Inside Enthusiast’s Quest to Control Gaming and Esports Fandoms
Video games with enough storytelling power and exciting gameplay can keep fans playing for several decades, and companies that can keep those fandoms engaged with fresh content are in the best position to survive. Enthusiast Gaming‘s recent $38 million purchase of gaming content creator Omnia Media is its latest move in a push to offer more subscription gaming content to offset shaky advertising revenues. “We see these Fortune 100 companies like Activision and Tencent and EA that are making the (intellectual property) and selling the games, and Amazon and Google and Facebook being the broadcast platforms, and we want to own the fan communities,” Enthusiast Gaming chief executive Adrian Montgomery told TheWrap. “We want to own the ways in which the fans interact, and there’s not a lot of people focused on the fan communities in the same way they are the other parts” of the gaming industry. Toronto-based Enthusiast Gaming was founded in 2014 by Menashe Kestenbaum and went public on the Canadian Stock Exchange in December 2018. It owns several gaming media outlets, including Destructoid, which it bought from founder and freelance journalist Yanier “Niero” Gonzalez in 2017 and Escapist Magazine, purchased from Defy Media in July 2018....
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