Angel Munoz joined the video game industry in 1995 by launching one of the first large-scale video game websites. Then in 1997 he launched the world’s first eSports league known as the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL). After completing the sale of the CPL three years ago, he recently launched a new venture called Mass Luminosity. Mass Luminosity is a social media community creating powerful experiences for video gamers worldwide. As one of the fastest growing social media ventures in gaming, Mass Luminosity operates primarily on Facebook [www.facebook.com/MassLuminosity] with 800,000 fans, and is developing its own social media platform for gamers called Gaming Tribe [www.gamingtribe.com], which already has over 100,000 active members. Munoz explains why he became disillusioned with the direction eSports was headed and how his new gaming community is opening up new opportunities for fan engagement to major companies in this exclusive interview. Can you talk about the early days of eSports and how you saw the Cyberathlete Professional League(CPL) grow over time? Branding and advertising have always been tricky proposals in the gaming industry, as hardcore gamers normally reject both. The original idea was to brand large technology companies in a gaming environment that would be exciting for both the gamers and our corporate partners. It occurred to us that a videogame competition presented as a professional sport could be the right combination for both branding and advertising. So with that in mind we launched the CPL in the summer of 1997. The exponential growth of the league was completely unprecedented; we went from a small localized event to a worldwide recognized league in a matter of four years. Our events would attract thousands of gamers, we had official qualifiers in countries across five continents and by 2005 we were offering $1 million in cash prizes. What impact do you think having live streaming back then would have had on the CPL? Live play-by-play commentary was part of our events as early as 1999, and later we added in-game broadcasting (or streaming) using Half-Life TV, more commonly known as HLTV, which was officially launched by Valve in summer of 2001. According to some public sources, the current HLTV world record stands at 40,000 simultaneous spectators for the CPL finals in 2004. Additionally, back then we used Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as a data feed during our live tournaments, and would have about 100,000 people on our channels. These, of course, were in addition to the thousands of spectators attending our events. At its peak, the CPL hosted the most watched and most exciting gaming tournaments in the world. Why did you decide to leave eSports? I’m more of a pioneer than a manager. As the league grew, the work load changed as we had to manage a growing number of moving parts: event management, sponsorships, ticket sales, merchandising, branding partnerships, broadcast rights and advertising rights. The founding team realized that, after ten years, day-to-day management was somewhat tedious, and definitely not as exciting as the pioneering years. When …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest