Alex Garfield on Owning Multiple Teams: “We want to support as many players and teams as possible.”
In a recent Ask-Me-Anything thread on the Dota 2 sub-reddit over at Reddit.com, Evil Geniuses (EG) CEO and GoodGame Agency owner Alex Garfield shed some light on the operations of GoodGame after community speculations that the company is slowly monopolizing the professional team market for the highly popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game.
Asked about his thoughts on accusations that GoodGame has been monopolizing the eSports market, the eSports veteran of 10 years answered that their motivations for signing on many players and teams into their stable of talent is because: “It is the right thing to do.”
“We’re good at supporting teams and players and we want to support as many players and teams as possible. I’ve always felt that if the cool thing to do also seems like the right thing to do, then it’s probably worth doing. That mentality, combined with the fact that we pride ourselves on treating players well, explains most of the things we do and have done in the past,” said Garfield.
In 2013, Garfield announced that his agency was also picking up Alliance — a European-based gaming organization — and adding it to his growing stable of talent. At the The International 2014, community reactions to this move came to a head, as EG and Alliance were both in the tournament, prompting questions of conflict of interests from commentators and fans.
Garfield said that although he understands the community’s response — in part because he (and by extension, the GoodGame Agency) has not felt the need to address speculations on the relationships of his teams publicly — people have been trying to guess the answers to the wrong questions.
“They’re trying to answer the question of, “What is this company doing in signing these players?” rather than trying to answer the question of, “Why are all of these players signing with this company?” said Garfield. “There’s a really big difference between those two questions and in my opinion it’s the second question that everyone should be asking. I think that if you focus on the second question rather than the first, you can actually start to tackle the core issues in the situation, which are mainly related to the fact that not enough team and talent organizations treat players properly. In my opinion, that is the real issue here.”
The EG CEO said that players and teams are signing with GoodGame because of the level of support and compensation that their agency has been giving professional players across multiple genres.
“If you assume that the players who are signing with us are intelligent and capable of making good decisions, then it logically follows that they’re signing with us for a reason. I think that, rather than tin-foil-hatting about the fact that we work with three Dota teams instead of two, people should be asking why the level of player support in this industry is, on average, so mediocre.”
In the same interview, Garfield said that they are in fact signing on a third Dota 2 team. Team Tinker will now be represented by the GoodGame Agency, dispelling rumors that Team Secret was going to secure the sponsorship.
Additionally, the multi-game team owner said that their agency is working with players across the eSports industry and its many genres and titles to create a players’ union to address issues of working conditions, salaries and overall treatment of professional eSports players.
“I have been encouraging players, across multiple game titles, to form a player association since 2011. Specifically, over the course of the past several months, we have already begun speaking with some of our players about how they could go about doing it,” he said.
“It might be kind of strange to hear that coming from someone who would have to negotiate with any player association entity (because obviously, neither my company nor myself can be both judge and jury), but I just genuinely think it’s needed. I think that player treatment, industry-wide, needs to improve and I hope that GoodGame can help achieve that goal.”
Source: Reddit AMA
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