Q&A: Mike McCabe on building the first Esports Nations Cup

ST: What kind of response has the Esports Nations Cup received from the esports community?

MM: The response from the players has been really positive because they’ve always wanted to match their peers in traditional sports in being able to represent their country. What was really heartening was also this drive from the publishers; in esports it’s the publishers who own the intellectual property. They have the biggest games in the world, rather than a traditional sporting federation like the NBA or NFL that runs the traditional sporting construct. The publishers were also excited because it gave them an opportunity to expand.

ST: How did you settle on a fall date?

McCabe: We never like to make this easy for ourselves. There’s always a congested calendar so we had to work with publishers to identify  the right games that gave a true global representation, a selection of 16 games that we would bring to the tournament and ensure global representation.

The second thing was to start building out the national ecosystem. It’s been very club centric hitsorically; there’s no organized, structured, consistent way that all of the national esports federations operate.

ST: What is your relationship like with the International Olympic Committee, which last year along with Saudi Arabia canceled a deal to hold an Esports Olympics in Riyadh?

McCabe: We were working with the IOC for a couple years toward building out the Olympic Esports Games, and we spent a couple years working toward that but decided to pause and go our separate ways last year. The main reason was that the IOC and the Olympic movement and esports operate at different paces. They decided to pause while they reflect on their broader mandates, but we felt the time was right for nation-based esports, and we’d proved it with the World Cup. We decided to move forward and that’s why we’re running the inaugural Nations Cup this year. We hope the IOC will come back to esports because it’s a path to connect to a younger audience.

ST: Why is this the right time for you personally to do this?

McCabe: It lives in that sweep spot for me. I’ve spent most of my career in video games either making them or publishing them, but I also spent four incredibly happy years at Nike as well and I’ve seen the power of sport. I’ve always been in the video game industry but spending that time at Nike and being able to connect those two pieces I always felt this was an absolute no brainer. This is exactly what I want to do, I get to live against all of those passion points.

ST: How will it work to have fans from around the world travel to this event?

McCabe: We know that brigning the most passionate fans is incredibly important. For the Esports World Cup we piloted a program called the SuperFan program where we helped fund some of the travel for supporters of the most popular clubs around the world, and it was a really amazing pilot that we’re doubling down on this year. It didn’t just take away that homefield advantage but it created this halo effect where the local [Saudi] fans would be supporting a Brazilian club because [those Brazilian fans] were so passionate and brought so much energy that it was infectious. We’ve really started to see it happen where you see it in China when they filled the Bird’s Nest in December with 60,000 fans for two teams, 30,000 on each side.