Starters LIVE with Tyler Schrodt
Founder & CEO, Electronic Gaming Federation
This is a recap from our Live Chat with Tyler Schrodt on Starters.co.
Tyler Schrodt is the Founder and CEO of the Electronic Gaming Federation. Founded in 2015, EGF works with high school and collegiate administrators across North America on varsity program development while running an intercollegiate tournament series and producing esports media.
Thanks a lot for joining us Tyler! Esports noob here. 🙋 Do you mind walking us through the brief history of organized esports at the high school and collegiate level? What has emerged over the past few years (both good and bad), what are some of the initiatives Electronic Gaming Federation is currently working on, and what do you envision the high school and college esports space looking like in 3–5 years?
Thanks for having me John! Collegiate and high school esports are fairly new, even relative to esports as a whole — until platforms like Twitch and publishers like Riot started to make esports a focus, and more accessible in general there were always local collegiate events but they would generally be limited to a local community (like a LAN party or a Super Smash bros event for example) and it wasn’t until recently it started to organize and professionalize.
Groups like Collegiate Star League, IvyLoL, and others were some of the first that ran student-focused inter-collegiate competitions and a few of them rose above the rest at the club level. Now you have Tespa (Blizzard) CSL (partnered with Riot Games), and some independent organizers who run club-based competitions, there’s NACE, an NAIA spinoff who serves most of the D3 athletics schools who have varsity programs, and EGF who builds infrastructure and platform for all programs regardless of status, runs a varsity league similar to NACE, and media production which includes an educational component for up and coming broadcast talent.
The benefit of that is you see a much stronger awareness from the general population about esports and I think because of that attention people are starting to see the potential of esports as more than just competition where teachers are able to integrate esports-based curriculum and the talent flow of individuals is more stable.
One thing I really hope to see and I’m happy to say it’s one of our focuses is esports becoming an opportunity for us to rethink the traditional sports model in college to address some of the criticisms of the NCAA and NAIA and experiment with a lot of things that have been suggested by athletes, administrators, and groups like the Knight Commission.
Currently, EGF is launching our 3rd regional rival series and we’re working on improving our educational program for casters where we help train individuals interested in becoming an esports commentators in partnership with casters from all over the world.
With regards to predictions for the next 3–5 years, I think you’ll see an accelerated rate of colleges adopting esports programs, there will be a discussion on how esports are categorized on a campus and what regulations will they be subject to as a result, and I think you’ll see a shift in how college esports integrates with the professional scene.
🙌 Rethinking the traditional collegiate sports model is music to my ears! What do you think the biggest differences will be between the current model and what you would like to shape for esports?
I think you’ll see an incredible amount of similarities — sports has had a really long time to solidify their model and a lot of it for good reason — things like tournament format, competition schedules, general welfare rules, player protection (at the professional level) and others set a really strong precedent for where esports could go.
Specific areas of difference could include an international component — there are already european college championships for instance that are multinational where the NCAA is obviously US-based.
I’m also really keen on how to support players and embrace the fact that most of them are going to want to monetize through streaming or other channels and I think that creates an opportunity to think through what the world would look like when that becomes a reality.
I hope that our educational initiatives also drive some change not just in competition but in classroom learning — being able to use esports in case studies or giving practical educational experiences is something I’m a huge advocate for.
While there’s probably a million opportunities, the last one I want to mention is how we approach the health of our players, not just physically but mentally as well. Mental health is a huge topic in our community and I think approaching esports with the mentality that this is supposed to be built for the players will encourage all of us to put those types of challenges as a top priority.
Hey Tyler, thanks for taking the time! Something very particular about esports is that some young players would rather stream than go pro given that they can make more money from the streaming side of the business. Recently the NCAA banned a college football player who refused to shut down his Youtube channel. How is regulation managed from that perspective for high-school or college esports athletes now, and how do you think esports in general will impact the broader college sports regulations in the future?
The cool thing about esports is that we’re starting from a blank slate — it isn’t classified as a varsity sport and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of support to push it that way so you’re free from that sort of redtape but it is a conversation that’s important to have.
I hope that esports can serve as a platform to experiment with the collegiate athletics model specifically to explore different ways a student might monetize their stream for example and how we can build an environment that supports that in a healthy way.
Thanks for the question!
You’re the man Tyler, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions! This area of esports is of particular interest for me. I’m curious to know how the idea of Electronic Gaming Federation came to be, what lead you to pursuing the mission of organizing collegiate esports teams?
Thanks Troy! I’ve been a part of the esports community since I was about 10 when I used to play CS 1.6 competitively and that evolved into running teams and eventually tournaments. I would spend my day at school, go to wrestling practice and then go home to do homework and play in tournaments (CEVO and CAL at the time).
I stepped away from that to focus on school when I got into RIT but that was also around the time Twitch came out so it was hard to stay away. Eventually I was just running tournaments for other college students out of my dorm room and after finding a ton of excitement from students around that I set to figuring out how to build a sustainable business around that.
After a ton of experiments and obsessive research into traditional sports we got to where we are right now working with administrators across the country to educate and build infrastructure for esports programs.
As we got more into what it actually meant to be something like the NCAA from a governance standpoint we took a specific interest in taking what the NCAA has done really well and iterating on their model to focus on potential areas of improvement (like player representation and involvement). We also have a mandate on how we advocate for mental health and partner with great organizations like Anxiety Gaming all because we knew how immense the impact we might have on a person’s life could be and we wanted to make sure that we molded ourselves to reflect that from day one.
Thanks so much for joining us Tyler. To follow-up on John’s question regarding your approach to the high school students: What has your experience been like with parents of young gamers? Have they become more accepting of esports as a career path? Thanks!
Thanks for the question Igli! Parents are always tricky — similar to the general public you’ll find some who are all about esports and are excited to have something to channel the passion a student has for video games into something productive (promoting social interaction, giving real life experience in careers related to esports, teamwork and leadership building etc) but you also find those on the opposite end of the spectrum.
For those parents who are vehemently opposed to the idea of esports in this environment you find a variety of reasons — sometimes they’re just opposed to content which we try to mitigate by not allowing certain games to be played in the league for example.
Sometimes it’s a matter of education and awareness for them so we spend a lot of time talking about the world of professional esports, explaining how a student could potentially become a professional player, or if that’s not the right path for them they could pursue a career in broadcast, esports management, psychology, analytics etc the same way you would in traditional sports.
A few years ago when we started talking with parents and administrators you would find a lot of negative responses, sometimes hostile, sometimes fearful, sometimes just unconvinced but thanks to a broader awareness for esports, investment from professional sports teams, and everything else that’s given a lot more attention to esports, that sentiment has shifted dramatically in favor of positive responses now.
What’s the typical life-cycle of a game? As far as competitively?
You have some games like Counter-Strike that have been around since the late 90’s who make small iterative updates and launch massive changes in new games that have the same core fan-base which has actually been growing a lot. That’s dangerous because if your massive updates alienate your base you essentially start from scratch.
The most famous example is probably starcraft. Arguably it was the first major esport but it’s almost entirely dead at this point save for a few major tournaments still around and that’s been a little over 20 years.
With games like League of Legends being a broadly popular game with an iterative model you might see it last significantly longer but generally speaking you’ll see a game last maybe 10–20 years, significantly less if the developer of the game doesn’t support and nurture the pro scene.
It all boils down to developer support, community interest in the genre, and changes to the game itself. Definitely a hard question to answer!
A big portion of NCAA athletics is the scouting and recruiting of athletes in high school and college. Does EGF do any type of scouting or ranking? Or does EGF consider itself closer to the NCAA in terms of an organization that separates itself from the players-to-teams model and, instead, focuses on the industry as a whole within the pre-professional market?
We decided to take a full-stack approach to high school and college which means we focus on three areas — infrastructure/recruitment/development, governance (where the NCAA analogy comes into play) and media production. The hope is that eventually you’ll have something that looks like a career path for a traditional sports athlete where you have the opportunity to move through youth to high school to college to pro or some variation considering esports professional tend to be significantly younger than their sports counterparts.
Hey Tyler, thanks for taking the time to join the live chat, love what you are doing. What has been the biggest obstacle (or objection) when approaching high school and college administrators? To piggyback off that question, how have the already successful programs been sourcing the necessary funding for their programs?
It varies from campus to campus but it often comes down to a lack of subject matter knowledge — it’s hard to say yes to something if a) you don’t know it’s even an option or b) you don’t know who to ask for help or to get more information or c) if you’re a risk averse organization to begin with, you might just not be able to satisfy your use case requirements to pull the trigger. That is changing now that there are something like 40 programs in the US that offer scholarships to some level but it’s still an uphill battle. I think a lot of people get really excited about the idea but have difficulty with next steps and that’s why we get more directly involved in program development.
Programs to date vary in almost every way possible from what department they’re currently under to where they get their funding. We work with each school to figure out their economic models but for example, the program might be part of an educational department, or you might find and alumni who’s willing to get the ball rolling. There isn’t much if any money in college esports, especially compared to traditional sports so most look at esports as an opportunity for recruitment and retention.
Thanks for joining Tyler! In regards to collegiate esports integrating with the professional scene, are there any age limitations similar to other NCAA sports?
Thanks for the question! As I mentioned in a previous answer, esports is sort of unique in the sense that we’re starting from an almost entirely clean slate so there aren’t any universal rules around things like age or eligibility with the exception of some professional leagues. In the case of Riot Games for instance I think you have to be at least 16 in order to play on a professional team although you can be recruited earlier.
Organizations like WESA are starting to look at that type of limitation on a more in-depth basis just because esports players tend to be a lot younger and that takes careful consideration on how you properly support them in their careers.
Hi Tyler, as the Founder and CEO of the Electronic Gaming Federation, how do you see eSports’s content distribution in the next 5 years? Do you think regions would affect it as it happens in traditional Sports content distribution?
Thanks for the questions Juan! It’s a hard one to answer simply because I don’t think anyone has an answer definitively but there are a ton of experiments being done to figure it out.
Broadly speaking, esports is becoming more an more accessible through platforms like Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from a straight streaming play. That’s triggering content bidding wars which has been really interesting to watch (YouTube for instance bought a ton of ESL content and won out over Twitch) and that’s a very broadly speaking audience (people from all over the world).
The question about regions is really interesting because esports generally doesn’t respect any traditional borders — video games don’t have borders and their fan base reflects that. However, because of initiatives like the upcoming Overwatch League that does have a geographically linked anchor point so to speak, you may see some efforts to boost viewership around a particular area but I think you would see significant backlash if you tried to do something like region-lock content.
I do however think there’s an opportunity for programming based on region. As more and more content and tournaments are added to professional and amateur levels, the sheer volume can be overwhelming and dilute value to the viewer or fan so I could see region-sorting being a strong opportunity to deliver specially curated content and potentially monetize around that.
Hey Tyler, thanks for taking the time! Many see esports are a true media & entertainment play, from an investment perspective. What areas within media and content production do you see as underutilized and not being monetized? A few examples: written articles, podcasting, vloging, video series, streaming, documentary series, etc.
A general theme in esports is everything is accessible at all times and its free. For example, Twitch doesn’t charge you to watch an event and there’s no such thing as a fight pass equivalent yet so there’s this inherent expectation of a viewer for that to continue. It’s been amazing for esports viewership (something along 260MM viewers last year) but that presents a challenge around content monetization.
I don’t think there’s been a good answer for it yet, but now that traditional sports realize they need to move to digital, they’re coming up with new opportunities for people to pay for and that’s something that will just take time.
The good news is, there’s a ton of amazing content all over the web that continues to drive incredible engagement around esports that makes it significantly more accessible than it was in the past.
Correct me if i’m wrong, but within esports, each game is essentially it’s own sport. How do high schools and colleges determine which games to support? Do you see game developers having any impact on this as time goes on?
It’s largely decided at two levels depending on the level of formalization of an organization. If it’s purely student-driven, they’ll compete in whatever title they can form a team for. If there’s an administration involved then they’ll look at things like age-appropriate content, what games best represent their communities, and what games actually have the proper infrastructure to support a sustained esports environment.
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