(2018-05-02) All We Want To Do Is Watch Each Other Play Video Games

All We Want to Do Is Watch Each Other Play VideoGames. Content farms are spinning up in Los Angeles, where managers now see gamers as some peculiar new form of famous person to cultivate — half athlete, half influencer. And much of it is powered by the obsession with one game: Fortnite. Over the last month, people have spent more than 128 million hours on Twitch just watching other people play Fortnite, the game that took all the best elements of building, shooting and survival games and merged them into one.

Esports are, finally, just like any other sport.

Movie theater attendance hit a 25-year low in 2017, while 638,000 tuned in to watch Drake play Fortnite recently. The Paris Olympics in 2024 are now in talks to include gaming as a demonstration sport.

Oakland’s new esports arena threw a pre-opening party recently.

Six people ran a production studio in back, getting the game streamed live — audio, lighting, graphics, live cutting and instant replays.

FaZe is one of several growing esports teams and content mills. The Faze Clan, probably the largest pop gaming brand, has houses in California (Calabasas and Hollywood) and Texas (Austin).

Jimmy Jellinek, chief creative officer of FaZe Clan and previously chief content officer at Playboy, said: “Jev will do a Top 5 clip of amateur footage and then rage over the microphone, and those do extraordinarily well.”

By 2012, the group decided to start professional gaming teams to compete in tournaments and take a percent of their earnings. Now they sign players to the FaZe teams across all games. At the house now they focus on more lifestyle gamer content.

Lee Trink, 50, an owner of FaZe Clan, has a desk that is almost entirely empty except for a crossbow. His last gig was president of Capitol Records. Now, he says, esports and gaming are the future and will eclipse movies.

Peter Guber, the chief executive of the Mandalay Entertainment Group, and Ted Leonsis, the majority owner of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, bought a clan called Team Liquid recently. (“We’ve won $19 million in prize money so far,” said Mike Milanov, the chief operating officer of Team Liquid, which recently opened an 8,000 square foot esports team training facility in Santa Monica.)

Gamers are coming together for practical reasons as well as social ones. Games are so sophisticated that they can overload home connections. And cryptocurrency miners have driven the price of crucial gear — like the graphics card gamers use to amp up their computers’ processing speeds.

And there’s an underused asset already at hand. “The movie theater!” said Ann Hand, the C.E.O. of Super League Gaming, which converts movie theaters into esports arenas, and has raised $34 million from investors. “It has that thunderous sound, and it’s empty a lot of the time.”

Two days a week, Ms. Hand and her crews convert about 50 movie auditoriums into esports arenas, where kids, mostly younger, compete and watch the winners onstage, projected onto the big screen.

By 2019, she expects to be in 500 venues.