Good Luck Have Fun
The Rise of eSports
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Esports is one of the fastest growing—and most cutthroat—industries in the world. A confluence of technology, culture, and determination has made this possible. Players around the world compete for millions of dollars in prize money, and companies like Amazon, Coca Cola, and Intel have invested billions. Esports are now regularly played live on national TV. Hundreds of people have dedicated their lives to gaming, sacrificing their education, relationships, and even their bodies to compete, committing themselves with the same fervor of any professional athlete. In Good Luck Have Fun, author Roland Li talks to some of the biggest names in the business and explores the players, companies, and games that have made it to the new major leagues.
Follow Alex Garfield as he builds Evil Geniuses, a modest gaming group in his college dorm, into a global, multimillion-dollar eSports empire. Learn how Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill made League of Legends the world’s most successful eSports league and most popular PC game, on track to make over $1 billion a year. See how Twitch.tv pivoted from a video streaming novelty into a $1 billion startup on the back of professional gamers. And dive into eSports’ dark side: drug abuse, labor troubles, and for each success story, hundreds of people who failed to make it big. With updates on recent developments, Good Luck Have Fun is the essential guide to the rise of an industry and culture that challenge what we know about sports, games, and competition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time author Li, an Oakland-based journalist who has studied video game culture for the past decade, has produced an in-depth look at electronic sports or e-sports, the video game competitions that "have become a global phenomenon." Unlike single-player video game arcades, e-sports feature multiplayer games in which teams of highly skilled players compete against each other in the same virtual world, and Li exactingly details how a variety of entrepreneurs, renegade game-players, and tech savants have struggled to translate this competition into a "formalized, regulated environment" similar to the NBA and NFL. One of the main threads in Li's book is the career of Alex Garfield, whose discovery of the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike in 2000 led him to join the gaming team Evil Geniuses, compete successfully in a range of international tournaments during the next 10 years, and then establish his own e-sports company, which he sold to Amazon in 2014 for a large profit. Following Garfield's career allows Li to successfully explore a number of gaming issues, such as the early dominance of South Korea in e-sports, the game industry's misogyny and "gender dysfunction," and the fact that despite millions in new investment money, e-sports remains "a digital Wild West."
