The 1960s birthed surf culture, a lifestyle centered on the beach involving everything from fashion to music and film. Whether someone ever picked up a longboard was almost beside the point: there were participatory cultural touchstones, from wearing flip-flops and board shorts to listening to the Beach Boys that fostered a “shared sense of belonging to that community,” said Gary Kleinman, a longtime owner of an experiential marketing agency.
Skate supplanted surf by the 1980s and ‘90s, with its own attire and soundtrack. Now, Kleinman argues, gaming is the latest counterculture to hit mainstream. He is the founder and CEO of WHAM, a new over-the-top network distributed by Cinedigm that will cover everything from competitive esports to Candy Crush as gaming follows the same lineage as surfing and skating.
“The biggest significant difference is that you have 2.3 billion people gaming every day — cross-language, cross-culture — and your access point is as simple as a mobile device,” Kleinman said.
His journey into esports began with the presumption of a typo. A profile story on a League of Legends player noted a sold-out tournament at Madison Square Garden, and Kleinman — who, as a father, had always told his kids to go outside and stop staring at a screen — couldn’t believe that video games could attract a paying crowd eclipsing 10,000.
“From my experiential background, what it meant to me was, that’s not about the game,” he said of esports’ appeal. “There’s an emotional connection, there’s a communal connection, there’s something going to spur that kind of engagement and involvement, so I endeavored to try and understand on a very specific basis what that was and where that connective tissue happened to be.”
Intrigued, Kleinman pored into research about gaming, initially planning to add esports as a vertical to his portfolio of marketing services and later choosing to start his own network when he realized no one else had done so.
WHAM, which launched on April 9, will broadcast major esports tournaments but also curate highlights and produce original content. Among the shows currently on air or in the works:
*Gamer IRL chronicles the day in the life of someone in the esports business.
*Clip Blip is a compilation of gaming fails and funny videos.
*Game Bytes will tour arcade bars, with the host playing a favored game and eating the local cuisine. (Think Guy Frieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.)
*Retro Gaming from the Strong Museum will feature old games in the Rochester museum’s collection, discussing current events around their release date to create a “time capsule through the lens of a video game,” Kleinman said.
*Page Up will tap experts in both gaming and literature to discuss the thematic elements of games, selecting novels that parallel each gaming title’s plot and morality storylines.
*Cryptic will seek to find identify A-listers who are serious gamers in a show spearheaded by 514esports’ Greg Zinone, who has long run the Pros vs. G.I. Joes nonprofit. The Drake/Ninja Fortnite stream that set a Twitch concurrency record helped bring a round of new publicity.
“Now everyone wants to know who the hidden celebrity and athlete is who’s really a good gamer,” Zinone said.
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Cinedigm’s platform includes streaming on the OTT Xumo platform included in many smart TVs as well as iOS and Android apps and on Twitch.
“We’re not game-dependent,” Kleinman said. “We’re not IP-dependent. We’re Switzerland in gaming, so to speak. We are a friend to everybody in the gaming world, whether it’s publishers, teams, what-have-you.”
The network is the flagship for a three-tiered approach to the gaming world. WHAM is also producing a social app, Wind, which helps gamers find playing partners based on selected attributes like game title, language, location, etc. This connective feature is derived from a Craigslist ad Kleinman saw from a man seeking League of Legends players who’d also want to meet for a beer. (“Isn’t that Tinder for gamers?” he joked.) It’ll also serve as a discovery tool, suggesting new games based on playing history and notifications of WHAM Network programming.
The third prong is the organization of events. The first will be an outdoor festival for gamers in Southern California in late summer.
While so many esports fans exist only in the silo of their particular game of choice, WHAM will seek to find the common threads tying them all together, including the sensory, tactical, intellectual and emotional elements present in just about every game.
“Gaming as a core concept is touching virtually everybody’s life, and you can extend that out to your GPS system,” Kleinman said. “If you use Waze, it is really nothing more than a game for you to get to a destination faster than you would on you own.”
Newzoo’s latest estimate projects 2018 esports revenues at more than $900 million — representing annual growth of 38 percent — with a global audience of competitive esports reaching 380 million. (Kleinman’s aforementioned 2.3 billion figure includes a much broader definition of video games, even simple mobile titles like Words With Friends.) Newzoo said the industry is climbing towards $1.4 billion in revenue by 2020, with a figure as high as $2.4 billion possible.
This popularity comes with a revamped self-identification for gamers, with wider acceptance of the pursuit.
“Part of what our network is all about is to take the gamer and give them, essentially, credibility that what they’re doing is positive, what they’re doing is great and people in their world can now share what they’re doing without having to necessarily play the game,” Kleinman said.
“Our unofficial tagline for the network is, ‘Gaming is a force for good.’”