The Esports Winter has been a topic of much discussion for years. Could it be we’re seeing a thaw?
Esports has gone through a lot of ups and downs and several winters over the decades. During the pandemic, in-person esports ground to a halt, but watching esports on digital channels skyrocketed.
As the esports started to recover, the optimism returned. In July 2022, esports organization FaZe Clan went public (via a SPAC) at a $725 million valuation. But in late 2023, FaZe Clan sold itself to GamesSquare in a stock deal worth $14 million, or less than just 2% of that number.
While esports results aren’t spectacular based on earlier expectations, the numbers are coming back. Esports is growing again, at least in certain categories. One of the companies that has been in esports for a long time is Electronic Arts, and it’s stayed the course in terms of growing its esports business.
At CES 2025 last month, I spoke with Monica Dinsmore, senior director of esports brand strategy and marketing at Electronic Arts about this topic.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Do you have any predictions for 2025?
Monica Dinsmore: 2024 was a transition year. We started to see some shifts. The last time we were together we talked a bit about esports winter. I’m happy that nobody asks about that anymore. We’re starting to see more–I don’t want to say right-sizing, because that’s what we said before, but smarter investment, more global investment. The Esports World Cup is bringing in some interesting opportunities for teams and players to get more exposure and earn more money. 2024 was that shift in the right direction.
2025 is going to be a big year for esports. At EA we continue to see incremental growth across all of our portfolios. We introduced college football. We’re doing some testing and learning in the esports space there. In my mind it’s a rebirth year. I’m looking forward to 2025 to see how those smarter investments and the bigger global reach will impact us. We’ll be in our second year of the new and improved EA Sports presents the Madden Bowl. We’ll show up with music acts and sports celebrities and esports celebrities. It’ll be a big moment in the NFL ecosystem.
GamesBeat: On the business side, how have you set everything up? Is this all your owned and operated games?
Dinsmore: We have a lot of partnerships across our league partners – FC, our partnership with NFL on the Madden side. Certainly EA owns and operates most of the competitions, the professional competitions. We do have a whole host of FC esports programs that we consult on, or in some cases we actually produce in partnership with our league partners. We have more than 30 football leagues and clubs that we work closely with. The eChampions League, eLaLiga. We have this ecosystem where we have EA owned and operated plus the league partners, and that all culminates in a world championship that will be coming up later in the summer.
GamesBeat: What are the biggest games for you?
Dinsmore: We’re pretty careful about where we invest our esports efforts. We have three titles right now: Madden, EA FC, and Apex Legends. College football, we’ve started doing some testing. We did a partnership with Nissan around the Heisman House. That was a really cool experience. The winner took home a car. We had Reggie Bush there. It was a great foray into the college football esports landscape. We also did a cool activation for the Army/Navy game around that same time. That was successful as well.
We like to think about watching and listening to the way that our players and fans are competing, and then build an ecosystem around that, rather than trying to design something up front and launch a game with a built-in esports ecosystem. It works well for us to listen and learn and then build around what we see.
GamesBeat: How do you look at adding more of your other games to this ecosystem?
Dinsmore: It’s about demand. It’s about how the players are playing, how they’re naturally competing. Then, like I said, trying to build around that. We have a robust licensing program as well. If there’s an opportunity to work with a partner that wants to put on a tournament, that’s a great test and learn opportunity for us. Does it work? How does it work? Do the fans like it? Do people watch it? Then we start to bolster around that. We’re always looking at opportunities. Sports games are super interesting. There’s a lot of opportunity. EA is best positioned to bring all of those things together – real-life sports, esports, and gaming.
GamesBeat: You have the opportunity for multiple circuits, I guess you could call it? How do you think about that? I assume that means you have to be very coordinated around schedules and things like that, so people can actually make it to these events.
Dinsmore: It’s a fairly lean group. Also, we try to align with important moments not only in the sports ecosystem, but in the game ecosystem. We work closely with the franchise leaders to show up as a strong marketing arm, to provide acquisition opportunities, to be a strong retention tool, to provide a real-life opportunity for the franchise to get together and celebrate the entire ecosystem.
For example, we have the Apex Legends championship coming up at the end of January and early February, which aligns nicely with the anniversary of the game itself. It’s going to be the first time we’ve been to Japan. We’ll be in Sapporo. It’s going to be a massive festival in celebration of the game. We see that work across titles. Getting back to our partnerships with FC leagues, we did the eChampions League esports championship the day before the actual Champions League. The winner of the eChampions League was presented with their trophy on the pitch of the actual game. In terms of scheduling, we try to show up and make a massive moment, whether it’s cultural – like Madden Bowl – or just a big celebration of the game itself.
GamesBeat: I had a lot of fun going to a bay area event where they had Porsche putting on a big race and festival. Sony had a Gran Turismo tournament. It was nice to be immersed in all that culture around race cars.
Dinsmore: That’s exactly what we’re going for. We’re uniquely positioned at EA to bring together those cultural moments – the competition, the game itself, music, sports, celebrities. There’s all kinds of crossover opportunities that we love to take advantage of.
GamesBeat: Are there things to be careful about now? Are you still striking at whatever opportunities you have to expand?
Dinsmore: Historically we’ve been slow and steady. We’ve been very deliberate about the decisions we’ve made around our esports programs. We see them more as engagement tools, as powerful marketing arms, as reacquisition and retention tools. We continue to position ourselves in that way. We’re not necessarily chasing a new audience. We’re looking within. Our games have such a massive core base anyway. That’s where we see our opportunity.
GamesBeat: Something like Esports World Cup, do you feel like that shows people starting to believe in this?
Dinsmore: I think so. We had FC and Apex present at this past event. Community sentiment was generally very positive. Esports World Cup was a good experience for our players and for teams. They felt well taken care of. It’s starting to gain some traction. We’re looking forward to seeing what they’re able to do next year. They got a lot of the kinks out this year.
GamesBeat: Are brands coming into esports events in a bigger way?
Dinsmore: I think so. We’re seeing smarter decisions, more deliberate decisions. We’re seeing a lot of collaboration, much more close collaboration. We did some cool integrations with brands where we had branded stadiums in games, for example. It’s less about what you can do on broadcast and more, how can you get a total brand experience? It’s the result of education and good partnerships. The brand partnerships will start to become more meaningful. The impact will be more measurable because of that.
GamesBeat: I think they’ve said there are 400 brands on Roblox now. Disney did their Fortnite thing. They all seem to be going after audiences that they realize they aren’t reaching. The youngest folks have such different habits that they don’t show up watching TV and things like that. Does that logic apply to esports too? This is another place to find people that can’t be reached.
Dinsmore: I think that’s been the case historically. Like I was getting at before, though–it was before the winter. There was money coming in without any conversation or collaboration or understanding about authenticity and how you’re really going to speak to that audience. We’re getting better as an industry about how we integrate with those brands.
The opportunity is clearly still there, especially on the sports esports side, where you have traditional sports and our partnerships with those organizations. Seeing those audiences age, how do they get the younger audiences invested in the actual sport? A lot of times their first exposure to that is through our games. That’s our job, to usher that connection. Their first touch point is with our games. If we can showcase the best of the best in a very sports-like environment, from an esports perspective, then it’s a nice way for brands to reach them. They’re talking to them where they are. Traditional sports, or even traditional games, are not used to communicating on Twitch or in games through a competition. We provide that platform.
GamesBeat: Do parents seem to be coming around to the notion of their kids competing?
Dinsmore: We were talking about that on the panel yesterday. It’s almost like the new mode of social connection for kids and younger people. Parents are starting to see the importance of that digital connection. I’ve been in esports for more than 10 years. We’ve seen those types of connections manifest in coming to an event and meeting the best friends you’ve been talking to online for five years in person for the first time. Even proposals and marriages happening out of gaming.
We’re far beyond, “Oh, this is not a valuable pastime for my child.” We can represent how you can be successful as a career in gaming across so many different modes. I’m an example. You’re an example. We crowned a Madden millionaire last year at Madden Bowl, a guy named Henry who picked up Madden over COVID and ended up winning a million dollars a couple years later. He was supporting his family. He was able to give them an opportunity to thrive through playing games. For the most part we’ve gone beyond the stigma.
It’s cool, as I mentioned, to talk about that flow between digital and real life, especially in the sports games. You might be inspired to play the actual game if you’re learning skills in the game. F1 is a good example of that. Sports professionals play our games to understand routes and tactics. There are so many possibilities. It really is the future of entertainment. Parents and the industry, the non-endemic industry at large, are taking notice of that.
GamesBeat: Do you think you’re going to get closer to something like a cross-generational audience? Something like what Disney or the NBA has.
Dinsmore: I think we have that now. One thing that was impressive for me, coming from Riot Games–at my first FC event, the demographic was significantly younger. Kids were bringing their parents, as opposed to parents bringing their kids. We’ve kind of reached that. Even the panel we were on yesterday, everyone was talking about how they have young kids that they’re introducing to gaming. A lot of these new parents have grown up with video games. They remember that.
Esports is such a perfect platform for that. It’s the physical culmination of the gaming community, the creator community, the professional community all coming together for one big important event. That’s where you see parents and children and everyone coming together to celebrate the games they love, whether it’s football, American football, Apex Legends. It’s kind of all the same.
GamesBeat: This feels super geeky, because I’ve been hanging around Nvidia, but have you heard much about this digital twin concept that they keep talking about? They’re designing a BMW factory now in their Nvidia Omniverse. They perfect the design there, and then they build the physical factory exactly like the digital twin. Then they put sensors on the physical factory and get all this feedback on what works. That goes back to the digital twin to improve the digital twin. They create this feedback cycle. It feels like esports is not so different. Like the Gran Turismo movie suggested, if you want to be a race car driver, you learn it on the digital side and then eventually race a car in real life. I feel like there’s more learning and perfecting that can happen on the esports side. Microsoft talked about something similar for Flight Simulator. They need a simulation of the earth to fly around it.
Dinsmore: Formula 1 drivers are very similar with the game as well. Those sleds over there are almost like a real car. Developing routes, planning strategies, you can simulate that in a game across American football, college football, FC. It’s fascinating. And then you see the best of the best playing this game. It’s always interesting to me to see when you get those celebrity crossovers, where the real-life sports celebrities are learning to play the game from the professionals. Henry that we talked about, he coaches Michael Parsons to play Madden. They stream together. That’s some of the coolest interaction you’ll see.
There was a simultaneous stream that happened on Peacock. You had an NFL game with commentary, and then the exact same matchup was happening in Madden being commentated. That was a fascinating crossover, the juxtaposition of real life and in-game. EA has done such an amazing job of replicating so much about the real life game. It’s almost indistinguishable. It was cool to see that side by side, and on network television. I expect we’ll see more of those types of things.
GamesBeat: It’d be interesting if we ever get to a time where the best physical sports player is also the best digital sports player.
Dinsmore: We do have Diogo Jota, who plays for Liverpool. He’s an extremely good FC player. There was a point in time where he had to make a decision – whether he was going to play in an FC competition or play on the real-life pitch. Of course he chose real life, but he paid homage to FC in his celebrations in the real game. He’s very good. We do see that. It’s very cool. He was featured in our launch trailer last year, when we launched FC Pro for the first time.
GamesBeat: I remember the AI event you put on for the investor day. They mentioned that the college football game got done because they could use AI to generate the first pass on all of the college athletes. They signed up 11,000 players and had to render them in three months. It was an interesting comment about how AI can come in and do things like create faces.
Dinsmore: It’s an exciting time. We’re still here, so that’s great news. We have a lot of exciting things to look forward to in the coming year, or two to five years, as we see the industry grow in a much more meaningful and deliberate way.
GamesBeat: Your fans tend to be very outspoken when it comes to feedback. Sometimes it seems like they’re there to keep everyone in line. In the best way, they provide a feedback cycle that’s helpful.
Dinsmore: They’re nothing if not vocal. We started to do some cool interactions at our Apex Legends ALGS events, where we bring the devs on site and do panels, Q&A, and meet-and-greets. The weapons designers, the maps designers. That was very cool to experience from an outsider perspective, seeing how impactful that interaction was for the developers, and also for the fans. “Wow, I get to talk to the person that made my favorite item.” Also, we would have intimate conversations with the pro players and the devs. The devs are learning about how their designs are used in a way that they’d never imagined before.
So yes, listening to the fans, listening to the pros, that’s definitely something that we at EA prioritize. It’s super important to evolve with their feedback in mind. Of course, everyone is going to have an opinion. You can’t indulge every single one of them. But it’s nice to be able to provide a platform for that interaction and listen to what they have to say.
The post How EA views the end of the esports winter | Monica Dinsmore appeared first on Venture Beat.
