Adam Fitch: New-look Immortals are ones to watch

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Immortals arrived on the scene in 2015, but despite high profile acquisitions in LCS and CDL, they have been left behind by bigger and more creative brands. Now, thanks to a couple of key senior hires, parent company Immortals Gaming Club appear ready to breathe new life into the North American esports organization.

Immortals Gaming Club looked set to make their breakthrough in 2019 when they acquired OpTic Gaming’s parent company Infinite Esports, and with it a place in the LCS and the Call of Duty League.

You’d have thought acquiring one of the most supported organizations in OpTic Gaming, as well as their Houston Outlaws franchise in Overwatch League and a slot in the LCS, would bode well for Immortals Gaming Club. Instead, it took even more attention away from their Immortals property and the acquisition failed on a logistical level. They may well have made a profit when eventually offloading those franchises, but that’s beside the point.

Immortals has become a pretty stale team brand over the years. They’re not among the most popular teams in the LCS, nor are their social media profiles rife with engagement from fans. Having followed the organization’s recent moves closely, it seems that things are about to change, and it may result in the growth of their fanbase and social media platforms.

In May 2021, I broke the story that Immortals Gaming Club had hired a new president to head up their efforts in revising the strategy behind the Immortals brand. Jordan Sherman, the former chief revenue officer for Gen.G, was brought in to assume responsibility for the team’s emergence and subsequent rise to prominence.

While he may not have had experience in running an esports organization before his time at Immortals, his experiences at Major League Baseball and LA Clippers have given him valuable knowledge when it comes to bringing revenue to sports properties and aligning with like-minded companies. His relative inexperience in overall brand strategy could end up being positive — he has no reason to attempt to recreate something he’s done in the past, providing the possibility for a fresh outlook on what an esports organization can look like. That’s if the big bosses at the parent company afford him such freedom and trust, of course.

Another new hire at Immortals comes in the form of a Vice President of Partnerships. Brett McGrew was brought in to fill the gig, utilizing his experience with the LA Clippers and LA Dodgers. If Immortals can bring in more revenue through sponsorships — the number one revenue stream for the majority of orgs in esports — then that could well persuade the parent company to place more importance and allocate more funds to the brand. This, in turn, allows for the signing of better players and creators and additional means of engaging with fans.

There’s a lot of bias against folks from sports coming into esports, and some of that is warranted. If they believe they can enter the industry and just copy and paste work they’ve done prior, they’re in for a rude awakening. Esports does not need to be put in a box, it’s a young industry that’s largely digital in nature and there’s no reason it has to be a like-for-like replica of an analog industry.

A quote from McGrew in an interview with SBJ is promising in this respect, suggesting that he’s not in the business of limiting what’s possible in esports just because of comparisons to more established sports: “There’s no excuse here to say ‘this is how we’ve always done it,’ because we’ve never done it. You can’t really say that.”

The recent sale of two esports properties paints a stark picture of how important owning assets is. FC Schalke 04 sold their LEC slot for $31.5m around the same time as legacy esports org Complexity Gaming was acquired in their entirety for $27m.

Invest early and intelligently in franchise slots, and the evidence is suggesting that this can be a financially fruitful endeavor. If Immortals in the LCS start succeeding and truly building a loyal fanbase in the hundreds of thousands, IGC stands to profit by an eye-watering amount should they sell up in the future.

It’s no longer enough to simply compete in esports as an organization, you need to create a robust media company that also has a competitive arm. Brands won’t gain fans and maximize revenue by winning tournaments alone — they need to engage with supporters by creating content and this is the path to monetizing the brand through merchandise, NFTs and more.

If Immortals’ new signing of Wild Rift content creator and pro player SeongHun ‘Hoon’ Jang is anything to go by, it seems as if Sherman knows that media is a massive proponent for the future of our industry. “We want to invest in areas of growth to invite more fans to become part of our community,” he said upon announcing the signing. It seems like he has his eyes on the prize. Esports fans and professionals alike, keep your eyes on Immortals.

Infinite Canvas raises $2.8M for a metaverse creator group modeled after esports teams

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With the promise of an interconnected virtual world coming into focus and user-crafted gaming content exploding, Infinite Canvas is looking to apply lessons learned from the esports boom to the metaverse.

“Metaverse” is the hot buzzword right now, but it’s not an empty term. Ten different people would probably define the metaverse in 10 different ways, but it’s generally used as shorthand for the web of emerging virtual spaces full of personalized avatars, games and digital goods that are already shaping our world.

Much like the realm of esports boasts individual standout players who command their own followings, the social gaming world has its own stars who make original in-game content. But right now, creators making hit content in Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are mostly operating on their own, without the supportive infrastructure that quickly professionalized the esports world. And like the early waves of esports players, those content creators skew young and lack some of the resources that would make it smoother to scale the digital brands they’re building.

Founded by Tal Shachar and Sebastian Park, Infinite Canvas is looking to connect creators who craft content for the world’s most popular online games with the financial resources, tools and experience they need to grow their businesses beyond what would be possible in isolation.

Shachar, the former growth strategist at BuzzFeed Studios and chief digital officer at Immortals Gaming Club, and Park, previously VP of Esports for the Houston Rockets, where he founded League of Legends franchise team Clutch Gaming, envision a hybrid talent management company and game publisher modeled after the success they’ve seen in the esports world. The pair liken the new venture to “an esports team for the metaverse.”

To grow their vision, Infinite Canvas has raised $2.8 million in pre-seed funds led by Lightshed Venture Partners, the venture firm founded by media analyst Richard Greenfield. BITKRAFT Ventures, Day One Ventures, Crossbeam and Emerson Collective also participated in the funding round.

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“We are just at the beginning of seeing what the metaverse market opportunity can be,” said Greenfield. “While the path to monetization is clear on platforms like YouTube, in virtual worlds Infinite Canvas is pioneering a network that will unite creators, players and content partners to enhance the earning power of the talent building new virtual empires.”

Out of the gate, Infinite Canvas has partnered with some big names in Roblox, including RussoPlays, DeeterPlays, Sabrina and DJ Monopoli from Terabrite Games, as well as a handful of other Roblox developers, Fortnite map makers and streamers who, combined, reach more than 4.5 million subscribers.

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For the team, this nascent era of user-generated gaming content looks a lot like another now-ubiquitous creator platform once did.

“Roblox in particular, but really all of these UGC gaming platforms, really reminded me a lot of YouTube. Which is to say that they were enabling a new type of person to distribute a content format that was previously kind of locked right behind like barriers of distribution and also of skills set and capital, quite frankly,” Shachar told TechCrunch.

After getting curious, Shachar and Park dove into the creator community and found a diverse array of generally self-taught young people from all around the world crafting custom in-game content for Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft. Much of that content, whether intentionally or not, offered players more digital spaces to connect during the pandemic-imposed social isolation, which saw interest in online social spaces take off.

“Everyone was pretty negative about the world writ large and we’re just talking to these like 17, 16, 18, 19-year-old guys, gals and non-binary pals from all over the world, just like straight up making cool stuff,” Park said.

In those conversations, Park and Shachar realized that while the world of user-generated gaming content can produce huge hits, creators were mostly isolated from support that could help them take their work to the next level.

“It felt very siloed — you have people making content over here on the right and then people developing these games on the left and then players kind of in the center there and that didn’t really make a ton of sense to us," Shachar said. “Especially because it was super clear that there was this really strong loop of content creation leading to gameplay leading to content creation.”

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With Infinite Canvas, they want to provide that missing framework, offering creators crafting content in virtual worlds everything from marketing support to capital and tech tools. As creator monetization channels within virtual worlds mature, Infinite Canvas hopes to even be able to broker ad and brand opportunities and empower creators to expand their own brands across platforms.

“What if we built a new kind of organization that blended parts of being a game publisher, parts of being an esports team, parts of being a capital and tech backend to basically enable these people to do what they do but better and bigger?” Shachar asked.

“For the metaverse — whatever word you want to use — to really exist, it’s going to take all of these independent people to actually populate it and bring it to life and make all of these experiences and there’s just an insane amount of talent out there that we think can be unlocked.”

WWE enters the NFT arena ahead of WrestleMania 37, offering digital tokens in tiered packages

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World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is jumping into the white-hot arena of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

A hot trend that’s taken the worlds of finance and art by storm, NFTs are a digital asset(s) in the form of unique cryptographic tokens that exist on a blockchain, and cannot be replicated. WWE announcement coincided with the organization welcoming back fans for WrestleMania 37, and will be made available beginning on Saturday.

The wrestling NFTs will feature some of the most iconic moments in the career of WWE superstar The Undertaker, and will come in four tiers — some of which are relatively pricey. The platinum package starts at $10,000 and includes an Undertaker token, a perk-filled trip to next year’s WrestleMania 38 in Dallas, and a personalized video from the wrestling great himself.

WWE Undertaker NFT — WWE Corporation

Bidding for the gold tier will start at $5,000, with only one NFT will be available. This level will include a one-of-a-kind NFT featuring The Undertaker, plus an experience for two with front row seats at a Monday Night Raw or Friday Night SmackDown of their choice in 2021 or 2022. The winner also gets a personalized video message from The Undertaker, plus a signed championship title belt.

The silver tier will feature 37 editions, and come at a fixed price of $1,000 each. The first 18 editions will be made available on Saturday, April 10 at 4:30 EST, while lots 19-37 will be released on Sunday, April 11 at 4:30 EST, and will commemorate WrestleMania 37.

Those who purchase at this level will receive one limited edition NFT featuring The Undertaker; and a pair of side plates for a WWE Championship title belt signed by The Undertaker. WWE notes that the title belt will not be included.

The bronze tier priced at $100 will be released in two separate 15-minute open edition drops — the first will take place April 10, right before WrestleMania 37. The second will be the next night, April 11, before night two of the “Showcase of the Immortals.”

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WWE NFTs are presented in conjunction with Bitski. They will be available for purchase at WWE.com/NFT beginning this Saturday, April 10 at 10:30 am ET through Sunday, April 11 at 11:30 pm ET.

Reggie Wade is a writer for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @ReggieWade.

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