The company is positioning itself more like a Vice than a Barcelona F.C in the sense that as much as it has an esports team, it wants to be an entertainment business. It’s not a new ambition. In fact, FaZe Clan has been working toward this goal for the last six years. There’s just a lot more pressure on the company to stick the landing now.

“Esports isn’t a lucrative business in the near term,” said FaZe Clan CEO Lee Trink. “That may change in the long-term, but for now the climate remains challenging.”

Digiday caught up with the former record label exec to hear why there’s trouble ahead for esports, how FaZe Clan has hedged against those issues and how he sees the business evolving over the next few years.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Where do FaZe Clan’s content ambitions come from?

It can be traced back to the period when FaZe Clan started to take off 10 years ago when the early founders and team members turned the cameras on themselves and filmed things like the trick shots [in Call of Duty games]. It created an intense fandom around FaZe Clan and was cool at a moment when gamers weren’t necessarily. When I joined six years ago from the entertainment world, it seemed like the logical conclusion to take what we’re known for and accelerate that everywhere to a point where we’re in all forms of content, whether that’s a 30-second video on TikTok to a two hour film. If the audience likes it then there’s value in it. As an organization, we have permission from our fans to go deeper into content.

Why is there so much pressure on building out the content side of the business?

Esports is challenging right now in the sense that it’s hard to look at it from an ROI perspective. So we have to lean into content. We have the ability to take parts of the pie away from traditional players [in entertainment] given the attrition of audiences that’s happening across the industry, whether that’s film, american football or linear TV. To get out of this situation, those businesses have to spend significant money on coming up with concepts —and that’s before they know whether anyone will even care about it. History is littered with examples of entertainment companies having high hopes, spending big to realize them and then suffering huge failures. It means the hits have to pay for the misses. In contrast, we can create content inexpensively, bring it to market quickly in front of a huge audience. Effectively, we’re able to test whether these creative concepts resonate with our …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron