Inside Asian Gaming

APRIL 2018 INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 43 to daily fantasy sports, because he was a big fantasy player – a season-long fantasy player. He came up with this idea that the most exciting part of fantasy sports is the draft so why don’t we come up with a game where you can just keep drafting? He did that and we worked with him for a little bit, I did a lot of conferences. I started doing a lot of speaking, so I did a lot of shows about fantasy sports and then eSports. You know, fantasy sports hit a wall really hard. We were telling them, “Look, it is gambling. You should get regulated.” They said, “No, no, no, we’re not gambling.” “Alright, fine…” OG: So the focus on eSports was accidental? HN: You know I have always been a gamer. Back in the ‘80s when I was doing computers, the first thing you do after you learn how to program is you learn to crack stuff, so I have always been a gamer. When eSports started coming around in the late 1990s there was the World Cyber Games but it really never caught on. My theory is that back then there was no Twitch. You could play but the network wasn’t that great, to get together and play was really expensive and if you did get together, who was going to watch it? There was no way to watch a proper broadcast. The second time eSports came around I thought, “Okay, this is interesting.” For me growing up, I’ve always been the weird one. The “never went to school, built my own computer” sort of guy. What’s interesting about eSports is that anybody can be an eSports athlete. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter your race, it doesn’t matter if you’re tall, short, fat, thin ... it doesn’t matter. You can find a game that you can be good at. OG: Do you still play? HN: Yes, I travel with my PS4. I started doing eSports probably mid-2016. OG: How will eSports impact on traditional gambling? HN: I think gambling will stay. The games will change. I think a lot of the games that gambling has been using, it’s been too long since they’ve changed. That’s unusual because a lot of things evolve, just look at the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell