You also have to pay pretty salty odds if you want to become a shareholder in the first listed esports team. 
https://twitter.com/tomi/status/1203870964225720321?s=20
Of course, it’s possible that Astralis will become an iconic brand and the company will one day be as valuable as, for example, current NHL and NBA teams. All in all, a very interesting IPO!
Could esports teams be the next big bubble after cannabis stocks? 
What kind of taxation and costs are there for Danish First North shares? I couldn’t find an answer with a quick Google search. 
I remember playing CS from 2000-2003, and the biggest prizes at CPL in Dallas were probably < $50k USD per tournament.
We’ve come a long way since then
I think I even played on the same team as ENCE’s coach at some point
I’ve been going through Astral’s listing PDF myself now. There’s definitely potential there. What’s going to happen when more esports teams start listing?
Interesting. Just when I felt like a fossil because I’ve stopped gaming, I can get back into the “scene” from an investment perspective 
I’ve been considering HUYA Inc myself, but investing in Chinese companies definitely gives me pause. I’m also wary because Tencent bought half the company, and they likely just want to grow the firm endlessly without money flowing to the bottom line.
Another interesting one could be Modern Time Group, which was mentioned earlier. Especially since the company was spun off from its TV ventures (Viasat, Viaplay, etc., which now operate as NENT Group). What do you all think about these two?
Esports as a business is nothing new. It should be treated mainly as a new sport. Not because it is a sport, but because the earning models are similar. The advantage over more traditional sports is mainly that the baggage of the past is absent, allowing for a somewhat more efficient utilization of modern opportunities.
In sports, media rights holders usually do business. The first one that came to mind for me was the aforementioned ESL, but it was already in a larger company’s portfolio.
I haven’t looked into the Astralis case to see which company was even listed there. The team was at least previously owned by a tournament organizer, meaning it had broader media rights. Investing solely in the team would mostly be like betting. A unique feature of esports is that an entire team can just walk away when contracts end, as there are only five players (in CS:GO).
As a side note, Astralis is originally Finnish. The Danes bought the rights to the name from here a few years ago.
I semi-accidentally found this esports ETF, which I excitedly bought this morning. A small position, mainly for my own pleasure
https://www.vaneck.com/ucits/etf/equity/espo/overview
It was established less than a year ago and has seen quite a rapid increase. It looks good when you look at the list of stocks included.
There aren’t many stocks where one could invest specifically in esports. Based on its top 10 holdings, this ETF also appears to be focused purely on the gaming industry, with esports being just a small slice of the pie on the side. The clearest esports-focused stock I know of is Astralis Group (Astralis Group) stock, which was listed on the stock exchange a few months ago.
Here’s an excellent tweet thread on why esports and gaming will continue to grow for a very long time. https://twitter.com/tomi/status/1254551436299399168?s=20
The author in question is a former Counter-Strike professional and a “kylteri” (student of economics) from Oulu who has also worked in the IB sector. He currently holds a management position in a fairly large esports organization called Immortals, so he definitely knows what he’s talking about. Before following him on Twitter, I recommend filtering out all his tweets about Tesla.
I don’t know much about the topic, but what is the value chain of esports?
First of all, regarding content, in which category would you put esports content:
I’m mainly thinking about it from the perspective of what opportunities content producers like leagues (?), teams, etc., have to make money, and what a winning platform (ESPN vs. Netflix vs. YouTube) might look like.
I myself watch, for example, CS tournaments.
It perhaps belongs to ‘traditional sports’, and afterwards one can check the results and highlights.
The winning platform at the moment is definitely Twitch (owned by Amazon).
Prize pools are already quite large (hundreds of thousands for #1) in tournaments. (https://esportsobserver.com/biggest-esports-2019-prize-pool/) Additionally, esports gets a lot of viewership. (Esports Marketing News, Player BIO's and & Settings - eSports Marketing)
There’s already big money circulating in betting as well - on who will win.
I hope this shed some light on the matter!
Here’s an illustration from Redeye Gaming’s report:
Newzoo’s estimates for market size and growth:
In terms of monetary scale, esports is still a relatively small market globally, but there is still decades of growth potential as the number of esports viewers increases, and at the same time, monetization per fan gradually approaches that of traditional sports.
Having followed the scene for a while, I’ll share my own view of the industry and why I don’t have any esports companies in my portfolio.
The biggest segments in the industry are:
Among these segments, I would definitely not invest in teams at the moment. Why? Because their position in the industry is really poor. It also depends heavily on which game is being played, but for example in Dota (which I follow), players have extremely high power. Teams’ success is very strongly tied to tournament performance, of course (visibility + tournament wins). This success is very difficult to guarantee. Organizations do not get multi-year contracts for players—unlike in traditional sports—and players change teams very easily. In esports, a team is almost always built by the players, and if the players don’t gel, the team changes, and the organization very rarely has any say in this. For this reason, esports fans most often root for the players, not the organizations, which is a big difference from traditional sports.
I wouldn’t invest in tournament organizers either, because esports consumers are (at least currently) the worst demographic ever. They consume little, partly due to their age, so it’s difficult to market to them. The free nature of tournament streams is an intrinsic value to them, and they would never be willing to pay to watch esports. But couldn’t a tournament organizer put its streams up for bid among different platforms and get a hefty contract? NOPE! ESL tested this with Facebook: fans were outraged and viewership dropped dramatically. The contract was lucrative for ESL, but they had to terminate it after a year because it was a PR farce. Esports is only watched for free and only on Twitch, maybe also YouTube. Of course, tournament ticket sales and merchandise sales bring in some money, but in my opinion, the megatrends don’t really support this either. Fans are introverts who prefer to watch esports on their own computer, with a couple of friends on Discord. I myself think this is the best way to consume esports.
Streaming platforms could be a more interesting investment target, but as already stated, Twitch dominates this field. In my opinion, Twitch has a really big moat that is almost impossible to break. This moat is called Twitch culture. The vast number of streamers, their own memes, and Twitch chat are difficult to replicate. Twitch is the home of gamers. Mixer has tried to buy big streamers with money, but viewers don’t seem to be migrating. 99% of content is still on Twitch. Of course, you can invest in Twitch through Amazon, but everyone surely understands that even if Twitch multiplied its value tenfold, it would have a negligibly small effect on Amazon’s stock price.
Game studios are, in my opinion, the most interesting investment target among these segments. While players’ consumption habits may otherwise be weak, they are certainly willing to pour money into long-term esports games. Every year, Dota’s The International tournament raises an absurdly large prize pool from skin sales. Last year, the figure was $34 million, and that amount is collected from a couple of months’ worth of skin sales, of which 25% goes to the prize pool. Valve thus sold 136 million worth of virtual pixels in Dota alone during that time. Oh, and TI’s prize pool has increased every year for 10 years. Selling skins is a really lucrative business, and loot boxes are essentially gambling, which is known to be a good business. This gambling can even be sold to minors, which sounds crazy, and this issue will likely be regulated away.
However, there are very few successful esports games on the market. The reason for this is that these games are very difficult to make because the game must find a balance between competitive play and casual play.
If a game is made only with casual players in mind = No esports scene will emerge because competitive play is not interesting for viewers or pro players.
If a game is made only with competitive players in mind = No esports scene will emerge because the game’s player base will not grow large enough due to a difficult learning curve.
In addition, the game requires constant updates and changes to remain interesting. There are only a few games that have successfully found their place in esports, and the barrier to entry is huge. Currently, Valorant is a game that is crossing this threshold and will likely join the select few esports games. Behind Valorant is Tencent, with a turnover of 300 billion, which has carried out an absurdly large marketing campaign on Twitch. So, becoming an esports game is not easy.
Currently, the biggest game studios in esports are:
Outside of these companies, there isn’t a single successful esports game. The selection is thus weak from an investment perspective, especially considering that Valve is not listed on the stock exchange. In addition, the giant company Tencent owns Riot and half of Epic Games from this list (the other half is privately owned). So, the investor is left with Blizzard and Tencent as options.
Regarding Blizzard, I must say that the company was a trendsetter in the entire industry in the early 2000s and very popular among players. After the Activision merger, things have been downhill since 2013, at least in terms of PR. Blizzard somehow manages to anger its own core audience time and time again with the silliest things. Games are released sluggishly, and they can’t balance esports games, so, for example, Overwatch’s metagame became really boring. Blizzard did, however, somehow manage to sell 20 team slots in the Overwatch League for $50 million each. These investors in team slots were some elderly owners of NFL teams, to whom Blizzard’s salesmen probably chanted esports buzzwords and the old folks experienced FOMO. These investors will never get their money back. The Overwatch League is dying more every year, and it may be that Valorant is the final nail in the coffin. But at least Blizzard raked in the cash.
So, the last investment option is Tencent. However, Tencent has the same problem as Twitch and Amazon. Tencent is one of China’s most valuable companies by market capitalization. The company is not solely dependent on Epic and Riot. If it were, I might invest. Epic Games, in particular, seems interesting. The company has made many successful game moves, such as the acquisition of Rocket League and the marketing of Fortnite. Epic also owns Unreal Engine, which, for example, the new hit game Valorant was made with. However, with Tencent comes an absurd number of companies that I would not want to own, so what can you do?
That turned out to be a long rant But the biggest problem with investing in esports is that there is very little selection on the stock exchange, and the few successful esports companies are just a small part of some giant corporation.
The message of the text is such that I could have written it myself, but worse. 
So I agree with every point as an old Twitch power user, having previously watched Dota tournaments almost daily and spent a fair bit of money on Dota hats. The industry is very interesting, but investment targets are very difficult to find.
There are very few of these esports games on the market, and there would be room to take the entire esports scene to a whole new level, but for precisely these reasons, it’s not a simple task. Esports is something that happens if the game naturally allows it. The game must first be able to stand on its own two feet and achieve a really large player base before the emergence of such an esports-viable game can even be possible. Making a game specifically as an esports game is almost impossible.
Ideating a game is still easy, but very rarely does the implemented idea stay the same from concept to execution. Most ideas eventually end up in the “throw away” bin, and for those that have been implemented, the idea has likely changed its form along the way to something completely different from what it originally was. After that, the implementation is weighed by “Me, You, and Them,” and only then do the masses get to give their final verdict on the game. The final verdict can be excellent, but it’s still a long way to becoming a popular esports game.
As a former esports player, I can easily agree that players have too much power in teams. Teams often start with good players coming together, and then a few key individuals among them start picking people for the final team. The problem isn’t so much getting the team together, but how the egos of the game’s “top 1%” fit together. Tournaments require strong mental fortitude, and to get there, you need to work 6-8 hours a day. In teams that lack an owner, manager, and coach chain, and where the key players handle the team’s operations, there is always the risk of the whole operation blowing up. Of course, a lot has changed since I competed, and esports is developing at a furious pace, but I would still stay away from these esports teams.
In my opinion, tournament organizers are not a good investment, at least not yet. Many learning debts will still be paid as the scene develops, and esports lacks that #1 game like, for example, real-life football. Dota, LoL, CS, etc., are big esports games on their current scale, but we haven’t yet seen the next step to the next size category.
I don’t see streaming services as a potential target for investors, unless one wants to own Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Twitch is the absolute number one in this regard, and at most, one of these other giants could theoretically shake its power. Even they have had relatively little success so far.
Good, relevant posts above
I’ve been betting on and following CS for a long time. You really shouldn’t invest in teams. Players do indeed change teams like socks. I’ve been amused watching Astralis since its listing. I consider it very risky. They’ve apparently launched some of their own sodas now Usually, such products tend to disappear from supermarket shelves quietly, and certainly not because someone is buying them. If you want to make money with Astralis, you should consider betting against them. And if you want any team in your portfolio at all, then speculate from the football side.
It’s really quite impossible to sell viewing rights in e-sports. When people are used to free content, it’s hard to make it paid, while the industry is supposed to grow significantly for a long time to come. That’s an impossible equation.
At the moment, my own impression is that if one wants to invest in eSports, the best options are ETFs? With these, one is generally more involved in the rise of the entire industry, and not just a specific player.
I’ve been eyeing the following two for a while:
VanEck Vector Video Gaming and eSports UCITS ETF (ESP0)
Roundhill BITKRAFT Esports & Digital Entertainment ETF (NERD)
Both aim to replicate indices.
I’ll have to look into those more closely. It’s difficult to find sensible direct stock investments in esports.
