The Monopoly Play

Esports had been a real thing in Asia and North America for years before Germany caught up—organized leagues, major sponsorships, stadiums of people watching StarCraft or Counter-Strike with the same intensity other people gave to football. In Germany, a handful of online platforms and gaming TV channels were slowly trying to build the same culture. The project needed all of them pulling in the same direction.

Instead, GIGA—the country’s biggest gaming television channel—sent a cease-and-desist letter to Gamesports, one of the most popular esports community sites. The charge was a youth protection violation: Gamesports had been streaming footage from age-restricted games around the clock without censorship. GIGA’s pay channel wasn’t allowed to air the same content until late at night, and the argument was that the free site was undercutting them.

The formal complaint wasn’t wrong exactly, but it wasn’t really about youth protection either. Gamesports was free. GIGA’s esports coverage required a subscription. When viewers can get the same content for nothing, the subscription numbers suffer—that’s the actual math here, and nobody was pretending otherwise.

The esports community turned on GIGA hard. The channel had positioned itself as the institutional home of competitive gaming in the country, the entity supposed to grow the scene. Going after one of the sites that had actually built that scene’s grassroots presence felt like a betrayal—like a television network filing injunctions against the bars where people gathered to watch. The fans understood exactly what the move was for and sided with Gamesports without much deliberation. You don’t build a monopoly by nurturing the thing you claim to love.