Arthur Schopenhauer once said: “People's envy shows how unhappy they feel; their constant attention to the doings of others how bored they are”. So true! Sometimes jealously and evil actoins against you just, and pop ou from those you always thought they would be there by your side for their love for you and comprehense of your path, but that is not the case, they are there to feed themselves fro your energy while they want to be in your place, but they cant, just becasue they are incapable of BE what they want to be, need to be and have to be, most of the time it is due to their own lack of ability to learn how to walk THE PATH. 

One of the biggest dilemmas for everyone is to understand the variety of the distant sides in ways of understanding the business in which they are involved, and in the way of acting for and by the business in which they are involved.

Much is related to both personal and professional experience, and the maturity of themselves as persons. And with the maturity we can more specifically talk about training, time of presence in several and specific areas of the market, positive or negative experience as an entrepreneur and whether success has been achieved by turning those who have undertaken, ultimately into real businessmen. So many other factors that are inherent to these understandings and the success to be achieved, such as ethics, moral values, disruptive but positive thoughts, understanding of the market in relation to the present time and vision of the future, and the list would go on for a long time.

But very specifically, the maturity that leads to, or at least it should do so, an understanding of what you do, how you are doing it, and with whom you do what you propose to do, is the main thing here in this text.

Many do not understand that in electronic sports, the protagonists are different, depending on the point of view and the market that is reached or that is intended to be reached. In part, it is the practitioners themselves (called players or athletes), who were there from the beginning, and we hope that they will remain so internally, but maturing in relation to business, as people who are entertained, without however failing to take this entertainment seriously and being themselves those organizing the activities, the competitions, with their "clans" or "teams" and so on.

And the companies that developed the games, most often incorporated by the publishers, had fun in a way doing just that, promoting more and more entertainment. Certainly, the purpose of a company is solely and exclusively, speaking more specifically in business, bringing to its owners, employees and in some cases shareholders, profit and only that. The naked and raw fact is this, if you have a company, the reason for having it is and should be initially to make a profit and be able to live off your profit. To think otherwise and philosophically, hypothetically and romantically for other purposes is pure naivete.

Want a proof? Take off the profit or if you get it, donate the 100% of the profit to charity and try to live like that with your company, your accounts and bills and your personal life as an entrepreneur. Pure naivety to think otherwise and to start a company thinking otherwise, but profit and to be able to support themselves with that profit from their products, services or whatever.

Logically, social actions, including educational ones, of various assistance and humanitarian contributions MUST be made by those who can do so, such as Microsoft, Apple, Nestle among many others, but believe me, the moment the accounts are not equated with the return of investment, all charity ceases, and rightly so! There is no shame here in doing or not doing these humanitarian actions or developing the social side of your private company, as far as it is concerned to a private company, this company is there to provide products, services and other possibilities that can be accepted by the greatest number of people so it can survive, and if after that it is willing to enter the field of welfare, humanitarianism and others, so be it.

But all this info so that you understand that there is nothing excluding about having the private and having the institutional at the same time coexisting, the only main difference is that one does not depend on the other and one does not interfere with another. Business values are different in their purpose of existence, but they can occasionally and in many ways have these values equated and equalized at various times.

Taking this into account, in the electronic sport, there is the private side, which, thanks God, exists, because without it we would not have the fluidity of the market that feeds into the production of more final inputs, that is, games and on the other hand, too fuels entertainment, which we now have as events for various electronic sports competitions around the world. They are made by the developers / publishers themselves, and others events are promoted by private companies from different sectors. But they all have a common goal in common: to leverage their brands, products and services. Take that from this events, and what is left are events that give value in prizes benefiting those who compete, and also bring entertainment to others, who are the audience of course. Is there any harm or bad thing in that? OF COURSE NOT, HOW COULD IT BE? But from the company's business and commerce perspective (speaking more about developers/publishers), this business model can be fatal in the long term and run in every way, when we talk about real return on investment, with regard to brand positioning (if something in the near future goes wrong with respect to continuity of these events for example), and in the dependence that their products must be sustained continuously by the interest of those who consume their products (the players and not only the esports practitioners, but the gamers themselves as a general audience), that is it, "consumers" because we consume (buy, commerce) so far, practitioners or just audience, and that interest changes quickly and constantly in a crazy and frenetic way, and maintaining loyalty and commercial interest in your product is an exhausting war. And take into consideration that most of the developers/publishers offer their products to download for free, depending almost exclusively of their micro transactions to sustain their products, and providing the internet servers, pay teams to keep on playing and competing in their titles, pay the production of their own competitions, and pay the final prize!!! That is why this business model is a double-edged sword, you propose to continue your product by creating events, and this is good, but it does not returns to you the investment at the same speed you invest on it, and at the same time you must invest even more so that this becomes possible by creating a market that is often mercenary purely mercantilist. But what's wrong with that? From a commercial point of view, nothing. From an ROI standpoint, and business model, everything wrong! Just reread that paragraph. It is most certainly a doomed business model and it needs to refresh. But the reasons for not having so much investments from third part in a heavy and deep way not only on this private events, but in teams and athletes is theme for another article.

But what is my point? Here it is: for years the market has been establishing itself on two sides, since the term “electronic sport” competition was used and not only “electronic games” competitions.

At first, there are those who understand the word "sport" very very very well, and there are those who understand the word "electronic" very well. The difficult thing is often to find those who understand both words, and even more difficult is to find those who understand the social impacts (we are talking about sport, social inclusion, education and entertainment), and economic impacts that both words have together!

In general, those who understand the word and social concepts, economic and practical concept of the word “sports”, have been in this market for years, generation after generation, whether in the professional high-performance market or in the professional high-performance Olympic market, in the grassroots market, in the school / university sports market (educational sports) and even in the entertainment sports market. These professionals have been creating and developing this incredible ecosystem that we have today, both privately and institutionally. Codes of conduct, arbitration and disciplinary rules, scientific studies, methods of achieving performance, teaching and learning methods, apart from the markets surrounding this ecosystem such as medical and medicinal products, food and nutrition, health , anti-doping, training devices and devices for competitive practices, and etc.

In this sports market, we reach the laws and regulations of these diverse laws, codes and regulations, rules and standards, disciplinary and arbitration courts, commissions and so many other peculiarities that were only possible with learning, and with that experience, and then at that point we return to the opening paragraphs of this article.

This is the institutional sport, not the private one, but it also has its commercial side and some points can be common to the private sports.

Electronic sport, however, took its first steps in this direction at least 18 years ago, very modestly, initiated by people who had no experience in the traditional sports market, or even came from that market. This is because the institutional market for “regular” sport did not know or even wanted to understand what the “electronic” part of the new sport was (but the regular sports certainly had the same beginning). By the way, very recently the "electronic sport" is an accepted modality in most of the places (countries and its governs), but even today there is still resistance in many sectors of "regular" sport and those who are part of it, sometimes due to lack of information, sometimes due to the way they are introduced to this modality and the inconsistent information that reaches them, and others for the simple fact that they are just “stubborns”.

But the best and simplest thing about all of this, is the fact of the breakthrough, the "boldness" and the will to make electronic sport institutionalized. And here we are today.

Certainly for myself from 2008 to 2010, I was very reticent about the institutional electronic sport market, but I started to believe and study it and observed the various gaps that exist in it, the main one being the one we discussed above, the lack of maturity in certain actions that the institutional requires from those who enter these paths, the other was the regulation of legislation, even knowing that it can in some point have the self-regulation model.

Legislation is one of them, the regulation, and then the standard business models for creating and adapting yourself to the pyramidal system of institutional world sport. However, this is not an obstacle for us to, and in fact we must, make changes in this system of the regular sport itself, at least for electronic sports, in the sense of renewing, giving new air, new ideas and working methods and the practice of institutional sport in what concerns and refers to electronic sport, after all we are the new era, aren't we? Why not set an example or open up new horizons and new possibilities for those who have been part of a system for years, trying to renew themselves, and that would be the main opportunity, in which case it would be so good for both "sides".

But I founded myself, demanding and wanting this actions, from people inserted in an already existing institutional electronic sports market, the maturity that they did not have, because it would necessarily have to obtain it from people who understood their “side” and wanted to adapt what they knew to new category they represented. What I write below must be read to the end, without prior judgment, otherwise directly and literally there will be no understanding of what I want to explain in this article.

Naively, as every immature market is, so to speak, the era of institutional electronic sport has begun. The IESF - International Electronic Sports Federation was the first to launch itself in the institutional electronic sport market. Created from people and their “institutions” (or associations, organizations, federations, call them as you wish), which together would initially try to regulate or standardize the e-sports market like we already had for the “regular” sports market.

This naivete was treated for many years internally and externally by the IESF, very negatively, both by people who really did not know what they were doing, but thus tried to act correctly with all dedication and love, both by people who knew what they were doing but whose their intentions were not very positive, and were most of the time taking advantage of the naivety of the market and others that made up this entity, they did it negatively and wrongly.

Another factor that testifies to the detriment of the uniqueness and maturity of this institutional market, is that many other entities that would make up the IESF were also immature and inexperienced, and many are still, and made equal, greater or lesser errors, in terms of national administration of esports. One of the most common mistakes, even today, is to understand that if you have a national entity for the administration of electronic sports, it is essential that you are part of the largest number of international entities (no matter if they are regional, continental or global entities), when it is quite the opposite. This is immaturity, naivety, at least that's what we want to believe at first sight. I would say that among ten national entities, one or two really understand what it means to be affiliated with entities that “compete” with each other, and the harm that this does to the ecosystem and to themselves, but they do so because there is still no global consensus on which one is the “real and legitimate” global administration entity of electronic sport (or so called governing body, I personally hate that term), and with that they affiliate in all of these entities, waiting for the final “verdict” to be given. The vast majority simply think that they "should" or "can" join the largest amount because that imputes a greater characteristic of "legitimacy" to themselves in their country making them the "right choice", instead the values that should confirm and recognize them as “the right choice” would be others such as having a proper infrastructure of your national organization, activities, articles and propositions of codes and regulations, professionals who are part of this entity and of course teams and athletes, but we will talk about that in a different article.

But this pluralist attitude testifies exactly against these entities at national level, since most of them think they must be affiliated in all international entities, and in the desire to join all international ones, for the reasons explained in the previous paragraph, you end up dealing with probable situations in which you will not be really accepted in all these entities equally and openly, and it may happen that your chosen entity is set aside by an entity that will justly be chosen and legitimized as a global entity in the very near future.

In my own experience, when I created the Brazilian national entity that deals with the administration of electronic sports, CBDEL, I knew exactly the steps I should take, and I did an extensive market research, marketing research, in advance and recognized the gaps from both national and international  view of the electronic sport, and I chose to act in the base over marketing and competitive activities, otherwise I would open a private company of events of electronic sports and walk it that way. What I mean is that, having a national electronic sports administration entity, in a country (call "Confederation", "Federation", "Association" or whatever), and promoting competitions without any purpose that adds value to the practitioner, and gives him career and post-career, it is simply to make it totally wrong from the beginning, what one wanted to have and be and to leave a legacy. An administration entity whose category starts, must, first of all, create the entire basis of this new sports category, codes, regulations, legislation, rules, standards, documentation, and must bring together professionals who come from these categories already existing in the regular sport but on the other hand, you will have to do a “job of little ant” to educate, explain and make yourself understood by these professionals so that only then they can contribute to this new category. In addition, you must deal with professionals in your field, that is electronic sport, and educate them, make themselves understood so that they can understand and learn from regular sport and only then contribute to the adaptation and mixing of both sides in a single new category, and it took 4 years to reach the highest level of maturity, and we still have a lot to learn and accomplish here in Brazil with CBDEL. And only now that we accept membership at national and state level, teams and athletes and we are educating these electronic sports teams and their athletes, to really understand what it is to be and have a team (or club) legally, properly and regularly created and their relationship with the athlete and their future in institutional electronic sport, without however leaving the electronic sport private side, so they can have benefits from both esports models, and the private esports is already a gigantic advance and differential in relation to regular sport.

Returning to the IESF, we were affiliated with this entity in 2015 and left it in 2017 for many different reasons, and IESF already had almost a decade of foundation in that year, but it lacked the maturity, experience that would have arisen from regular sport both in its infrastructure and in its administration. But as I said it was founded and made by people 100% coming from electronic sports (in fact electronic games practice),  and that in itself is praiseworthy, they lacked the direction, the correct leadership that would had guided them to the right path, which also proved to be harmful in all aspects for the entity itself over the years. This was also reflected in several internal values and models of operation and business that have proved even more harmful over time. Its president, as we know, made personal and professional mistakes and those mistakes reflected directly and mercilessly on the IESF.

Another negative factor was the business model adopted, it was in fact non-existent, and the operation model vitiated many other entities that were “recognized and affiliated”, breaking the sustainability chain that should have been promoted among national entities and their own existence as an entity of global reach, and an annual operational dependency was promoted (which is not the case here to talk about) . However, in the case of “affiliated and recognized” entities, due to the lack of maturity and experience in the field of sport and even administration, there was no correct degree of application of an affiliation criterion, with clear rules and regulations for this, and this was reflected a lot in the desire to have quantity over quality, another point as we said above, which directly reflects on the importance and relevance of a global entity and its image in the medium and long term.

Added to this you had some intentional actions from some of the IESF members, to break the esports ecosystem, regarding the recognition of entities that competed with each other at national level, and due to the lack of affiliation criteria many times, and some even purposeful against those who did not share the same vision towards this entity, an environment of dispute, split and constant war was created in national levels.

In 2016, I was already unhappy with this, I decided to found , as a result of a lot of thinking about this issue together with another friend of mine from Netherland and another friend from China, an entity that at first was not an entity that proclaimed itself “global administration entity” or even “international governance entity of e-sport”, we would simply exist to create a standardized, regulated, legislated institutional environment, with codes, research and above all that would stand out for the integrity of the e-sport practitioner, and that would inevitably create an environment sustainable for all its members, which would be composed of a national administration entities of electronic sport (at all levels: professional, grassroots, educational and sports ), sustainable in the broad and complete sense of the word, and for that we would have to involve also private companies from different sectors, but all of this in a global level. So we created WESCO - World Esports Consortium, and with that we joined national electronic sports management entities, regional esports associations within those countries, companies from different sectors such as hardware, food and hospitality, among others, and little by little we settled in regions and countries, being accepted as members of various chambers in other countries, such as China, and other activities that led us to create social programs using the electronic sports as a tool to create a better citizen to the world, such as the esports programs "Changing the People, Changing the World" and "Ambassadors of Esports". We give voice to regions of the world that are excluded or even overlooked, within e-sport, such as the African continent and its various countries that yearn for a chance to show their gigantic values as an incredible source of e-sport practitioners not to mention private companies and other entities awaiting these opportunities, which we now take to them. Other international partnerships like “Enter Africa”, to name just one among several, and so many other activities.

We have also formed our infrastructure so that we were adaptable and synchronized with market needs, and split into world regions and their market vice-presidents, their president of advisory board, and we recognize other continental esports administration bodies, regional esports administration bodies already accept by those continental bodies, and so on for the national level.

We offer freely to these entities and to all members, our business models, education projects and operation models so they can adapt to their local markets, social programs as already said above, which also bring sustainability including the business side, and commercial partnerships with private companies, also members of WESCO, so that they can have sustainable activities, products and etc.

We also try to educate national entities, in particular, in the sense of having the necessary infrastructure for themselves, and if they do not yet have this infrastructure, to have little focus on competitions, until they have a real reason to hold these events, which should then lead the practitioner to have a career ranked within a sports system already recognized and created, and thereby bringing to this practitioner the same benefits of a career as a regular sports athlete, such as a player and football, or basketball and etc. We try to educate these entities in the sense of being loyal to what they live and to the environment they live in and are accepted for the reasons already explained above many times when I wrote about pluralism management entities of the international esports.

We created several Commissions (such as Education, Social Development, Commerce, Olympic Movement, Ethics, Athletes, Arbitration, etc. ) and Departments (such as Anti-Doping, Health and High Performance, etc. ), and very recently we created CAES (Chamber of Arbitration of Electronic Sport).

And since now it is fashionable among international entities that wish to have the most “legitimate” appeal, at least is what it looks likes from those recently founded, maybe in the previous 6 months between 2019 and 2020, when they use TITLES and more TITLES (ex-president of that…former chairman of that and so on), when they present the members of their “BOARD” or “Comissions ”, we also have among us professionals who made the history of regular sport, and some who still actively do it, members and former members of CAS, WADA, IOC, NOCs, IOC Scientific Committees , among other sectors . But citing names and their titles is , to say the least, childish and wishes to divert attention to these titles as if they were proof of mandatory accreditation for success or credibility , without wanting to belittle these same professionals or their careers and life, on the contrary, I deal here only with how they are being treated by marketing areas of their entities, they often do not even know about it themselves. This is our biggest difference, we work for the institutional esports community, without news, articles on specialized websites and specialized magazines, because it does not bring anything to anyone who practices, to ourselves and especially to humanity and what we can add and leave as legacy to the world. The titles we leave to royalty, and the fireworks we leave for holiday parties.

But above all, the people who make up WESCO are mostly part of electronic sport, and these people are our foundation, our bases and our greatest assets, together with the professionals already experienced in the regular sports environment.

And returning to IESF certainly time is everything, as I always say to all who work with me, if they thought that everything I have described, at least from my point of view about this entity (IESF) was towards negativize and discredit them (if I would wrote this two or three months ago make sure that I would do it for that very reason), that is not the case. And I am very happy for this and for being able to publicly expose and say it, as I did in the opposite direction months ago, that the IESF as well as WESCO are undoubtedly, each in their purpose of founding and acting, amazing right now. Peer entities in the sense of the quest and practice of the ethics of operation and administration of the esports category, in the search and application of principles and standards of integrity for the electronic sport, either for the practitioner or for the ecosystem as a whole, and in the standardization and simple regulation of this category, in order to aggregate and unify all sectors, no matter if they are private or other entities at institutional level, in a greater good, leaving a legacy for posterity both in the professional sphere of electronic sport, and in the professional Olympic, educational and social sphere.

The IESF has been undergoing immense and magnificent changes in its mode of operation, in its organizational structure, and in its objectives. Ethics is now the natural word in the whole action of this entity, and adapting new membership criteria, and reviewing the standards of these affiliations and their current members, this entity shows intellectual growth, advancement and the search for the professionalization of its management model and greater equivalence and adequacy to transparency and compliance values in all management processes. Nevertheless, it is now open to new dimensions of e-sport and is breaking the paradigms that have deposed it so much over the years. Previously IESF wasted their time? It may be so, but it all depends on the speed with which these changes I am listing now here in this paragraph, and the application of the new ways of management and operation, are applied. And believe me when I say that IESF is new, transformed, renewed and seeking perfection and fairness, that is literally what is happening with this entity.

It is being reconstructed and composed, as any and all sports category management entities must be composed, above all, by people who come from this environment, as in their origin, but now better trained and prepared, and other professionals that, like WESCO, come from the regular sports environment and other industry sectors, and their diverse administrations skills with experience and competence.

I repeat that the IESF has demonstrated in practice, fulfilling the promises of change, that it is adopting new policies and criteria for membership, new criteria for internal and external operations, and gradually changes its management model to adapt to the new international standards demanded by the so fast changes of the market. And all this at a speed very adequate to their own needs, that is, practically instantaneous in comparison to what was done previously.

And when it comes to ethics, as I have stressed so much here in relation to IESF and WESCO, this is what is most lacking today among many entities, companies and people. Ironically and even almost sarcastically, we use the word “ethics” as if it were an adjective, when it is in itself a noun, and something that should be considered “normal and regular” a standard for every human being, not even necessary to mention.

Instead of creating other entities in the same area and intention (which was never the case of IESF and WESCO for example), the people involved in these activities, should first of all calculate how harmful these actions are to the INSTITUTIONAL ecosystem of electronic sports that are struggling to form and calm down. These people deal with the ingenuity of others, as I mentioned above in this article, and intoxicate them by taking the promise of “recognition and legitimacy” to them. But we know how much we have to improve and create and offer, even before we hold ANY competitive electronic sport event, as I explained for example about CBDEL in Brazil, or even the example I gave about the various phases and parts of WESCO's creation worldwide, because we have to create our bases for the category, codes, regulations and all of that in a Global level, and after that adapt EVERY MEMBER of our international entities to those same standards, otherwise we will be destroying themselves as the entity of administration of the global, continental, regional or national institutional electronic sport. And remember what I wrote at the beginning of this article, about private companies and their role, especially about developers / publishers, it does not matter (however conflicting in the sense of interest that it may be in fact), if representatives of these companies constitute the “BOARD” of some of this new entities, what they must do is to promote trade in their products and services. There is no interference in both ways, from these private companies to the institutional and vice versa. There is a solution to the problems that I explained, at the beginning of this article, with the continuity of their products so that they should never again be concerned with the “popularity” and use of their products as they would be institutionally placed in the category of electronic sports, that in itself would make these companies more profitable and also have a greater return of investment.

I repeat, these new institutional management entities for global electronic sport, with the exception of a mistake of judgement, when co-opting to themselves, entities already recognized and part of an institutional international entity administration of e-sport, be it global, continental, regional or even in a national level, show clearly and unmistakably that they are already beginning their work in order to testify completely against the principles of ETHICS, MORALITY and DIGNITY, both for co-opting something already established , and for using, as I said earlier, the naivety of many national entities, and make use of the titles of professionals invited to their management and even private companies, in the sense that these are the reasons why such national entities of institutional electronic sports , in their naivety, now co-opted, should accept such an invitation. And those national entities doing this, are volatile, still immature and unprepared, because they serve everyone, and we know very well that as the quotes say: “whoever serves everyone, ends up serving no one”.

Personally I would be ashamed, even more so if I were, if that were the case, having titles and market experience and therefore should be an experienced professional and I would understand about the principles of good market and ethics, of allowing such an entity that I was invited to compose and provide my services, act in such a way, the least I would do would be to ask them to change this attitude or I would leave this environment that testify against my person and career principles, since it is certainly already happening.

I dare to say that the electronic sport scene has yet to be seen, something never seen before, despite any other entity being founded and claiming to be the “global administration entity of electronic sport” in the last few months, that both IESF as well as WESCO, I repeat each one in its work proposal, especially now, are not conflicting but complement each other, can, should and I dare to say that they will do an exquisite work in international standardization and adaptation to the professional environment of high performance of the practice, and in the high performance of the Olympic movement, of electronic sport in all its levels, and will be finally establishing this category in the institutional environment, and leveraging, helping and tripling the private environment of this category as already explained, once and for all.