The Press Box - Ep. 209: Explaining the Strike and a Facelift for E-sports

Episode Date: November 18, 2016

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion talk to prolific video game voice actress Jennifer Hale about the ongoing voice actors strike (2:24), the unique challenges of voicing video games (8:07), and infiltrating a formerly male-oriented field (21:54). Then, they bring on Nate Nanzer, Blizzard Entertainment's global director of Overwatch e-sports, to discuss how the company is trying to fuse its popular e-sport with the infrastructure of traditional sports in the forthcoming Overwatch League (25:45). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Today's episode of Channel 33 is brought to you by Seekek, the presenting sponsor for my podcast, as well as the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling tickets for sports and music. With just two taps on your phone, you can instantly buy Seekkeek tickets to an event, and you can enter that event just using your phone. No paper tickets. Drop your old ticket app. Use one that's built for 2016.

Download the free SeatGeek app or go to Seekekek.com. Hello and welcome to Achievement-oriented Channel 33's gaming podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg and I'm staff writer for the ringer.com, joined as always by my fellow writer for the ringer, Jason Concepcion. Hello, Jason. Hello, Ben. We're still doing it. We're still managing to put out a podcast somehow. Yeah, in fact, there are not enough weeks for the podcast that we wanted to. I'm like scouring the schedule. Can we fit in two there? We were originally going to take Thanksgiving week off because it's going to be a short week for the site.

but now we're not because we have too much to talk about. We're just trying to cram in podcasts anywhere we can because there are too many games to get to and too many people to talk to. So next week we're going to do a very game-heavy podcast. We're going to talk about dishonored and watchdogs, which we've been playing. So if you want to play along with us,

you have until early next week to finish those. But today we're going to talk to a couple of guests. So later on in this episode, we're going to talk to Nate Nanzer, who is Blizzard's global director for Overwatch e-sports. And we touched on this last week, but not at length. This won't be a really Overwatch-specific conversation. It kind of is, but we won't get into the nitty-gritty of the game so much as we will.

Blizzard's larger efforts to build an e-sports league that is like traditional sports leagues in some ways that e-sports leagues haven't been thus far, because that's pretty fascinating to us. And it's also good because you're the only one who knows anything about Overwatch right now. For now, Ben. For now. That will change. That will change. But first, we wanted to talk about an issue that's been in the news for a few weeks. The video game voice actors strike. So we are joined now by someone whose voice you know very well, whether you realize it or not. Her name is Jennifer Hale. And if you go to her Wikipedia page, which I highly recommend and just scroll down for maybe a few minutes or so, that's about how long it will take to read all of her video game roles from Naomi Hunter and Metauby. Metal Gear Solid to Bastila Sean and Kotor to Commander Shepard and Mass Effect to Samus in the Metroid. Sorry to spoil the Samus reveal in Metroid. For those of you just playing through it on NES Classic, Jennifer, thanks for coming on. Yes. Hi. Very happy to be here. I just noticed that you and I are both dual Canadian American citizens, which I feel like is

it's an enviable position to be in these days. You know, what's interesting is actually I was planning to move up in a couple years, just because, you know, I just want to be hanging out with my family also for a little while. So we want to ask you a little bit about your history and voice acting and video games, but we will start with the issue of the day, the strike between the video game voice actors in the Screen Actors Guild and some selected video game publishers has been going on for almost a month now. After a 19-month negotiation, and you've been involved in this process and you've been striking as well. So are you surprised that it came to this? I guess at what point did you get a sense that this was

not going to be resolved in time? You know, we tried until the very end. We tried really, really hard. We bent over backwards. And what surprised me was that they have a version of the contract that has, you know, that they wanted to present. And then we have our version where performers get a bonus only if a game is a hit, you know, and it doesn't kick in until too million units or 2 million subscribers or, you know, the 2 million mark. And what we, when we went in and said to them, tell you what, how about both contracts are available to all employers? So just let us show everybody the option of your version or our version. So that way, you never, ever, ever have to employ us under our version. You can always use the version you love. And we thought

that was a pretty reasonable offer. And they said, no. I was, I was, I was, stunned honestly i was like what what and so you know because we basically agreed to pretty much everything else that you know but they just they just dug in and said no and i think part of way they dug in goes back to a it's two pieces i mean the part of this that is the hardest for me is my friends who are directors and and production staff and you know people who work on the games on the other side you know having to you know suffer as well that's killing me that's killing all of us i i can't stand it the other piece of that puzzle is these are large corporations there's 11 corporations that were striking you know corporate corporate interests that we're striking against and i the people that we

work with day to day are super awesome and we love them it's really the corporate interest kind of summed up in one interaction that one of our people had with them i'm not going to name names this person works, you know, as we say on both sides, the glass. This person performs as well as does production and direction stuff. And I guess the executive in the conversation didn't realize that and said to this person, I'm not giving them a bonus. That comes out of my bonus. And I think that's what they're concerned about. They don't want to see this trickle-down effect for the rest of the team. And we would love to see it, but only on the most successful games, you know. Now, the other beautiful side of this is I worked on a game yesterday. And I can't because we have a whole contract out there for these,

there's just 11 companies that we're striking against. There's so many other companies that we're incredibly excited about building relationships with and working with. And we're actually working really, really closely with the indie community to make sure that our contract is friendly to them and works exactly the way they need it to work, you know, as closely as we can get it. So that's super exciting. Could you talk about some of the issues that are, separating the two sides right now? What are, what are the things you guys are really that you just can't, you won't compromise on these core issues? The only issue, well, let me tell you what we went in asking for. We went in asking for four things. We went in asking for, you know, the, you know, the, we call it

the contingent compensation, I think it's a technical term. Basically, when a game's a hit, can we get a little bit of money? Like, you know, first it's like a quarter of a session fee and then another half of a session fee at the next level of big hit, you know, and it totals up to, I think, a total of like 30, just over three grand. I want to say 33 or $3,600 somewhere in that zone. That's the first, that's one of the four things we asked for. The other thing we asked for was transparency. Two of the things we asked for were money and two were safety. Transparency was the other sort of money-oriented issue. We could be negotiating for, you know, what a call of duty, 8,00. And we wouldn't know it. We wouldn't know because they won't tell us.

Now, it's crazy that they won't tell us because we sign non-disclosure agreements anyway. We don't, like, I'm not telling you what I worked on yesterday or who I worked for because I just don't. Until it's out and until they announce, I don't say a word. You know, that's just how we're trained. So that's transparency is only fair. And honestly, it's an issue across all parts of industry these days, every single one of them. You know, what's in my food? I'm not telling you.

Really? Okay. And the other two issues we wanted were safety issues. One was vocal stress. And we wanted to be really objective about this. So we consulted with doctors. We consulted with speech therapists. We consulted with OSHA, the occupational safety and health administration.

We tried to get really objective and really factual about this because we got members who can't work for months because they're having to have surgery from something that happened in a session. And this is not infrequent. I know I have a friend of mine who literally bled was coughing up blood during a session. Wow. Because, well, you know, I mean, imagine the low end of that scale is you go out to meet a buddy at a bar and it's kind of loud and you talk all night and you're kind of raw the next day, right? Most games happen at that level. It's like, hey, so we're talking over stuff because we got to talk over stuff because there's a lot of action happening right now. And sometimes I have to run, you know? Yeah. Like, and then you've got a lot of lines to do in that zone and you've got to do them well. So the player has a really good experience. So vocal stress is an issue. Vocal safety is a big issue. And the other safety issue affects some of our most important people on the mocap set, which is our stunt brothers and sisters. We wanted to, it required that there be a stunt coordinator on set. We have actors who have been asked to do some crazy stuff,

and there's not a stunt coordinator present. And part of this is that game companies started as tech companies, right? Right. But they've evolved into entertainment companies. every single other aspect of the entertainment industry understands what it is. You know, that it's entertainment and you got to provide A, B, C, and D to keep everybody safe and keep it all cool and keep it all working, you know. Game companies are like, no, no, we're not entertainment.

No, we're not. No, we're not. Now, they're making crap tons of money entertaining people. And listen, I have no problem with anyone making crap tons of money. I think it's a beautiful thing. but there's a culture in corporate America today of what I call unconscious, disconnected capitalism. This is all part of this kind of accidental war on the middle class. You know, let's squeeze that last dollar out so we can have a big, a nicer dividend than the other guy to our stockholders. Let's squeeze this out and give our corporate Joe his bonus, you know.

Wow. And you really have to look around. and see what that's doing to the middle class. And it's not just the people, they forget that the people that they pay are also the people who pay them because they're the people who buy their stuff too. But when they can't afford it, that equation's a little broken. So one would think that since it seems like fairly small amounts of money are at stake in this particular negotiation with a very small number of games,

probably per year, that one of the concerns on the publisher's side is that if you win here, if they concede on this issue with you, then everyone else who's involved in a video games production is going to make the same demand. And, you know, maybe it's insignificant for voice actors alone. But if 10 other types of people who are involved in the production of a game start making the same demand, then maybe that eventually cuts into the bottom line. Is that kind of the best guess for why they're holding the line here? I'd say that's an excellent guess because we took everything else off the table.

We took everything else off the table. And they came back and they said, no, we'll give you a bonus. We'll give you 50 bucks if you do three sessions, which is rare on a single game for the majority, unless you're a lead, you know. We'll give you this extra bonus when you hit this number of sessions and this extra bonus when you hit this number of sessions. And it totals about 960 bucks total, ever. And it's all up front. but most people will never qualify for those bonuses based on how typical sessions run. They were very smart in their structuring of that for their purposes.

So that was sort of, you know, the gist of their, you know, back end proposal, which was a front end, not a back end. And we now keep in mind, like I said, we took all our other requests off the table. They just wouldn't consider them. They said, just trust us. We'll provide all that. Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm not comfortable with that.

But in the interest of bending over backwards to make this work and not strike and not hurt all these people, we said, okay, we'll take everything off the table except how about this? We see your version of the contract you want to have. We'll let you have that as long as you let us present to each employer our version as well. So they get to pick. And they said, no, that's how threatened they are by this whole concept. I mean, the thing I'm most excited about, honestly, is that this is really. spurred us to go out into the indie community and we're, I think we're taking on in the next couple days actually a big celebration of indie games. I mean, there are, there's so much

volume of creativity and cool stuff and awesness in the indie community. We're really excited about partnering up with that. And I think that over time, if they, if the corporation stay stubborn, you know, it won't, it really, we're going to feel that less and less as we create more partnerships in the indie community. And let me be clear, our issue is not with devs. It's with these corporations. The devs are our partners and our friends, are very good friends in many cases. You know, there are allies. We have an incredible relationship with them. The teams, they're amazing. I mean, what we're looking at is a sea change and a paradigm shift. The tech culture eats its young. You know, it chews up its employees with insane,

hours and insane requirements. So they burn out. And it threatens them if they don't comply with, well, look, there's 20 people in line for your job, whatever. You don't want to do your, you know, 60, 80, 90 hours a week. Too bad, pansy, go home. You know, that's, that's kind of, I don't know. I don't think it's very sustainable. From the corporation's side, they might say something like, obviously the voice actors are very important crafts people in the field, but how do we justify paying them under a different system than the art director or the coder, etc. How is what you do different than those other jobs within this industry? My answer is, I'm only speaking for myself here. I am not speaking for SAG or anybody else. I don't think we are any different. And I honestly

think the whole system needs to change. But I know that's a very threatening answer. And trust me, please let me reiterate. I'm only speaking about my opinion. I think a sustainable system is one that rewards everybody who contributes. And let me say a little something about this whole money conversation. Many, many times, we as actors, like, let's back it up a little bit.

Our session fee is like $8,000, 800 something, right? It's not, and it's for four hours, and people are like, what if I made $800 every four hours? Oh my God, what the hell is your problem? I'm like, you know what? Let me just explain something to you. To get that four hours of work,

work, people do 15 to 40, 50 auditions. And those auditions take a couple of hours apiece to drive there, do the audition, you know, drive home and train for it and study for it and be ready for it, right? And even if you record from home, you got to study for it, you got to go to class, you got to get ready. You add up all those hours and you divide that by 825. It's not the best hourly wage in the world. However, we chose it. None of us are complaining. The rest of the entertainment industry understands if that's how it works, right? So I can't tell you how many times it's happened lately. One of our actors has said, hey, is there any more than the 825 for the four hours? Can we just do a little more? And they go, oh, no, no, our budget's really, really tight. And they

show up, and they're in the same game side by side with an A, B, or C-level celebrity who got paid five figures for the same four hours. So the money was there. And the other pieces, of that to add insult to injury. A lot of the time, the vocal stunt work, shall we call it, the screams, the death sounds, the this kind of thing, said celebrity chooses not to do it or can't do it or is concerned about the impact on their voice of doing it. So, you know, executive says, don't worry about it. We'll get the voice actor to do it. We have to stunt double for the person who got paid all that. And yeah. And their assertion is, that we don't matter. And I would ask the fans, I don't know. Do we matter? I kind of feel like we do.

Right. And of course, a lot of those other fields are not unionized, so they might just not be in a position to take the step that you're taking, even if they deserve it or even if they should or would eventually. And to circle back to your question, man, it's a whole climb. And I'm available to be anyone's ally in that climb. I think, I mean, this speaks to a much broader question in our culture, which is this whole thing of squeezing the bottom line in order to eke out a higher profit, but you've got to follow the money. Where is that money going? It's going somewhere.

And we've got a whole level of derivative businesses, Wall Street, you know, stock, you know, people who take a commodity and then cut themselves out a piece of the profit margin, stockbrokers, fund managers, all these people, they're not actually creating something. they're distributing it and handing it off and making money to it. They're sort of, you know, I don't know, they're parasitic businesses, some of them in my mind. No offense to stockbrokers, I think there's great value in much of what you do, but we're getting to be too many levels of derivation here, you know.

And you've been called, you know, the Merrill Streep of the form and which is so much. So much. Thank you, Tom Bissell. I love you so much. That's such an honor. You've, I think, said that you kind of valued that ability to fly under the radar at times you can go to a convention and walk across the hall and you will not be mobbed necessarily. As long as my name tags backwards, no one knows it's me. Right. So I guess that can be a good thing at times. And then this is sort of the other side of that in that that also makes it easier to take your work for granted.

Yes, it does. You're absolutely right. That's an excellent point. You know, however, when I look at things like there have been several Kickstarter projects in the last couple years, last few years, that I and other. people have participated in and one of them I participated in was, I think, two and a half days from the expiration of its time to raise money and they were only 70, 75% of the way there. I signed on and announced and they went, they popped up over their raise within, you know, a day or two, a couple days. And I see that happen with my peers all the time. We do bring value.

And I think the Indy and the direct community sees it. I really think the, and I think that that community sees it for the artistic team and the production team as well. I think the place where it's not seen is in the corner offices. The directors see it. The people on set see it and we see their value. I think the disconnect is in the upper levels. And that's pretty clear from what I'm seeing. Like there are so many people signing on to our contract, our interim contract that we get to use during the strike going, yeah, let's play. Yeah, you guys have value. Let's do this. You know, sure, these terms are reasonable. Can we adjust this and this? And we go, sure. You know, away we go. I think it's just the disconnect. And you see it everywhere, don't you?

Well, I'll be voting for you in 2020. God help me know. God help me know. But I do hope everybody out there gets involved. I think we've seen that, well, you know what? Okay, let's just circle this to the bigger picture for a second. Since you brought it up, you know, there was sort of a radical event in America last week. And that event happened because of disconnect. Like we love all this cool technology and all the stuff that globalization has brought us. It's been beautiful and amazing and so cool. But we forgot to look at the cost. And the cost is all these cities in what they call flyover America, you know, between New York and L.A.

All those cities, oh my God, I'm going to cry. they have lost everything. They don't have that big factory anymore. They don't have that big company in there anymore because they went somewhere else to squeeze out that bottom line, you know, and to stay competitive. And I think, I just feel like if you reevaluated some of these corporate salaries and some of this money

that goes into the walls, you know, just the what it takes to go public and what it takes to add this thing to our public, whatever, and what it takes to make our dividend look all fancy, and our stock price go blah blah. You look at all those insulary costs and you go, wow, what that's cost us is that this town in America, the big business went out of business, and then all the little Main Street businesses went out of business. The coffee shops are gone.

The grocery stores are barely hanging on. Their suicide rate is double the rest of the country. Their heroin addiction rates are climbing. And it's because there's no freaking hope because no one sees them, you know? And it's part of this disconnect. It's this disconnect is disconnect. Disconnect is what's gotten us here at the strike. And disconnect is what's devastated enough of America to make the kind of choices that we've been making.

So we need to connect. And you've almost single-handedly made the field less male-oriented, I think, just by being in such an enormous number of video games. I do like to take the boy's job. Just saying. You're just raising the percentage all by yourself. Oh, no, there's lots of us out there, man. You've got some amazing women. You got Kari Walgren.

You got Sarah L. Molly, you got Laura Bailey. You got, like, there's so many. And Ashley Birx, everyone had forgotten to mention who's incredible and I love Vanessa Marshall. Like there's so many, Gray Delisle, Tara Strong. Yeah. And since maybe your best known role or recent role is as Commander Shepard, and I

know that there were some unique challenges of being the female half of a unisex character in a sense in that, you know, you couldn't necessarily go off script if you wanted to because Mark Muir, who's doing the male version. of Shepard has to. We couldn't vary by a letter or a punctuation mark. Right. Yes. So it must be difficult, but do you think it's feasible for that to be the standard? Should it be the standard? Should just every video game offer that option? Or do you think? I think they should from a number of perspectives. I think they should because there's a crap ton of female gamers out there starving for things to play and to identify with. I think they should also because, I mean, let's circle back around to

what this all started from, which is the strike, which is essentially a monetary conversation, you're leaving money on the table if you don't, you know. There's a lot of women out there that want to be that, you know, play that character. There's a lot of girls coming along. There's a lot of, a lot of money out there to be had if you want to broaden your perspectives. And also I invite everyone to throw out their gender identifications when casting. Like, you know, take the gender, take the, you know, all racial, take all social identifiers off of things, unless someone's talking about their anatomy. It's unnecessary. So did you know you were working on a Mass Effect game when you were doing that game?

Or you were just completely in the dark? I just knew I was working on a game. They don't usually tell us what we're working on. And frankly, I don't usually focus on it. That information is for my agent. What I need to know, there are things that I need to know. I need that transparency because I need to know the world I'm occupying. I need to know the culture of that world.

I need to know the rules of that world, how it operates. And the more I know, the more research I can do and the more I can bring to the party. All right. Well, we were tempted to ask you to do voices. We were tempted to ask you to do death sounds. I would not do it. I don't know what you expect for me, people. I don't even know why you're asking.

In your New Yorker profile a few years ago, you said it's really fun to die. It is fun to die. I like to hear all different sorts of death sounds. Like throat slashed electrocution. You are at least partly on strike, so we will not insist that you do any voices for us right now. You're so kind. I had a pretty demanding session yesterday. I can't say anything about it because it'll give it away, but let's just say it was occupying a part of my register.

I rarely occupy, so I'm grateful for the break today. All right. Well, we appreciate your time. Everyone can find Jennifer on Twitter at J-Hill tweets and in every other video game. Oh, my gosh. Thanks, you guys. And listen, I just, I want to say thank you for giving us a voice. And I want to say thank you to everybody out there for playing because you're half the equation.

And without you, we don't get to play. And we're all most grateful. Thanks, Jennifer. Thank you. Thanks, you guys. All right. So now we'll take a very quick break. And we'll be right back with Nate Nanzer from Blizzard.

Hey, guys, this is Andy Greenwald. This week I talked to Stephen Falk, the creator and showrunner of the FXX comedy, You're the Worst. You can listen to the full show by subscribing to The Watch. on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking now to Nate Nanzer. He's the global director of Overwatch Esports. And we're going to be talking to him about the new Overwatch League that Blizzard is starting. Hello, Nate.

Thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Talk a little bit about this, the Overwatch League. I think it's certainly interesting idea. It's the most sports take on e-sports yet. You're going to have teams in cities. You're going to have a draft of sorts. You're going to have a combine.

Talk about why this story. structure. When we sat down and started to think about Overwatch esports, like, it was very clear early on when we're making Overwatch that this is going to be an incredible game and an incredible competitive experience. So we started really early on about thinking, like, what do we want this to look like as an esport? And myself and all the other guys on Team 4, the Overwatch team, we're all big fans of traditional

sports. And we were kind of sitting down and saying, like, what are the things that we think are really cool from traditional sports that we want to bring into Overwatch Eastports. So we sort of over the last year and a half really dug in and did a lot of research around the structures across NFL, NBA, MLS, Premier League, even looking at things like F1 and UFC and just doing like an audit of traditional sports and sort of came up with the things that we think are really important from traditional sports around having a local connection to teams, having a clear path to pro. And we really wanted to bring that to

Overwatch e-sports. And we also wanted to make sure, though, that we were, you know, staying authentic and true to e-sports as it's existed for the last 20 years. So that's sort of how we kind of wanted to bring the two worlds together, pick and choose the things that we thought worked best from both traditional sports and e-sports and turn that. And that sort of evolved into the Overwatch League. And we're, you know, really excited. We spent, obviously, we've been doing esports as long as anyone and have great relationships with all of the, the team owners that exist today in e-sports. And we've spent a ton of time talking to them. And it was very clear to me early on that one of the challenges that e-sports has as this sort of online global phenomenon

is the team owners are all sort of competing for the same pool of global sponsorship money. And if you go and you go and you do an audit of how do the traditional sports teams make money, you see that there's a tremendous amount of revenue that they create from in-venu and local sponsorship and activations. And, you know, it's really important to us that Overwatch League players are the most celebrated in the world. And we think the best way to do that is to make sure that the teams have stability and the teams are able to make money. and we think the best way to do that is to unlock pools of revenue that don't exist for owners today in e-sports by localizing it in that way. So sorry, that's a super long answer to your question. But that's great.

You're talking about looking at different leagues, MLS, NBA, NFL. Have you, do you have an idea of what your franchise structure would look like? For instance, MLS uses a single entity structure where essentially all the separate teams are owned by the league? or are you looking at something different like an NBA or NFL structure where there's actual owners, they own the teams and then they buy into the franchise with a fee or something? That process is, you know, we just sort of kicked off our team sales process at BlissCon. We had, you know, about 120 different owners and representatives of both e-sports teams and traditional sports teams out to hear a little bit more detail about the league and sort of

just start that conversation. You know, I think the one difference between traditional sports and e-sports is, we actually own the sport. Like, it isn't going to be the type of structure where the teams own the league. Blizzard will own the league. But we do want, also, like, it was, you know, back to sort of your original question around borrowing things from traditional sports. I think one of the things that we definitely wanted to borrow from traditional sports is

creating a truly investable asset that, you know, ideally is appreciating over time and becoming more valuable. And, you know, you look at, you know, things like in traditional sports, you look at the, the value of teams, you know, like the NFL alone, I think the, you know, revenue aside, the aggregate value of the teams is like $62 billion. So we want to be able to create value for stakeholders and investors. And the way we do that is, you know, guaranteed spot in the league, share in the economic. So it's going to be more like that sort of NFL NBA model,

that the teams won on the league, was zero to the league. And how do you try to ensure that there's stability and continuity and that a fan base in a local market can really forge a bond with its team and its roster? Do you envision there being a ton of turnover? Or could you see the same players returning to a team, you know, year after year? That's our hope. I mean, I think that's one of the challenges in esports today is teams don't really have any stability and therefore players don't have any stability.

So we think first, like step one is make sure that the teams that are in the Overwatch League have a stability and they have a guaranteed spot in the league. So that's step one. Step two is making sure that we create a healthy environment for players. And we think, you know, finding best in class owners and operators and giving them stability is going to create a better environment and more stability for players. We also are looking at things like. We want to make sure that, you know, being an Overwatch player is a real career and there's guaranteed salary, there's benefits, you know, the sort of things that you see in traditional sports.

We want to bring that to the Overwatch League as well. And I think that stability, we hope, will result in players having longer careers, staying with teams, building those bonds. It's like I grew up, I grew up in San Diego in the 80s and early 90s. And like Tony Gwyn, I had like 47 Tony Gwyn posters on my wall, right? It wasn't just because Tony Gwyn was the greatest left-handed hitter in the history of baseball. It's because Tony Gwynn was also from San Diego and like, or Long Beach, close enough. And like it was, you know, it was like this thing where it was like, wow, our best player. he's like he's one of us right and you see that you know i think you see that bond with players like

stephen gerard and liverpool and you see that bond like all throughout traditional sports is like wow that's so cool that like our hometown team you know the star our star player is also from our hometown and we hope that that things like that can actually emerge in the overwash league that haven't really emerged in in esports before that should have the the ultimate benefit of creating a better fan experience where fans know that Like, if I decide that I'm a fan of Los Angeles in season one, I don't have to worry about Los Angeles not being in the league in season two. And I can really, like, invest in my energy and my time in becoming a fan of this team.

And, you know, stability is just so important we think to grow this in a responsible, sustainable way. So does that mean we're not going to see relegation like we see in, like, illegal legends type league? Yeah, so relegation is, I think, is an awesome system. Like, I'm a huge, I'm a huge European football fan. And if you just look at, like, English football, the Football Association in England was founded, I think, 153 years ago. It's 153 or 156, something like that.

And there are, there's actually nine divisions in English football, but there's actually eight that path, theoretically, path up to the Premier League. But like that length of time that people in playing the sport and that level of engagement from, you know, Division 1 all the down to Division 8, like that takes time to build that infrastructure. That didn't pop up overnight, right? And I think relegation works really well when you have an infrastructure like that where if a team gets relegated, they don't have to essentially completely disband and go out of business. we think that the best way to build a new sport is to not have relegation. So our plan is to have guaranteed spots in the league and the teams have that stability where they can not worry about we need to win these three games just so we can stay in the league.

They can plan more long term. Now, I know that's a super hot topic right now in the League of Legends community because a lot of fans complain it saying, like, oh, I won't watch if there's no relegation. and relegation is what keeps it competitive. I mean, I would offer, I think if you look at, I think it's the last 10 years, there's been seven different teams that have won the Super Bowl. And in the last 100 years of WALLEGO,

there's been four different teams that have won that title. And what you end up with in those relegation systems is there's money that's going to enter the ecosystem. And the money tends to go to the teams that are the most stable and have the best chance of staying up. So you have Real Madrid and Barcelona who are constantly, it's like a revolving d'Ordo see who comes in first, and then you have Salta Vigo or, you know, these lower teams that are struggling to stay up.

They're struggling to make it to remain competitive. And it's because of the money disparity is so huge. So we think having the closed ecosystem is going to be best to grow this and to grow the sport. Like does that mean, you know, if this is a wild success in 25 years from now, if we have crazy engagement we wouldn't consider relegation like no we totally consider it but we think right now to build a new esport that's the best way to do it and i think it's it's our job uh running this league to make sure that the teams remain competitive i i have the same concerns about no relegation of you know you don't want to end up with teams you know tanking for a better spot for future players or any of those

sorts of things right so like but like there's way you know i think there's there's there's things that we can do to ensure the teams remain competitive. And as we start to roll out more information around the league, we'll start to share some of those levers that I think we can pull. And how do you envision this working as a spectator experience, both in person? You know, would you want there to be an Overwatch arena in each city where every game takes place or would it be a rotating kind of thing?

And I guess more broadly, does this need to be distributed in a certain way? Do you need to have this on a TV network? Or do you not need that? Can it just be on Twitch or live online and find a large enough audience to sustain it? You know, we want, like, reach is really important. Like, we're growing a new sport, right? We want to make sure that people are able to view the content. I think nothing is really off the table for us, though.

I mean, we haven't, we're not, we haven't announced anything about our distribution plan. We'll talk more about that in the next few months. But, you know, we're, we're open to multiple platforms for this content to be viewed on. In terms of the in-person spectator experience, I mean, that's something we're super excited about. Like, when we, you know, I'm lucky enough that I live in Southern California where there's lots of e-sports that happens. But, you know, if I lived in Milwaukee, like, when do I ever get to watch a live e-sport event? You know, it's really like L.A., Shanghai, Seoul, like, you know, Berlin. Like, there's very few cities in the world where there's regular live e-sports content that you can actually go, you know, buy a ticket and go see.

and we think and I'm pretty confident that there's millions of folks all around the world who would love to be able to go watch an Eastport event but it just doesn't exist in their in a drivable distance from where they are so one of our you know ideas around having these city-based teams is that we hope in the future you know this is not a 2017 thing but we hope that in the future we'll get to the point where every single team in the Overwatch League actually does play home games in front of a live audience and that teams actually travel around and play each other. I think that's going to go a long way to fostering rivalries. Like, you know, think about like, if we could have New York-Boston rivalry

in the Overwatch League, like, that would make me, that would make me so happy. That kind of stuff is hard to do when fans from those two cities never, you know, get to get to interact with each other. And I think that's really one of the things driving our thinking around city-based teams is a world in the hopefully not too distant future where teams are playing home games and they're traveling around and we really get that. The fans are able to engage with the content in a way that's different than they engage with it today. And, you know, I mean, I'm sure you guys have been to an esport event. Like, every time I go, it's so exciting.

You know, it's such a different experience. Like you actually, you know, this experience that can be, like, it's social, I guess, in the way that you can chat with others and Twitch chat or things like that. but actually going and sharing that experience and high-fiving the person sitting next to you, like all of those things that we love about traditional sports, like bringing that to e-sports, I think, is a really important step to broadening the audience for it. You're talking about some of the global reach of the game, watching the World Cup, recently Overwatch World Cup,

struck by how many of the really exciting players are international players. You know, you've got Shatterburn from Russia, Tivik, who's Swedish, Miro from South Korea. How do you plan to incorporate those players into this system? Are there going to be international teams? Is there going to be a way to bring those players over, allow them to play for a city-based team? Yeah, so, like, we weren't the best players in the world to play in the Overwatch League. If, you know, if there's an L.A. team, it doesn't mean that all six starters for L.A.

must be from Los Angeles or even from California or even from the United States. That's one of those things as we start to roll out more plans around the league. We'll have more details on this. That's certainly our view is that, you know, a player like Shadowburn is going to be highly sought by every single team in the Overwatch League. And that's a situation that we want to create. We want to really create the biggest and best stage we can for the best Overwatch players in the world regardless of where they're from. And what do you envision an Overwatch combine looking like? Because that's maybe the most fascinating part of all this to me.

Well, yeah, so I think it's going to be awesome. So, you know, right now, I get asked this question a lot. Like, how do I become an e-sport athlete? Or how do I get assigned to an e-sport team? And I do not have a good answer to that question. It's really hard, right? Whereas, like, when I grew up playing baseball, like, actually, it's really really hard to be a pro baseball player, but I actually knew all the things I needed to do. It was very clear, right?

Right. And in sports, it's like, I don't know, get really good on ladder and, like, pray that somebody notices you and, like, finds you on Twitter. and it's really hard. We also think that it's silly that e-sport teams have to, like obviously scouting is an important part of a team's competitive advantage

that they could have over another team. But we think that we have all the data. Like we know who's good. And Blizzard should be playing an active role in making sure that the best players are bubbling up to the Overwatch League. So the idea of the Combine is we want to reward the players

who make Maybe people don't know, but maybe they're incredibly good in their top hunt 100 on ladder, people who are playing in like amateur and grassroots tournaments who are on their way up. And we want to have a way where we can sort of keeping our eye across all those ecosystems, having the best players bubble up and then come to an event where, you know, it's it's not about, you know, who can bench press 225 pounds the most time. but it's it's about understanding

who the whole player is I think Overwatch one of the most awesome things about us in e-sport is it rewards teamwork and coordination typically over just individual skill like you have to work really well

together as a team like you saw that you know certainly in the World Cup with the South Korean team that had just crazy synergy so the combine is about understanding like obviously things like who's really good at certain heroes

reaction times and things like that. Obviously, we want to understand cognitive ability. I think the world will be shocked to see, you know, maybe our Overwatch League players can't run a 4-240, but I bet you they'll score really, really good on all the cognitive testing. But the idea is a way for owners and scouts and general managers and all the teams to come and actually interact in person with the players and find out, like, who do they think?

work good with their team, who's going to have good synergy, who's maybe a bit prickly and hard to deal with, like, all those things that you need to know about that full player. And honestly, like, looking at the NFL Combine and actually, you know, doing a lot of what they do. You know, they do cognitive testing. They do one-on-one interviews. Like, we're able to bring a lot of that stuff to the Overwatch League Combine and really make sure that we're probably about the best players in that. It also gives us a chance to really start doing some storytelling around those players that we think could be pretty cool. Back to Ben's question about volatility. And this seems to me it's really an obstacle for all e-sports.

Unlike basketball or baseball or traditional sports, your game will ostensibly change. You know, every few years, they'll be an Overwatch 2 and Overwatch 3 or an update, something that beyond just the normal meta changes that happen with each kind of like update. How do you bridge that volatility? to create a sustained league over time? It's a great question. I think you see, you know, even games, like think about Counterstrike. People have been playing Counterstrike completely for 20 years. There's been three major, four really.

And like, it's still kind of fundamentally of the same sport, though, right? Like, I think that's really important. And I know it's something that we're thinking about, like, as Overwatch involves, there will be new heroes. There will be new maps. There will be new game modes. Like, all of those things are going to happen. But fundamentally, that core sport, I think will always be there. And it's our job to obviously, as the game evolves, evolve the league around that.

And, you know, be constantly looking at rules, be constantly looking at the way that we play the game competitively and making sure that that's evolving as well. But I mean, you see that in traditional sports. I think in traditional sports, it moves a little bit more slowly. but, you know, I think the 24 second clock in basketball is a good example. There's lots of examples from commercial sports. And, you know, like, I think you also see in traditional sports, the leagues that can't evolve and adapt are struggling right now. Like, I love baseball.

I do not often have three and a half hours. Tell that. Don't say that's abandoned. Like, you know, it's the, and I don't think, I don't think you say, you say, see the typical millennial or Gen Z are sitting down and spending three and a half hours watching watching anything. So I think the things evolve and, you know, we, that's our job, I think, as the maker of the game is to make sure that we're evolving the sport along with the franchise.

And if the league gets established and becomes a success, are there any ways in which it would complicate your decision making for the majority of players, you know, if you're taking into account the pro game, which is just maybe a completely different elite level, will you have to balance those things? Or do you not anticipate that being a conflict? No, I don't think it's going to be a conflict. I mean, we already do that today. Like, we, you know, when we make balance changes in Overwatch, it's not just for low-level players. It's not just for high-level players. We try to do it for, you know, understand that we have, you know, 20 million people playing this game right now. I don't think that's going to be a concern for us.

I mean, one of the things that we will do, like, you know, we will make sure in the Rush League, like, let's say that there's a big balance patch on the main game that happens to land, like, right around, like the playoffs. Like, we're going to obviously not make the teams relearn a bunch of balance changes a week before playoffs. Like, we'll never do that. So, like, we're going to, you know, take steps to make sure that the competitive integrity of the league is maintained. But no, I'm not too concerned about having to make balance changes around the league and the impact that that would have on the main game. And a final question, Nate, and it's really more just a request. This goes to, you know,

Kaplan or whoever has the juice to make this happen. Is it possible to make it so that players who select DPS players at Solo Q, they have to be a minimum one prestige to make it like a driver's license? I'm just losing 20 games in Solo Q because of like guys who play freaking Genji. and don't know what they're doing. You got a snap pick quick. It's so bad. It's like, you know, it's like, come on, man. Your job is to shoot the pharaoh, guy.

What are you doing? I'll go ask a cat putt if you can do that for you. The key is you've got to work on your snap pick skills. Like, I'm a roadhog main. So I actually, like with my eyes closed, know how to just click right where roadhog is on that screen as soon as possible. So I think I think you might just. I just need to work on that. All right.

Thanks a lot. We've been talking with Nate Nanzer is the global director of Overwatch Eastports. You can follow him on Twitter at Nate Nanzer. Nate, thanks a lot for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having you guys. I'm forward to talking again soon. All right. So that will do it for today.

Nice talking to you, as always, Jason. Same. I enjoyed it. I'll see you next week. And look for us in your Channel 33 feed early next week. We'll be talking about, again, dishonor two, watchdogs too. We'll be talking about stealth games. general and interviewing a developer, so it should be interesting. We will be back then.

Have a nice weekend. Bye.