Even today, esports is a very profitable business, but Andrew Frell, a gaming industry veteran and founder and CEO of Convergence of 4 Dimensions LLC, sees one big problem with the way the business is handled. At CES, we spoke with Prell about how his esports vision could redefine the future.
“We’re moving away from a 25-year-old model that’s similar to the NFL.” Prell explained. “As we speak today, neither of us can imagine that we’ll be in the Super Bowl next year. So why would we teach that to 3.8 billion players? What we want to do is change the mindset that the World Series of Poker taught poker players to not only participate in their tournaments, but maybe even win their tournaments.”
What are his plans? Create full cross-reality games where tens to hundreds of thousands of users can participate in tournaments at once, filling stadiums. “I mean, we had a concert in a video game that got 12.8 million people,” he said. Prell said, referring to the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite. “That’s internet scale. So what we’re going to do is we’re calling it a ‘Cross Reality Team Tournament.’ Stadium scale.”
Prell himself has a long history with video games, virtual reality, and multiplayer titles. “In ’92, I created Wolfenstein VR using the Wolfenstein 3D source code from John Carmack at id Software,” he said. He explained. “That’s when I decided, this has to be multiplayer. It didn’t matter that there weren’t multiplayer games. To make it multiplayer, I had to come up with a theory of blind device communication, and I created cybertech.”
Since then, he’s worked with a number of people, including the creators of the little-known game Doom and the creators of the original Xbox. Below you can read Prell’s full story and learn more about how he plans to redefine esports:
