esports vs ecommerce

Theory: esports is to traditional sports as ecommerce is to brick & mortar retail.

3 similarities. 1 difference.

Similarity 1: In ecommerce and esports, some people overvalue(d) the in-person experience.

Remember when they said we’d never buy clothes online because we need to try them on first? Remember when they said that shopping was a communal experience? Eventually they said we’d buy small things online, but we’d never buy something expensive like a car online?

For reference, online clothing is a $300B market today. Online cars is at $50B in US alone. I think they underestimated how consumer behavior can change.

They’re making the same mistake with esports. They say the “in-person sports experience” can’t be replicated online. They say it’s about the crowd and community. "You need to see a game in person to get hooked."

I think they underestimate how consumer behavior can change.

The experience is never the exact same, but ecommerce used the advantages it has (endless selection, one-click ordering, never leave home) and developed ways to overcome it’s disadvantages (free returns on everything).

Gaming and esports will do the same thing.

You can play fortnite anytime you want with people around the world. It’s inherently social. It naturally generates video content (without a huge stadium in the middle of a city). Those are big advantages. They’ll figure out ways to overcome the challenges.

Similarity 2: In ecommerce and esports, the stars have more control and the conglomerates/franchises have less.

This creates a unique advantage.

Stars don’t need brands to endorse or franchises to play for. Their celebrity is the brand. The other pieces, like distribution, can be outsourced.

In old days a celeb would endorse a makeup line. Now Kylie Jenner owns her own (& outsources production) In old days LeBron dealt with Dan Gilbert cause he owned the franchise. Ninja basically owns his own franchise (& outsources monetization). Bet LeBron is jealous.

Removing the brand/franchise gatekeepers gave ecommerce an unfair advantage. It sped up experimentation and innovation. It created endless variation. I think it will do the same in esports/gaming.

Similarity 3: The legacy distributors can’t keep up with digitally native ones.

Brick and mortar retailers like Macy’s saw ecommerce as a compliment to their “core” B&M business, even as it began to shrink. They kept asking themselves how to merge the two.

Amazon and Shopify just built digitally native ecommerce.

ESPN's viewership is in decline, but it's just adding esports content in the same format as the World Series.

Twitch & Caffeine don't have legacy constraints. They’ve built digitally native platforms around new consumption patterns. (fwiw overtime has too).

But there's one big difference: Esports is kind of a (profitable) marketing channel for game publishers.

To my knowledge, ecommerce never had anyone that could influence the ecosystem like that.

It’s a wild card that can change incentives. Unclear to me how this impacts things in the long run.

If theory is right, who ends up building the esports stack? Who's the Shopify, Amazon, the 3P shippers, the packaging companies, etc. of gaming/esports?

(Originally published as a tweetstorm on October 5th, 2018)