associated Press adopted grassroots community spelling of âesportsâ 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 âpepeâ as âpeipeiâ or âpypyâ unironically. It simply isnât 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 donât know anyone in esports who wouldnât consider this to be a red flag.
2: Numbers
The only relevant stat, imho - and which isnât 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
Hereâs how Ops and Innocents compare to 5 other random âfastest growingâ channels I saw on SullyGnome (the site for Twitch stats):
The channels of players listed on this AIP arenât 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 hasnât 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: Iâm not making any judgement about the players or their character. I assume theyâre great people. I am simply saying that data shows their channels as dying/nearly dead. Even without comparing Opsâ channel to peers, you can just zoom out on his channelâs 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 theyâre 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 âconcurrent viewersâ 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 Danteâs posts on âcompetingâ AIPâs thread. I use quotes because imho itâs 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 membersâ proposal is, imho, abhorrent and in direct violation of the forumâs guidelines.
Not sure how many others agree, but this stands out to me. You donât 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 Danteâs âduel to the deathâ on Twitter Spaces, this AIPâs requested amount suddenly changed to $200k (+ staking rewards):
Above you can see that the bulleted list / amount of work hasnât 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 todayâs prices, at most $500K, so thatâs 700K total vs 900k of previously requested amount.
Except now youâd be getting this money a whole year later. And yet, the timeline says âMonth 6 - Finalize development and audits of the ACE DAO.â How can this be true if the yield wonât be ready by month 12, and even then the total will be 200K below originally-requested $900k AND then youâll 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, Iâm looking at your LinkedIn and it shows that so far your experience is working at your dadâs 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 Riotâs 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]âŚwe aim to establish ApeCoin DAO as a key player in the Web 3 ESports arenaâŚ[quote]
So - tournaments/league, esports team, âa marketplace for boosting servicesâ, 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 isnât 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 Iâd guess Dreamhack, then Twitch Rivals, then WSOE if theyâre still around, then maybe ESL, though I admit Iâve been out of the loop past few years.
Reading this extraordinary claim re: BFC, I went to dig for data:
-
BFC website has expired security cert, so I had to force Chrome to even load the site.
-
Twitter account banner shows that there was no separate channel built for BFC, instead existing streamersâ 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 âbecoming the largest Esports league in the world for Fortnite in regards to viewershipâ even less believable.
-
BFCâs YouTube channelâs 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 itâs 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 âbiggest Fortnite league by viewershipâ 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; itâs an incurable illness I suffer from.
5 Likes
As an esports guy, I was super happy to see multiple esports proposals as well. Hope youâll be at the Twitter Spaces in a few hours for the Q&A. This kind of discussion is essential to put in front of people, and itâll bring more attention to the DAO.
2 Likes
I am very happy to see new proposals like these, your second proposal was really more coherent than the first. I am anxiously waiting for new publications, it will certainly be of great contribution to Esports.
2 Likes
what was said makes perfect sense
1 Like
Having worked in VC with a focus on investments in gaming, I know it is extremely difficult for an esports org/platform to make money. Itâs one thing to sponsor a team in an effort to increase awareness of the DAO, but creating our own esports team (or platform/DAO for that matter) would likely be a net negative for the Apecoin DAO with regard to time and money. I would however be in favor of a group of DAO members to license the Apecoin logo to use on an existing esports team as a means of publicity, especially if they are active participants within the Apecoin/Yuga communities.
5 Likes
Thank you so much for getting active in the discourse!!!
Looking forward to seeing you around!
3 Likes
What a well put comment Sasha, got stuck at it for more than 20min thatâs for sure 
It was good to see some data presented from a perspective of a guy who has skin in the game stating that itâs near impossible to further develop this AIP at itâs present terms. I was excited to see a tournament taking place at an exotic venue but it is what is.
Thanks for bringing real numbers and expertise to the table pointing the almost infinite blank spots, though critics are necessary to guide decisions and you were respectful during all the time. People will get it.
3 Likes
Hey Art,
We are very happy that Sasha has given us some well thought criticisms, as this allows us to show even more strength on our proposal than without.
Weâve addressed Sashaâs points live in the debate on Mantisâ Twitter space titled âApecoin ESports Warsâ if youâd like to hear us speak with Sasha live.
However we are also finalizing a thoughtful response to these concerns made to post on the forums for those that prefer to read. Most of the points made here are reaching, not relevant, or factually incorrect, but nonetheless will serve as a powerful contextual reference for voters 
2 Likes
Iâd like to state for the record that none of my concerns have been addressed; theyâve simply been given a response. âAddressingâ a concern is giving a satisfactory enough answer to resolve the concern. All of my concerns remain (+ new one re: lie about being bfc founders).
I hoped my earlier post to be my last, but seeing as youâre speaking on my behalf in a deceitful fashion (frankly itâs quite infuriating), Iâll go ahead and record summary of the Spaces here. I hope thereâs a recording that people can listen to and hear for themselves.
List of concerns from previous post:
- Spelling. You tried twisting my words by saying that spelling is the âbiggestâ concern, whereas it is but the first.
- Numbers. Opsâ explanation of showing past achievements and how even $5k tourneys attract decent audience made sense, but the concern around which channels youâre going to be working with then, exactly, if not Opsâ and Innocentsâ channels, and why theyâre not listed here and why those people are not present here in the forums, was not addressed. Thereâs further concern of how any of this viewership can even translate into something productive, i.e. what CTA will be present / whatâs the onboarding workflow, and how apecoin is benefitting.
- Treatment of others. You lied about not wanting to have âcompetingâ AIP removed when thatâs clearly documented here on forums and available for all to see. You then (imho) lied again about being the good guy and wanting to give them a chance since âyour proposal was gonna go to vote first.â Finally, you lied by stating that you have no beef with the other team whereas esports is the leakiest ship of all and I know this to be false (thereâs previous history between you guys). You then said the DAO cannot approve both proposals for some reason, which isnât true (and if your AIP was to go to vote first, as you claimed to have believed at the time, then Iâm not sure why youâd have this concern in the first place - by your own logic this would auto-disqualify the other AIP). So this concern not only was not addressed, it was exacerbated with the lies.
- Mismatch of budget and timeline/work. No attempt to address the actual criticism as written. Also, you lied about not changing budget to match the other teamâs amount - you did. I know this b/c I talked to the person who recommended you to do just that. You can argue semantics - that the amounts are just close enough, etc. But when you ask for 2.5M, then another team asks for 200K in same industry, then you decide theyâre âcompetingâ and challenge them, they refuse to accept, and you then finally go ahead and change your AIP to a very similar amountâŚ
- Lack of relevant experience. Not addressed. Thereâs some old, tangential experience in a one-off event 4 years ago, but Iâm not sure how you think this would possibly address this concern re: experience, especially given the next concern where youâre wanting to build 3 completely separate businesses (each super hard and time-consuming on its own).
- Every buzzword in one AIP. Not addressed nor can be as this is a structural problem with the AIP - any AIP that tries to do 3+ things instead of focusing on one core idea will have this criticism. Lack of focus is one of the most common reasons for projects to fail; itâs not something specific to only this proposal.
- FYRE festival-level ideas. Not addressed, I think we skipped over it due to time constraints if I remember correctly.
- BFC claims. The concern here actually grew when a lie was uncovered during spaces where AIP stated that you (or Ops) founded BFC but turned out you didnât. The actual founder showed up in Spaces and umm corrected you. Iâve made a lot of mistakes in my writing, but I canât say Iâve ever come close to accidentally claiming to be a founder of something I wasnât a founder of, much less doing it three times.
8 Likes