Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of eSports

by Roland Li

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781634506588
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	268
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Roland Li is an Oakland-based journalist whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Observer, and Interview magazine. He was born in Beijing in 1988. After briefly being a pre-med major, he studied journalism and history at NYU and spent eight years in New York before moving to the West Coast in 2015. He has been gaming since Warcraft: Orcs&Humans was released in 1994, and his favorite DOTA 2 hero is Visage.
Roland Li is an Oakland-based journalist whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Observer, and Interview magazine. He was born in Beijing in 1988. After briefly being a pre-med major, he studied journalism and history at NYU and spent eight years in New York before moving to the West Coast in 2015. He has been gaming since Warcraft: Orcs&Humans was released in 1994, and his favorite DOTA 2 hero is Visage.

Table of Contents

Pre-Game Why Video Games Matter 1

Chapter 1 The Evil Genius: Alexander Garfield and the Rise of North America 9

Chapter 2 The Emperor of Seoul: Boxer and Brood War 35

Chapter 3 Nuclear Launch Detected: Starcraft II Explodes 52

Chapter 4 Stream Dreams: Twitch 80

Chapter 5 A Challenger Appears: League of Legends Ascends 106

Chapter 6 Unbalanced: Women, Race, and Gaming 131

Chapter 7 Born to Win: DOTA 2 Raises the Stakes 150

Chapter 8 Capital Flood: Big Money Comes to eSports (Again) 183

Chapter 9 The Road to $18 Million: The Fifth International 200

The Players 223

Acknowledgments 229

Notes 233

Editorial Reviews

05/16/2016
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." (June)

Publishers Weekly

"An in-depth look at electronic sports . . . Li successfully explores a number of gaming issues." —Publishers Weekly

"Debut author Li delves into the burgeoning industry of eSports. . . . [Good Luck Have Fun] will be of interest to ardent gamers [and] readers interested in the genesis of a new sport." —Booklist

"Having been a part of the industry for over a decade, Good Luck Have Fun was nostalgic and took me on a trip down memory lane." —Stephen "Snoopeh" Ellis, former League of Legends LCS player and current eSports adviser

"Good Luck Have Fun is a comprehensive and compelling archive of the birth and growth of eSports. With insight and stories from founding giants and legendary players, it's a must-read for fans and newcomers alike." —Paul Tassi, writer for Forbes and author of the Earthborn trilogy

"Good Luck Have Fun offers a fascinating collection of stories from the frontline of the emerging world of eSports." —T.L. Taylor, professor at MIT, author of Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming

"An in-depth look at electronic sports . . . Li successfully explores a number of gaming issues." —Publishers Weekly

"Debut author Li delves into the burgeoning industry of eSports. . . . [Good Luck Have Fun] will be of interest to ardent gamers [and] readers interested in the genesis of a new sport." —Booklist

"Having been a part of the industry for over a decade, Good Luck Have Fun was nostalgic and took me on a trip down memory lane." —Stephen "Snoopeh" Ellis, former League of Legends LCS player and current eSports adviser

"Good Luck Have Fun is a comprehensive and compelling archive of the birth and growth of eSports. With insight and stories from founding giants and legendary players, it's a must-read for fans and newcomers alike." —Paul Tassi, writer for Forbes and author of the Earthborn trilogy

"Good Luck Have Fun offers a fascinating collection of stories from the frontline of the emerging world of eSports." —T.L. Taylor, professor at MIT, author of Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming

From the Publisher