Esports should be less like the NFL, more like poker, says gaming industry veteran Andrew Prell
We spoke to the man hoping to truly take advantage of internet scale in Esports.
While Esports remains a very lucrative business today, gaming industry veteran and founder/CEO of Convergence of 4 Dimensions LLC Andrew Prell sees one major problem with how it's handled. At CES, we chatted with Prell about how his vision for Esports could redefine its future.
"We're changing it from the current 25-year-old model that I would say is like the NFL," Prell explained. "Where, as we speak today, neither of us can imagine us making the Super Bowl next year. So why would you teach that to the 3.8 billion game players out there? What we want to do is change it more to the mindset that the World Series of Poker taught poker players. Not only can you make their tournament, you could possibly win their tournament."
His plan? Create a full cross reality game that allows tens or even hundreds of thousands of users to compete in tournaments at any one time, with the potential to fill out stadiums. "I mean, you had a concert inside of a video game with 12.8 million participants," Prell said, referencing the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite. "So that's internet scale. So what we're going to do is what we're calling a cross-reality team tournament. Stadium scale."
Prell himself has a long history with video games, virtual reality, and multiplayer titles. "In 92, I created Wolfenstein VR from the source code of Wolfenstein 3D from John Carmack of id Software," he explained. "Then I decided, hey, this needs to be multiplayer. It didn't matter that there wasn't any multiplayer games. I had to come up with blind device communication theory to make it multiplayer, and I created CyberTech."
From there, he went onto work with the folks who made a little known game called Doom, the creators of the original Xbox, and more. You can check out Prell's full story and how he hopes to redefine Esports in our full interview below: