The mystery of the anonymous esports manifesto

In mid-October, on the occasion of the 52nd anniversary of esports (this whole thing is apparently the fault of Stanford students organizing a Spacewar! tournament in 1972) I got an email from a group called the Open Esports Initiative. Conspicuously anonymous, the senders prompted me to join their “movement” by reading and sharing a white paper on “the constraints of game intellectual property ownership” and the future of esports.

Okay, I’ll bite.

The white paper is broken into sections. You can read the whole document here, but I’ll also be citing it at length throughout. I’m simplifying a bit, but the four main sections can be summarized thusly.

1. Publishers are the problem. Everything in the current iteration of esports flows downstream from the game’s publisher’s interests. Some major issues arise from this, including the “stifling” of competition and innovation, “misaligned priorities” between different dev teams (such as: the internal esports team and the core dev team), and all manner of largely unpredictable disruption for third parties in the space (teams, tournament organizers, and others).

2. Is esports worth saving? The white paper leads its second section with this provocative question — aaaaaaand does not answer it. Some viewership and financial statistics are introduced here, and maybe that’s this group’s answer, though I do not find it compelling.¹ More importantly, this is where the document starts shifting into a more visionary gear: “For esports to move beyond mere survival, the missing piece of the puzzle remains the ability of the community to directly craft competitive gameplay experiences,” the authors write. “Traditionally, esports organisations have solely focused on off-game aspects such as broadcasts and events, whilst game publishers have concentrated on development itself. This disjointed approach creates misalignment. For esports to thrive, we need to empower individuals and entities to own and combine both facets.”²

3. What is the OEI? The bulk of this section is boring “esports is growing, but it’s not growing enough, and why not?” throat-clearing, but the conclusion offers a first glimpse at a path forward. If the problem is “centralized control” under a publisher, the solution is “a decentralised model where control and ownership are spread across the community, leading to more democratic and equitable governance.” Listen, I’ll be honest: I’m quoting here because I could not explain in my own words, or in more concrete terms, what this means. The authors continue: “By focusing on inclusivity, creativity, and competition whilst blurring the lines between players, developers, and viewers, we are setting the stage for a significant shift in how esports are consumed, developed, and crucially, governed. The OEI offers flexibility, allowing the community to choose the governance system they prefer for their game.” This makes the OEI both a group of people and a framework/model (?) which is a bit confusing. Get used to that.

4. User-generated content is maybe the thing here? More statistics. 😴.³ About halfway through, though, the OEI “predicts” that user-generated content focused games are the future, or at least a big part of it. Here’s where things get a little bit funky. The authors write: “The crucial difference with OEI is, we do not pay people to build content for our platform, we simply provide them with the tools to create competitive, esports-ready games. They are not competing in an artificial marketplace of our design; they are engaging with the broader free market, contending alongside other game developers and platforms.” It is now less clear to me, after this passage, what the OEI is or is meant to be. The additional details only inspire more questions; I present them without comment: “Here, ownership and control remain firmly in [people’s] hands (or if they wish, have no single owner at all, and anything in-between),” the authors write. “OEI eliminates the burden of developing costly esports infrastructure — observer modes, game data APIs, and community-driven monetisation marketplaces are all built-in from the start,” the white paper reads. “By building a competitive game within OEI, one is not merely crafting a game; one is laying the groundwork for a complete esports ecosystem with a solid foundation,” the section concludes.

This is a long document, and even a good faith summary (like mine 😊) probably omits some of the nuance the authors carefully worked into the text. Again, I encourage you to read the whole thing, if you’d like.

Still, you might be thinking: Huh, this is pretty farfetched! So, who are these guys? Who or what is OEI? Well, I had the very same question.

My first response to the original sender (roughly: “Intriguing stuff! Who are you?”) went unanswered, so I went digging. A cursory search turned up a LinkedIn profile and a Twitter account.

Let’s start with the LinkedIn page. Though no other accounts are publicly associated with the page, it includes two posts (with no visible engagement): One call to action that reads like ChatGPT⁴ and roughly mirrors the content of the white paper, and a second titled “Why Anonymity Matters: A Candid Reflection on the Open Esports Initiative White Paper.”

“These authors are not newcomers,” the latter post reads. “They've collectively garnered over two decades of experience, working with and for top-tier esports organisations, tournament organisers, game developers, and practically every major tournament and event alongside esports sponsors and partners.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. (For one thing, we can see that both the social posts and white paper are written in British English.) The text continues:

“Recognising that the validity of the ideas within the white paper might be clouded by the identity of its authors, they have chosen to remain anonymous. The aim is simple: the conversation should centre on the ideas themselves and the promising future of esports, without being overshadowed by their personal accolades or contributions.”

This really caught my attention. It is very possible — even likely! — that the authors are well-intentioned esports veterans with bad instincts around promoting their work.⁵ But my immediate reaction, given the absolute wealth of bad actors at the heights and nadirs of esports, was that 1) this group must include some nasty characters from the industry’s rougher neighborhoods 2) they know their reputations are bad and 3) they don’t want you to know. The flimsiness of the group’s justification — As if people would be so blinded by an esports executive’s “accolades.” Pshaw! — further raised my suspicion.

What about the Twitter account? This one’s a bit of a red herring. The account follows seven other people, a medley of recognizable gaming and esports industry people, and is followed exclusively by porn bots. But what about those seven people: Are they involved somehow? As best as I can tell, no. I reached out to each person with open Twitter DMs to ask if they were involved; three people, Adam Apicella, Ben Goldhaber and Greg Street, all responded in the negative. Most of the other people — including John Carmack and one of the leads on Deadlock over at Valve — seem like unlikely participants in this sort of thing.

Throughout the process of poring over social media accounts, I periodically checked in with sources of mine from over the years: Hey, does the phrase “Open Esports Initiative” mean anything to you? The answer was no in all but two cases: once, when a source received the same email I did, and another time when the person I asked said their employer had been approach by the group for a conversation in which my source did not take part. (I didn’t learn much else beyond that.)

Spoiler alert: I still don’t know who wrote the white paper. But as I worked through the information above and chatted with more people about what I was learning, a couple of theories emerged, some more plausible than others. I’d like to briefly walk you through my thinking about possible culprits. I’ve arranged the groups from least to most likely, with the pesky caveat that the participants in this initiative may not all neatly sort into one bucket; more likely, the OEI is an agglomeration of people from both legit and shady corners of the industry who may fall into several of the categories outlined below.

People connected to the Saudi Public Investment Fund

Anyone involved in Saudi esportswashing would obviously prefer that their identity not “distract” from their message, so that’s immediately where my head went. The white paper references the PIF and the Saudi-owned ESL FACEIT Group, and even includes a quote from a YouTube interview with the company’s co-CEO, Craig Levine.⁶ The interview has under 600 views on YouTube; it’s a real deep cut, a niche pull for a document like this — unless the authors know Levine, or work with him.

That said, the document ends with a call to action about gauging community interest — a step that is totally beneath any company with Saudi funding.

But just in case, working off an illusory early lead, I emailed the Esports World Cup and EFG to ask if they or their executives were involved. The EWC said no. EFG did not respond.⁷

Tournament organizers

The one person I spoke with who recognized the OEI and was not a member of the press theorized that the people behind it might have some involvement in the TO space. Given their proximity to the situation, I’m going to throw that theory right here.

Crypto, betting, or metaverse hustlers

These groups are all a bit different, but they overlap, so I’m lumping them together. Most of the sources I ran the white paper by seemed to think it came from within this approximate grouping — a.k.a. people whose first instinct would be to make a LinkedIn page for their industry disruption manifesto. “UGC,” “decentralization,” “governance” — this is the vernacular of the LinkedIn entrepreneur working on the cutting edge, in industries with big ambitions, bigger wallets, but also less-than-obvious use-cases.

Less flippantly: Some of the references (Bay Area tech, Tim Berners-Lee, open source development) suggest these are maybe older guys in the Tim Sweeney, online-libertarian, techno-utopian mold. (Maybe venture capital?)

If it’s someone in this space, I likely have no idea who it is because I don’t follow that corner of the industry at all.

I am open to the possibility that this group is none of the things I’ve listed above and I’m making a fool of myself.

This is my escape hatch in case this is, again, just normal people with bad instincts around publicizing their work. Maybe these are just functionaries across a range of gaming companies who want to stay anonymous so they’re not seen as starting shit — but who can also reveal themselves to the world if people love their idea.

Anyway, these are just guesses.

I eventually corresponded with someone from the OEI over email. They were very polite, and I appreciated them entertaining my questions. That said, their answers (“We're industry veterans with almost 30 years of experience in gaming and esports, including at C-level positions” who are “not associated with any esports organisation”) did not really get at the heart of my question, which was whether their hesitation to go public had anything to do with associations with controversial groups/industries, such as crypto or the Saudi PIF.

So what about the content of the white paper?

Within my focus group of sources, responses mostly fell into one of two categories, and sometimes both.

1. Wow, whoever these folks are, they really identified the problem!

2. This is not happening.

I don’t want to come off as a prick. I don’t want to discourage smart people from seeking solutions to problems in the industry. I don’t want to just say “that’s impossible!” about an audacious bid to uproot publisher control over esports. ^{Buuuuuuuuuuut…}  

This one sort of feels like it’s just not happening — for all the reasons the white paper readily identifies. Publishers won’t turn over power freely. And more likely than not, the esports infrastructure project envisioned by the OEI is downstream of developing a successful UGC game. No easy task, that.

In my correspondence with OEI, they said the white paper was “neither a statement of intent or a solution we've implemented.” They were cognizant of the scale of the undertaking, and seemed genuinely interested in feedback.

“We aren't commercially orientated,” they wrote. “This isn't the typical white-paper that aims to justify the existence of a company that has already been built.”

These are great signs — as is the plain fact of trying to jumpstart a conversation, rather than attempting to brute force a new paradigm. But also, my personal feeling about the solution proposed in the white paper is that it is vague to the point of uselessness. Is the group describing Roblox with built in esports functionality? A Steam-like marketplace with the Counter-Strike replay system built into every product? A Reddit upvote/downvote system for prospective game and esport updates? A Creative Commons license for esports infrastructure? Robert’s Rules of Order for esports governance, but on the blockchain? I think these are all more or less credible readings of what’s described in the white paper — which is to say that 100 readers could dream up 100 different “ideal” implementations of this project, none of which would necessarily comport with OEI’s vision.

The OEI’s first email to me ended with a request of sorts: “While solutions may not be immediate, we have faith that your insights and stories can ignite an industry-wide dialogue about the future of esports — a conversation that you, as a storyteller, are instrumental in starting.”

I’m flattered — and happy to attempt that here. But it’s hard to envision a scenario in which publishers are pushed off-course by mere conversation, and even harder if people don’t own up to their own proposals.

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1. My eyes glaze over when I see this sort of stuff: “Total esports hours watched also increased from 2.65bn in 2022 to 2.76bn in 2023, a year-over-year uptick of 4%.” When I see a sentence like this I stop reading. Sorry!

2. Note the British English spelling of organization here. We’ll come back to this.

3. Is an emoji a sentence? Does it require punctuation? How would you punctuate this?

4. For what it’s worth, I ran both posts through a handful of free online AI detection tools, all of which seemed confident that the text was mostly AI generated. This didn’t tell me anything about OEI that their mere presence on LinkedIn hadn’t already conveyed. Both posts also include disclaimers that their share images are AI generated, which does hint vaguely at the poster’s orientation as someone who is aware and responsive to the fact that AI is controversial, or at least someone interested in online posting etiquette/best practices.

5. Or maybe spinning up a little faux-ARG — even a boring one — is a smart instinct! It worked on me.

6. Who I’ve also interviewed!

7. Which I include not to hint that it’s actually EFG, but to suggest that they probably dismissed the idea out of hand and just didn’t even care to respond.