In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Philipp Geppert of eSports.com explains the innovation behind their award-winning platform.
Despite its swift audience growth, the eSports industry is still considered to be in its infancy. Analysts have long predicted that eSports is on the cusp of becoming a billion-dollar industry and yet, for an industry that boasts an audience of millions, it still lags behind other sectors as far as investment is concerned.
Investors tend to put most of their money on traditional sports rather than venture into the realm of video games because they believe that the former is a safer bet. But eSports.com’s Philipp Geppert believes that competitive gaming, despite being a fragmented industry, presents greater opportunities since it doesn’t have big players to compete with and marketing expenses tend to be lower.
“What you have in the eSports industry is that it is a very fragmented industry. With a community platform, a lot of people had the problem of monetizing on their customer,” Geppert told CalvinAyre.com. “What we do is put several revenue streams in our model to be able to pay for this high-quality content we have to produce because that’s not cheap.”
eSports.com is a one-stop shop for competitive gaming that Geppert and his co-founder Benjamin Föckersperger developed after discussing the industry with attendees of the 2017 ICE event.
“So, like a day later, we said we really have to do this. There’s no way around it. So the next day, I entered my office and said, ‘sorry I’m out of here’ and from that moment on, we did eSports.com,” he said. “Right now, we have 20 to 30 people working on it. We had an ICO, so there’s a lot of marketing going on. There’s 15 people working on the product.”
Several months after it was conceived, the eSports platform won the EiG Start-up Launch Pad 2017. When asked what he felt after eSports.com was feted at EiG, Geppert said that he was “incredibly proud” of his team.
“I have to say, I love to win. So, it is great to be the winner of the EiG Launchpad. So, this is nice to get the prize. They deserved it. We deserved it for the extremely good work they are doing and for their enthusiasm,” he said.
