The Vancouver Titans made the Overwatch League’s 2019 Stage 1 finals in their first season. Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment
The Canucks’ owners have made a major dive into the world of esports. Its growth potential tells you why
Thousands of people young and old, screaming their lungs out in a stadium.
It’s an image with which we’re all familiar.
But in this picture, there’s something different: Instead of players moving about on a field or sheet of ice in the middle of all these fans, there’s a collection of young people, wearing headsets, wired into computer screens in front of them.
Yes, esports is exactly as you’d imagined it. These are the gladiators of the future and, more and more, of the present.
In the crowd are faces both young and old. If you looked only at the stands, you might think you were at a hockey game.
“It’s like a Canucks game,” Nathan Yamanaka declares. The nine-year-old boy, who lives in Langley with his parents Niki and Gord, is the quintessential modern kid: He plays minor hockey and also is an avid video gamer.
His dad Gord agrees. Father and son attended The International, the championship tournament for the video game Dota 2, at Rogers Arena in 2018.
“Back in the day esports, they weren’t as prominent, but now you see how big the events are, they’re going to have families there,” he says. “It parallels going to a sporting event when we were kids. We’re lucky to have both.”
Gord Yamanaka with his son Nathan at home in Langley. Both are big fans of sports. ‘It parallels going to a sporting event when we were kids. We’re lucky to have both,’ says Gord Yamanaka.
Jason Payne /
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‘Sports right now’
That’s the thinking behind Canucks Sports and Entertainment’s big push into the world of esports. It’s more familiar as an event than you might think and, yes, they think there’s big money to be made in this new (virtual) arena.
“This is sports right now,” says Tim Holloway, Canucks Sports and Entertainment’s director of esports.
CSE launched its interest in esports last year with the Vancouver Titans, who play in the Overwatch League. Their second season starts in early February.
They’ve now added the Seattle Surge in the Call of Duty League, which launches this weekend.
Two summers ago, with the NHL expansion team-driven renovation of KeyArena in Seattle set to begin, The International was in search of a new home.
The Canucks put up their hand.
“That’s the fastest sellout Rogers Arena has ever had and it was a six-day event,” says Holloway. “That really got the ball rolling.
“You actually went and saw this and what it was and the noise and the passion behind it. And that’s when I was like, ‘Whoa, this is remarkable.’ ”
The Yamanakas were blown away not just by the presentation in the arena or the actual game action, but were also impressed by how close they could get to the stars.
“He got autographs from some players and the casters,” Gord says of his son’s experience. “I don’t think there’s any sport where you can meet the broadcasters so casually. You can meet them at the International, they’re right by the stage, you can go up to meet them, they talk to you. And the teams were right there in the boxes and you could get them to sign right there.”
Nathan recalls being interviewed by one of the in-game hosts and seeing himself on the big screen.
“I got a signed jersey from one of the teams, too,” he adds.
‘That’s Bumper!’
Just a few weeks later, Holloway and the Canucks’ owners, the Aquilini family, plus senior management from CSE went to the inaugural grand final of the Overwatch League, which was held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Again, a huge crowd. The potential to get in early on a movement that looked like it was set to expand rapidly was so clear.
CSE signed on with the Overwatch League (OWL), run by Activision Blizzard, the game’s producers, for a 2019 expansion franchise.
The Titans were an instant hit even if they didn’t play any home games in their first season. The team was based in Burbank, Calif., for its first season, but are hosting two homestands at Rogers Arena this year, on May 16-17 and July 4-5.
Last summer, a fan event at the Cambie Street location of Best Buy drew a big crowd.
“The line was all the way up Cambie,” he says. “Bumper (one of the Titans players) came out to hand out some free stuff and people went nuts. ‘That’s Bumper! That’s Bumper!’ That’s what we need to work on and what we will be doing.”
On social media, the Titans estimate their potential reach as more than one million sets of eyeballs.
In actual game play, they were a hit, too: The Titans made the 20-team circuit’s 2019 grand final, losing out to the San Francisco Shock.
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In setting up the Titans, CSE initially partnered with Luminosity Gaming, a Toronto-based esports gaming outfit, which had expertise in running teams in a broad range of games.
Over the following months, CSE also engaged with Enthusiast Gaming, a well-established Canadian esports media company. After a series of complicated ownership transactions, Enthusiast, Luminosity merged with CSE.
The newly expanded Enthusiast, which Holloway describes as the “mothership” for CSE’s esports ambitions, is now headed by Adrian Montgomery, the former president of Aquilini Entertainment.
After the merger was made official in September, Enthusiast’s founder and president, Menashe Kestenbaum, called the merger a push toward dominance of the industry.
“Our vision when we founded Enthusiast was to build the largest, vertically integrated esports and gaming company in the world,” he said in a statement. “The merger with Aquilini GameCo and Luminosity was a strategic decision that positions us as a dominant player in the gaming industry and unlocks access to Luminosity’s 60 million dedicated esports fans and one of the largest esports franchises.”
The merger was about bringing in on-the-ground expertise and a whole lot more, Holloway says.
“What helps us is Enthusiast Gaming just had their big expo, it’s called the GLX, in Toronto. And that sold out the Toronto Convention Centre for three days,” he says. “So what that gets us is their network, their gaming network, and their influencers and obviously, guys like Richard Sherman.”
Sherman, the National Football Football League star cornerback, isn’t just a brand ambassador, but is actually a shareholder, Holloway says.
“This isn’t just him wearing a T-shirt for a photo, he’s put dollars and cents on the table. He sees the the remarkable growth and the opportunity.”
And Sherman’s not the only high-profile name from traditional sports throwing his weight behind esports.
The Vancouver Titans in action at the 2019 Overwatch League grand finals. ‘This isn’t just a business fling,’ says Tim Holloway, Canucks Sports and Entertainment’s director of esports. ‘This is a sport. It’s happened. It’s happening.’
Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment
There are investment bankers who have put money into OWL, but there are also faces from more traditional sports involved: Sports heavyweights Robert Kraft and Stan Kroenke, sports media giants Comcast, former NBAer Rick Fox and Andy Miller, part-owner of the Sacramento Kings, are investors in OWL.
“What got them hooked, as very competitive traditional sport owners or players, is the passion around it and anyone that’s gone to a live event — or anyone that will go to a live event in Seattle and Vancouver — they’ll feel that right off the bat,” Holloway says.
The potential reach of esports surely draws their attention, too. Globally, there are an estimated two billion people who play video games.
‘A real audience’
Vancouver lawyer Jon Festinger knows plenty about traditional sports as well as esports — he was once general counsel for the Canucks, and in recent years has written about video-game law as well as studies emerging media.
Now, he’s a professor at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver as well as an adjunct professor at the University of B.C.’s Peter A. Allard School of law.
“It’s a real audience,” Festinger says of who is watching and following esports. “It may seem strange to those who watch traditional sports, but to an alternate audience it’s not new and different. The comparison I make is why do we watch hockey instead of playing it? The mindset is really no different.”
There may be buzzy growth potential for esports, but there are still many challenges, most of them familiar. Just look at the experience of how most new leagues struggled to establish themselves over the past century.
“Major League Soccer has made huge strides, but it’s taken a long time.”
And a league like OWL, where the actual creators of the game are also running the competition, are rare — roller derby in the 1930s and arena football in the early 1990s are the best examples.
In building the Titans, Holloway credits Luminosity’s Steve Maida with identifying Team RunAway, from South Korea.
The whole squad, who won the amateur Overwatch Contenders League in 2018, was signed on.
The 2019 season had the Titans based at a studio in Burbank, Calif., with the players living in a house together. That made for some real lessons, Holloway acknowledges.
“I think that definitely made Canucks Sports and Entertainment a lot stronger and well rounded, dealing with those kind of trials and tribulations that come up,” he admits.
‘Homestands’ format
The upcoming 2020 season will be big. The Overwatch League is moving to a city-based “homestands” format, essentially three days of play between teams in the league, rotated through the various home cities.
If the format sounds a bit like the Canada Sevens, you’re not wrong. There’s a lot for fans to take in over the three-day event — if there’s a game they aren’t interested in watching in the stands, there will be plenty going on around the arena.
Originally, OWL’s leadership was looking at running a more traditional home-and-away schedule, where one city would visit another at a time. But after running three-day events in places like Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles, the vision changed.
Spending three days in one place meant the cities themselves got to play a starring role. It also forced the weekend’s host to think about how to set up their venue.
The expansion Vancouver Titans didn’t actually play any home games in their first season in the Overwatch League, being based in Burbank, Calif., but still made the 20-team circuit’s grand final, falling short against the San Francisco Shock.
Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment
Alfred de Vera, who has worked for the Canucks’ communications department for seven years but who now is focused solely on CSE’s esports department, says the L.A. homestand was notable.
“I like Overwatch, but I wasn’t prepared to watch five games back to back,” he says.
The L.A. games were played at a studio in Burbank, one that had once been used by Jay Leno’s Tonight Show.
“We were there for six hours but we were entertained,” says de Vera. “There was like a Bud Light lounge where you could hang out and watch esports on one and watch college football on another. It was open to all fans.
“There was maybe a dozen or a dozen and a half things to do in that space that would occupy you if you didn’t want to watch, you know, San Francisco vs. Philadelphia, or whatever.”
It’s a trend that’s even sprouting up at Canucks games, de Vera adds. While there are many fans who come to Rogers Arena to watch every second on the ice, there are also now fans who are looking for a different experience, like it or not, one that’s as much about the company as it is about the on-ice action.
“It’s a social thing,” is the lesson, he says.
“I think that’s where esports is in my opinion, it’s taking that to another level.”
The challenge for hockey, he admits, is finding a happy medium.
Youthful demographic
In determining how they’re going to do their game presentation and set up the arena itself, Holloway says that they’re looking outwards, trying to engage with their fans in the Lower Mainland through their social media channels to learn about what people want to see and experience when they go to Rogers Arena.
It’s a youthful demographic that follows esports, something that tantalizes OWL’s leadership and its current and prospective investors.
According to Nielsen’s per-minute viewership data, the 2019 OWL grand final’s global audience averaged just over one million people. In the U.S. alone, viewership in the 18 to 34 demographic average 182,000 per minute, up 11 per cent from 2018.
The reality of most traditional sports is their viewing audiences are only getting older, so the potential for growth that advertisers and broadcasters see in the youthful face of the average esports viewer is obvious.
The micro commerce already built into modern video games is another potential area for growth. A portion of purchases made by gamers inside the Overwatch environment, things like buying OWL jerseys for player characters, is used to fund OWL’s prize pools.
Getting in on the ground floor is already proving to be a booming proposition.
Fees to join Overwatch League were in the $20-million range. As a comparison, the CFL’s expansion team in Halifax will pay a league entry fee of $9 million.
Overwatch is particularly massive in Asia and South Korea, but OWL counts teams in Toronto, London, Seoul, Paris plus 11 teams in the U.S. and four more in China.
“At the grand final in Philadelphia, there 85 credentialed media and these weren’t just blogs that had 100 followers. These are major sites across the world, in China and South Korea, and the U.K, France,” says de Vera. “The Washington Post had writers there. ESPN, too.”
‘This isn’t a business fling’
Call of Duty has a long-standing loyalty with North American gamers. And it’s predominantly played on these shores with Playstation 4. Activision Blizzard is growing its esports footprint by launching the Call of Duty League this year.
“This isn’t just a business fling,” Holloway says. “This is a sport. It’s happened. It’s happening.”
Esports will be a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games. It’s potentially a trial sport for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. But as it gets bigger, Holloway is conscious that it can’t lose its do-it-yourself spirit, the one that grew from kids playing at home or in their dorms.
“What I love about working with the grassroots community is that they’re very, very hesitant of losing what brought esports to where it was and and that unique touch, if you will. And I think that’s how it will be successful in that, which is what we’re still working on, we’re still learning from it.”
Traditional leagues are loath to ignore esports’ potential for growth among younger audiences, Festinger says, before recalling a point he made once to an executive who worked in traditional sports.
“My son would rather play FIFA (EA Sports’ world-famous soccer game) than watch the real thing.”
The federal government is ordering the dissolution of TikTok’s Canadian business after a national security review of the Chinese company behind the social media platform, but stopped short of ordering people to stay off the app.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced the government’s “wind up” demand Wednesday, saying it is meant to address “risks” related to ByteDance Ltd.’s establishment of TikTok Technology Canada Inc.
“The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners,” he said in a statement.
The announcement added that the government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content.
However, it urged people to “adopt good cybersecurity practices and assess the possible risks of using social media platforms and applications, including how their information is likely to be protected, managed, used and shared by foreign actors, as well as to be aware of which country’s laws apply.”
Champagne’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment seeking details about what evidence led to the government’s dissolution demand, how long ByteDance has to comply and why the app is not being banned.
A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement that the shutdown of its Canadian offices will mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying local jobs.
“We will challenge this order in court,” the spokesperson said.
“The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive.”
The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of TikTok in September 2023, but it was not public knowledge until The Canadian Press reported in March that it was investigating the company.
At the time, it said the review was based on the expansion of a business, which it said constituted the establishment of a new Canadian entity. It declined to provide any further details about what expansion it was reviewing.
A government database showed a notification of new business from TikTok in June 2023. It said Network Sense Ventures Ltd. in Toronto and Vancouver would engage in “marketing, advertising, and content/creator development activities in relation to the use of the TikTok app in Canada.”
Even before the review, ByteDance and TikTok were lightning rod for privacy and safety concerns because Chinese national security laws compel organizations in the country to assist with intelligence gathering.
Such concerns led the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill in March designed to ban TikTok unless its China-based owner sells its stake in the business.
Champagne’s office has maintained Canada’s review was not related to the U.S. bill, which has yet to pass.
Canada’s review was carried out through the Investment Canada Act, which allows the government to investigate any foreign investment with potential to might harm national security.
While cabinet can make investors sell parts of the business or shares, Champagne has said the act doesn’t allow him to disclose details of the review.
Wednesday’s dissolution order was made in accordance with the act.
The federal government banned TikTok from its mobile devices in February 2023 following the launch of an investigation into the company by federal and provincial privacy commissioners.
— With files from Anja Karadeglija in Ottawa
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
LONDON (AP) — Most people have accumulated a pile of data — selfies, emails, videos and more — on their social media and digital accounts over their lifetimes. What happens to it when we die?
It’s wise to draft a will spelling out who inherits your physical assets after you’re gone, but don’t forget to take care of your digital estate too. Friends and family might treasure files and posts you’ve left behind, but they could get lost in digital purgatory after you pass away unless you take some simple steps.
Here’s how you can prepare your digital life for your survivors:
Apple
The iPhone maker lets you nominate a “ legacy contact ” who can access your Apple account’s data after you die. The company says it’s a secure way to give trusted people access to photos, files and messages. To set it up you’ll need an Apple device with a fairly recent operating system — iPhones and iPads need iOS or iPadOS 15.2 and MacBooks needs macOS Monterey 12.1.
For iPhones, go to settings, tap Sign-in & Security and then Legacy Contact. You can name one or more people, and they don’t need an Apple ID or device.
You’ll have to share an access key with your contact. It can be a digital version sent electronically, or you can print a copy or save it as a screenshot or PDF.
Take note that there are some types of files you won’t be able to pass on — including digital rights-protected music, movies and passwords stored in Apple’s password manager. Legacy contacts can only access a deceased user’s account for three years before Apple deletes the account.
Google
Google takes a different approach with its Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to share your data with someone if it notices that you’ve stopped using your account.
When setting it up, you need to decide how long Google should wait — from three to 18 months — before considering your account inactive. Once that time is up, Google can notify up to 10 people.
You can write a message informing them you’ve stopped using the account, and, optionally, include a link to download your data. You can choose what types of data they can access — including emails, photos, calendar entries and YouTube videos.
There’s also an option to automatically delete your account after three months of inactivity, so your contacts will have to download any data before that deadline.
Facebook and Instagram
Some social media platforms can preserve accounts for people who have died so that friends and family can honor their memories.
When users of Facebook or Instagram die, parent company Meta says it can memorialize the account if it gets a “valid request” from a friend or family member. Requests can be submitted through an online form.
The social media company strongly recommends Facebook users add a legacy contact to look after their memorial accounts. Legacy contacts can do things like respond to new friend requests and update pinned posts, but they can’t read private messages or remove or alter previous posts. You can only choose one person, who also has to have a Facebook account.
You can also ask Facebook or Instagram to delete a deceased user’s account if you’re a close family member or an executor. You’ll need to send in documents like a death certificate.
TikTok
The video-sharing platform says that if a user has died, people can submit a request to memorialize the account through the settings menu. Go to the Report a Problem section, then Account and profile, then Manage account, where you can report a deceased user.
Once an account has been memorialized, it will be labeled “Remembering.” No one will be able to log into the account, which prevents anyone from editing the profile or using the account to post new content or send messages.
X
It’s not possible to nominate a legacy contact on Elon Musk’s social media site. But family members or an authorized person can submit a request to deactivate a deceased user’s account.
Passwords
Besides the major online services, you’ll probably have dozens if not hundreds of other digital accounts that your survivors might need to access. You could just write all your login credentials down in a notebook and put it somewhere safe. But making a physical copy presents its own vulnerabilities. What if you lose track of it? What if someone finds it?
Instead, consider a password manager that has an emergency access feature. Password managers are digital vaults that you can use to store all your credentials. Some, like Keeper,Bitwarden and NordPass, allow users to nominate one or more trusted contacts who can access their keys in case of an emergency such as a death.
But there are a few catches: Those contacts also need to use the same password manager and you might have to pay for the service.
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Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your questions.
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday it’s opening a formal investigation into Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it has “sufficient information” to launch an initial probe after it sought input earlier this year on whether the deal would stifle competition.
The CMA has until Dec. 19 to decide whether to approve the deal or escalate its investigation.
“Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world,” the company said. “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”
San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The company has focused on increasing the safety and reliability of AI models. Google reportedly agreed last year to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, which has a popular chatbot named Claude.
Anthropic said it’s cooperating with the regulator and will provide “the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration.”
“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others,” it said in a statement.
The U.K. regulator has been scrutinizing a raft of AI deals as investment money floods into the industry to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom. Last month it cleared Anthropic’s $4 billion deal with Amazon and it has also signed off on Microsoft’s deals with two other AI startups, Inflection and Mistral.
