2024-06-25
1 小时 14 分钟My guest today is a director of esports for Riot Games.
While attending the University of Texas at Dallas for computer science, he worked as an automotive safety software engineer, inventing a wireless car seat that would sound an alarm if a child was left unattended in the car.
Then in 2013, he moved into the emerging world of competitive video game playing, developing broadcast tools for live esports competitions.
The following year, he dropped out of college to help oversee the growth of college level League of Legends in North America for riot Games.
In 2022, he joined the team behind Team Fight Tactics, a chess like spinoff of League of Legends, working to establish the game as a competitive sport.
And today he is helping to build Riot's forthcoming fighting game 2xko.
Welcome Michael Sherman.
Thanks for having me, Simon.
Thanks for doing this, Michael.
So, yeah, it obviously takes a huge amount of money and organization to run a video game and to turn a video game into a competitive sport, I should say.
What else do you need to make it a success other than money?
I think first and foremost it really starts from your understanding of how players want to play the game.
I think a lot of Riot's success in esports in particular has come from really adapting to players are self organizing, players are kind of forming teams on their own.
How are players kind of like taking this game and expanding on beyond just the feature set that we put out there for it and really trying to push the way that players are playing it.
So we always joke that season one of the League of Legends world championship was in freak's basement or just at dreamhack with a 60 player audience and hundreds of thousands of people tuned in and it's like, oh, okay, we should, we should chase this.
We had no idea the demand.
So a lot of it is really like critical to have a deep understanding of your audience and what they want out of the game and how they want to interact with it is probably like way more important than the money you actually put into the esport.
Right.
But like I suppose the League of Legends you had a game that was already massively popular, like incredibly popular.
I think the stat was 5% of people in Taiwan played the game or something, you know, you know, what about when you're working on games like Team Fight Tactics and like the new fighting, are you working on where it's not already a massive established player base?