KADOKAWA Game Linkage started with publishing gaming magazines “Famitsu” and “Game Dengeki”, stepped into web media management, putting on events, and other business related to gaming. In 2018 we started “FAV Gaming”, a large scale pro gaming team that would be able to compete with the big players overseas. It’s unusual for a game media company to run and manage an e-Sports team, but baseball teams have always been run by media companies.

We think there is a nice compatibility between media companies and teams, where media companies can report on the gaming team’s activities and advertise for them, which can in turn raise awareness of the media company. The team name comes from the team slogan of FUN and VICTORY, and that’s how we try to run the team. It’s still a young team without much history, but we currently have eight groups and we manage pros in multiple titles. We have a fighting games group and sako and Ryusei are part of that team.

A big part of why we joined SFL is that we manage sako and Ryusei, and we thought that would be a good venue for them to continue their daily activities. If they were going to join anyway, and we have conviction that they will win, we had no choice but to answer “YES!” to the question of joining.

There is also of course a very attractive business opportunity as well. Different e-Sports titles have different reach to different demographics. SFV has reach into a comparatively older audience, with a high disposable income so there are many business opportunities we can develop.

We have the back-up of SFV as the IP Holder, and the community has long had a tradition of putting on tournaments in a grass roots style so there are many fans that are already used to watching tournaments. We also thought that we could gain valuable information on how to manage a gaming team from the experience of joining SFL. Also, during Corono there have been fewer opportunities for our athletes to get visibility. With Capcom running regular tournaments like this and the CPT, that is a great chance for our players to get experience and increase the level of their play. Since there were fewer opportunities to play at a high level in 2020, we thought that if we were going to continue running a fighting games division there was no other choice for us but to join. We also wanted our players to do more streaming since there were fewer tournaments. However, a daily stream is on a complete different level than the high stakes matches you get in a tournament and they just aren’t the same things. So even if you are a popular streamer, that doesn’t mean that there is a connection to your reputation as a fighting game competitor. For players that are good streamers, that are great at talking and are able to entertain an audience, I really think that’s a great talent. However, the two fighting game players we have on our team are not that style of person. Ryusei wins tournaments though raw power, and sako fascinates people with his intricate play. So we thought it was important for us to build a venue for them to be able to show off their talents, and this also connects to a way for us to encourage their growth and growth of our fighting games division.

While FAV is in the name of the team, this is a special team where we joined with other teams and players, so we also thought it would be a good change to get hands-on knowledge of how to manage a multi-franchise team like this.

Our biggest concern when joining SFL was about how to build our team. We wanted to create a strong team. That was also a request from our players, so we had to think about how to make that a reality. We had sako and Ryusei, and the big topic was what other players should we invite? It costs money to run a team, so we also had to go around to sponsors to secure funds. However, we couldn’t invite players without first having the funds to do so, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. As we were trying to figure this out, we also got the impression that other teams were already coming together, and we really started to get worried and felt like we needed to rush. We finally settled on our team composition about two or three days before the deadline.

Speaking frankly, if we invited players who saw that opportunity to join SFL as more important than the money, we could build a team with a more limited budget. When we talked to sako and Ryusei however, they didn’t just want to appear in SFL, they wanted to win it. So we started to talk to popular players who were already sponsored, and from that point of view we wouldn’t have to worry about money as much but we needed to make sure that there would be benefits for them to join as well. It took us a really long time to figure out how to do this: Top Pros already have sponsors and teams, and it was hard for us to figure out to make it work for them to join with the FAV gaming team.

Each player with their sponsor has a contract that specifies the kinds of appearances they can make. This is true for sako and Ryusei, and also Tokido and Bon-chan who joined the team who each have their own contracts. To give a concrete example, if the sponsors for two players are different and in competition with each other, which logo do we put on the uniform? What brand of equipment should we use in the competitions? We had to negotiate with the different sponsors for all of that. Our team name is “V6 Plus FAV Rohto-Z!” which has brand names in it, but we had to decide on whether to include brand names at all, or to which extent. This is difficult to do when you are running your own team, but even harder when you include players from other teams and you don’t want to make them feel slighted or disrespected, and you need to negotiate with their sponsors.

We had a lot of conflict around whether we should try to build our own team, or work hard to fulfill sako and Ryusei’s request to bring on external sponsored players to shoot for the win. sako and Ryusei were both in the previous SFL season and other teams were reaching out asking them to join their team, and I’m sure that if we didn’t make a team they would have joined some other team. If they did that though, the FAV Gaming team name would be delegated under some other team, but we really wanted FAV Gaming to take part in SFL so we decided to build our own team. Tokido and Bon-chan were both two candidates that sako and Ryusei really wanted to join our team, so they were both super happy when we were able to confirm that they could join the team. Also, both Tokido and Bon-chan were happy because they think the team could win it all.

When we first started with e-Sports and player management we were just a single group but as our scale grew and the company started to be more interested in e-Sports, we became an independently operating division. From March 2020 we started to run “FAV Cup Sponsored by v6 Plus” tournaments. While there are popular shows that gather up influences and the like, we thought it was important for e-Sports and the community to host large open tournaments to find out who is the strongest in the community. We run events like that to broaden exposure for our team, but also to help grow the entire community and market for e-Sports. On top of giving sako and Ryusei a monthly salary, we handle negotiation for them, management, providing a practice environment and equipment, as well as other support. One of the strengths of our team is that havae a media organization that creates opportunities for media and events.

We went to a lot of effort and difficulty to assemble this team for the SFL and our goal is to win. We think all the teams are looking at us, and we think our players are great at adapting and developing strategies. We think our team is strong enough that the players on our team are asking themselves about who would be able to beat them? At FAV Gaming our goal is to be the #1 team in Japan. There are lots of ways to evaluate how one could be #1, but right now e-Sports is a hot word and getting more known. We want to develop domestic e-Sports further and we want FAV Gaming to be at the top of people’s minds when they talk about which teams are the best. While Japan is said to have been late to the e-Sports game, we also want our teams to shine internationally. Just like in physical sports athletes need to be able to perform at their peak, and while we don’t know all the answers and there is a lot more to learn, we are working with different sorts of ways to collect data and do analysis to help support the best ways to train and get peak performance.

While we are thinking about becoming great on the global scale, we also want to stay connected to the local scene. KADOKAWA established a large cultural multi-purpose center in Tokorozawa in Saitama-ken. There are teams in the SFL from different locations, and with the home and away system that’s really fun. If you watch an Urawa Reds Soccer game in Saitama, that’s super exciting, right? We think e-Sports should also be more locally rooted so we’re planning to builds things out from our Tokorozawa center. We’d also like to hold workshops for high school kids. We thought about making a high school team but there are a lot of problems to deal with there, like making sure that everyone has a PC, everyone has good internet connections and so on. So we’re thinking of gathering high school students at Tokorozawa and having pros teach them there. Similar to how when people think of Shizuoka they think of strong high school and pro players, we want Tokorozawa to be the same for e-Sports. We think the expectation of e-Sports is very high with kids now, so we need to think of a way to deliver on that.

Right now the e-Sports marketplace is quite small in Japan, and there isn’t a lot of money out there. I think it is tough for any company that want to break into e-Sports, and we don’t have any examples of successful companies in it yet. We say it is B to C, but can you monetize the consumer in the B to C equation? Once you find that point, you can start to say that e-Sports is a business. For any business you have to first start with “what do the customers want?” What can you do in that space with e-Sports? It will be important for e-Sports as a business to develop and deliver on that point.

What I would like to impart to people interested in or thinking about getting into e-Sports is that you need to have passion for it. The market is still small, even though the word is pretty big, the reality of business hasn’t caught up to it. You really need to have passion for the scene, the players, the IP, and the competition if you want to do it.

The owner of our company is a fan of gaming, and in 2017 I was introduced to Gachi-kun by an acquaintance, and we started to support him in his travels around the CPT with money, scheduling support, and so on. It started out as just a hobby, but then we got into the e-Sports business. Then in July 2018 we founded “Good 8 Squad” and in May 2021 we signed Kawano, but we never made a big public entrance into e-Sports. From the fan’s point of view they were like “what is this company?” When Capcom approached us about entering into the SFL though, we thought that would be a great opportunity for our players to appear in so we grabbed it. Actually, within the team we were really debating over whether we should make a team or not, but it would be a great opportunity for our company to show up in a large way, and while it is a lot of work, we thought it would be a lot of fun. It is also being streamed on a large platform and is a great chance for our sponsors to get exposure too. Since we already have Kawano and Gachi-kun on our team and they are well known in Street Fighter, if Capcom continues this team based SFL, then we could get in early and get off to a great running start, so we accepted.

Once we decided to join our biggest problem was how to build our team. The teams are each 4 players, but we only have Gachi-kun and Kawano on our team. Should we pick up people in the draft or sign free-agents before that? If we take a free agent rental, the chances are high that they would only be with us for 2021. We also thought our team branding would be important. We also thought that if we told our sponsors that we would pick up two strong players, but only for the limited time of the SFL it wouldn’t really contribute to the team spirit.

On the other hand, Gachi-kun and Kawano are both young players who joined our team early on before they were super well-known, and came into their strength with our team. We thought our team had the branding of young players and fresh faces, and we wanted to continue that theme. Pugera, who had just become a free agent at the time we solidified our team concept, was available so we reached out to him. We shared our team vision with him and he was excited about it and wanted to join. The other rental agent we picked up is Kichipa. He came recommended from his management company, and when we looked at his past performances we really liked him. Kichpa uses two grappler characters, Zangief and Abigail, and is a real wild card in tournaments. We thought he would play a key role on our team. They are both big body characters with high damage output, and when complementing the characters that Pugera, Kawano, and Gachi-kun play we think that makes an intimidating line up that other teams aren’t going to want to face. Because he was in the previous SFL with the ban rule, he also has developed both of these character to a high level of play.

While we now have our own team in SFL, that doesn’t mean there are big changes to how we treat our players. Each of the players and streamers that are on our team get a monthly salary. We also provide necessary equipment for games and streaming. We also edit the videos that our players make and upload them to YouTube. We think videos are becoming more important, and for players that want to focus on that area we brainstorm ideas with them for new topics/events/plans and do the planning to bring those to reality. We haven’t yet made concrete plans but we also want to form a gaming house.

We’re a small company so we don’t have big divisions in responsibility across teams or departments, each person is independently in control of their own work. Of course we have different managers for each of the players, but the entire company supports each player’s efforts. For example, we don’t have a meeting with everyone in a division (fighting game or FPS or whatever) but have regular meetings with each player and share that out with the whole company. Even if players are in the same division, the way they think and things they do are different, and there are some things that might be hard to talk about with your teammate, so we hold individual meetings to try to reduce the stress that people feel.

Even though we are a small company, we have lots of pro gamers or ex-pro gamers in the company and we think we have a very good environment to understand the thoughts and feelings of pro gamers. We put together career plans for each of our players. It’s rare for players to actually think about “What do you want to do in the future?” and other concrete things like that. Of course, e-Sports is still a young field, and we don’t really know how things will look in the future. However we don’t want our connection to players to stop after our contract ends, and want to think about after support for people after they are done with competition. So that is why we ask about what players want to do in the future, and try to make goals and work towards that with them.

Even though team play hasn’t yet started, we are seeing some positive benefits. Even though Kawano and Gachi-kun are sponsored by the same team, in the end Street Fighter is an individual game, and so they didn’t really have the sense of being on the same team, and might have seen each other as rivals. But now that they are on the same team there has been a bit change. On the first day of the INTEL World Open Tokyo Gachi-kun and Pugera were #1 and #2. I’m sure that Kawano was very frustrated at not doing well there, and took that as motivation when he won the TOPANGA Championship. He was so emotional that he cried when he won, and I was overcome with emotion and cried myself. It’s unusual to see so much emotion from him. This was down to the hard work that each person put in as teammates, and helped each of the teammates grow stronger.

I think fans can understand when the players put in this much effort how much it means to them. I think it is great when you have fans that can cry along with the players. When Kawano won the 3rd TOPANGA Championship, his opponent was Higuchi, and Momochi, the owner of the team that Higuchi is on had a lot of comments like “He’s a good kid”, and “You can cry”. We hope that we’ve put together a team for SFL that fans can get that emotional about.

In the future we’d like to focus on finding and developing young talent that can fight at a world class level. We initially started this company because we loved the competitive scene, but we signed Kawano and Gachi-kun and saw that they were able to get to a world-class level under our management. We’ve just really started out activities recently and don’t have many actual results to show, but we are looking at running a large tournament for all the players that were not able to join SFL. Gachi-kun and Kawano have gotten to the level where they are asked to join media programs and we’ve developed good career plans for them. However fighting games have a long history and people are always watching the storied veteran players, and there aren’t many chances for young players to become famous. We’d like to run events like tournaments where young players can get the spotlight and create places for young players to develop.

Our sponsors were happy to hear that we would join SFL, as were Red Bull and Level Infinity for Gachi-kun, and HITBOX for Kawano. When we reached out to Level Infinity about Gachi-kun’s involvement, we’re grateful that they also decided to sponsor us. The sponsors that we work with are obviously Gaming PC and accessory related, and we are also approaching business that are not directly related to e-Sports. We are interested in companies that want to support our vision of developing young talent and who see the merits of our vision. When we think of e-Sports as a business, you can’t just live off of players that are strong. With pro soccer or baseball, players that are very good naturally become more famous, but that isn’t the case of e-Sports. It’s important for e-Sports in Japan that you have a lot of twitter followers, or many subscribers on YouTube, or a lot of influencer power. No matter how good the results you have in tournaments, if you don’t have good communication capability it won’t feel like that alone has much value. For your sponsors, just winning titles doesn’t help them unless you are also able to expand the influence of their products or services. So you need to work on communication through twitter, YouTube, or other sorts of ways to make a good contribution. Of course the team side works on marketing, but that is very difficult if the player also does not help. There are players that would prioritize practice over this kind of activity or have a bad attitude around it. You really need to have trust with the players for this to work well. To build trust with the players you need to not just praise them on their work in tournaments, but also look at their twitter, appreciate the good things they do there, and understand the game that they play. We think the trust between the management company and the player is the most important relationship in e-Sports.

If you are a person or company interested in getting into e-Sports, don’t just think about your investment but it is mandatory that you also play the games. You also need to watch streams and tournaments to understand the game. There are also existing communities for these games, so you should also enter the community and understand the players and fans. Online gaming is really active now, so if you play online you might run into pros there, and you can connect with them on Social Networks and live streams as well. A few years ago there was a boom and people thought it would be the year of e-Sports but even now it’s not a place that you can bet a business on. There are people that enter without understanding the environment and their contracts aren’t good. If you understand the scene and the pros in it you can avoid cases like that. If you don’t understand the game you won’t know how to support the players, and you end up pushing that burden onto them and that isn’t good. If you can deeply understand the game, that will help players to open their hearts to you, and is an indispensable for anyone that wants to get involved in e-Sports.

We are a group of three brothers running sibling companies, starting with Kyushyu Security Securities Inc. run by my older brother. We have three separate Presidents, but our start was a base in Kumamoto. Next was Saishunkan Pharmaceuticals that started selling Domohorn Wrinkle skin cream, with me as the President of that company. Then we added a third company in 2013 that does system integration focusing on security, mail order, CRM systems, and the like. My younger brother runs Sakura Cross Hospital. We all run different businesses, but we are all focused on developing the local region of Kumamoto. When I presented the idea of an e-Sports team to President Nishikawa Naoki he thought it sounded interesting, so we did it. So all the companies were in on it, but we had to decide what company name to put on the team. We went with Saishunkan Systems since that has national recognition, and it has the closest relationship to e-Sports. So while the name just says Saishunkan systems, in actuality we have three companies in Kumamoto that are supporting the entire effort.

We actually also started with J-league soccer team “Roasso Kumamoto”, Pro Basketball team “Kuamamoto Voltaires”, and the independent pro baseball Kyushu Asia league “The Salamanders from the Country of Fire” team. We got into support a lot of local teams. We had a good experience with these teams, and thought on a positive note that as e-Sports is becoming big globally we also want to show that Kumamoto is a great place for that. We were involved with the Japanese e-Sports association before JeSU was around, and knew about Street Fighter from that. We were also involved as sponsors when Capcom came through Kumamoto two times with their Rookie Caravan, we went to the Tokyo Game Show and saw the Asia Premiere there and saw with our own eyes the excitement and passion there. So when we were asked about Street Fighter League we thought there is a lot of opportunity there for us to send a team from Kumamoto so we accepted.

This SFL is a team event, but e-Sports itself is an individual game. We also actually own a badminton team, and that is very similar. We’ve also supported e-Sports players in the past that are local to Kumamoto, and seen them advance to the Asia region level. We have an office in Kumamoto and once a month we hold small e-Sports tournaments there to advance e-Sports in the area. We do many things to support and accelerates e-Sports locally, but it isn’t all just about the money that we spend. Of course, expenditures that help Kumamoto and make a real contribution are good, but you have to think about the bottom line, and it isn’t sustainable in the long term as a company to just spend money.

In e-Sports, the content is the prime focus, and the IP holder is therefor the strongest actor in that relationship, and unlike physical sports if you want to expand the audience / funnel / reach, you need to think of different ways to do that. Internally to the company we debated about how we think you need to give normal people a chance to interact and play the titles in e-Sports, but now with Corona we don’t have things like large events or festivals where that is possible. Why are we always focusing so much on the Kumamoto area? Well, as we talked about before all our companies starting with the Security company got their start in Kumamoto and that is where a lot of clients, customers, and partner companies are. Through our work we can improve Kumamoto and that rising tide will raise up our companies as well. If we never had the customers for our security company, we would never had built our pharmaceutical company, or Sakura Cross Hospital, so everything we do starts from that base.

After the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake we felt that way even more strongly. We can’t just say that, we need to back it up with action. So we really want to pay back and make a contribution to Kumamoto. Just like our badminton team “Kumamoto Saishunkan Pharmaceutical Badminton Club” we put the Kumamoto in the “Saishunkan Sol Kumamoto” in the team name to put our money where our mouth is. Of course we’ve supported Capcom in the past, but putting our own team together we didn’t know anything about how to do that and it was a lot of work. We reach out to people that we know that have teams, and talked with people at the Japan e-Sports association, and are really trying to figure those things out.

We were involved with supporting SFL previously, and when we heard about Capcom moving to a team owner system we supported that as well. So we were excited to join to help promote Kumamoto, but if we wouldn’t be able to get players from Kumamoto itself, we really wanted to build a team that had players from the Kyushu region. Unfortunately we weren’t able to do that this time. Other teams probably looked at how to build a team that could win, but our starting point was different and we are really looking at how we can develop Kumamoto. When we talked with Nemo about this concept, he was really excited by it. We also agreed a lot on how we would like to shape the future of e-Sports with Nemo, and he was excited about appearing in e-Sports events in Kumamoto. We are lucky to have found a partner like Nemo who can help us promote e-Sports in Kumamoto.

We actually started an e-Sports team in 2017 “Le Gaime Kumamoto”, but we weren’t close to Street Fighter. So it was difficult for us to do recruiting and trying to build a team. When we asked Nemo about who to add to the team he said that he had often been paired with Shuto in team events, so we reached out to him. We then intentionally didn’t add two more players. We wanted to pick up a young player that fought through all the qualifications to get to the try-outs. Player management was difficult for us as well, but we were able to get help from Nemo’s management company, “Well Played Rizest“. Of course we want to have a strong team that can win, but that’s not all; we also want our players to have some connection to Kumamoto and be able to make contributions that help the area. So we’d like to get young players that Nemo can help rise up and with great effort, and make a team with a good team spirit and feeling. Because the team’s feeling is also a reflection of the company owner. We can’t just leave all of that up to the players though, so as the owner we hold weekly practice sessions and have Nemo give feedback to the players. Of course we do that to talk about strategy for league play, but we also want to foster a team spirit feeling that way. You just don’t look at players as strong or not, you also have to think about their relationships with other players, check their social media, and evaluate their character as well. We also are looking forward to players positively participating in events in Kumamoto, and both the competitive side of things and their personality is also important. Of course it is important for e-Sports to succeed as a business to improve sales, but we also have to polish our companies and people and how we use games to realize that growth, and putting a team together with that in mind is important as well.

Honestly speaking from a business perspective, there isn’t much merit to taking part in SFL if you don’t have something that you can sell. For the products that our companies sell, there is almost no benefit. However, the company “Saishunkan” has an image as an old-fashioned cosmetics manufacturer, and for a company like that to jump into e-Sports I think is surprising and can get us some recognition. Within Kumamoto people that know about e-Sports are excited, and we’ve been able to get some meetings with other companies about sponsorship opportunities. We also hope that we can continue some of the work with people that have been involved in the future as well. From a recruiting perspective we’ve also had people join the company that are interested in e-Sports related work. While things are switching to Online with Corona, we’ve held some local events offline periodically. We want to hold events that anyone can join, you just have to enjoy it, so we don’t restrict entry. That helps increase the number of people interested in e-Sports and increase excitement in Kumamoto. We also want to make content of what we have learned so that other companies in Kumamoto that get interested in running events have documentation and an example case of what they can do. We want to spread out our know-how, rent out the equipment that we’ve purchased, make sure that lots of people are having fun, and then think about how to monetize things later.

We also started a Sports division at our three companies. Like we said before, we have a badminton team, and sponsor basketball, soccer, and baseball teams, so now we have a division looking at how we can monetize those operations. Withing that, all told we have 6 people working on e-Sports, from people in the company, our worked with Well Played Rizest, e-Sports advisors in Kumamoto, and MC and other people that we have worked with. Of course we would like for our team to do well, but that’s not the only thing we are looking at. We have meetings with Nemo about what else we can do. With the 5th anniversary of the Kumamoto Earthquake coming up in June, we hope that we can have some good battles, and show the world good things from Kumamoto.

Right now it is difficult to say that you can expect profits in e-Sports. I don’t think that Capcom or other IP holders want to have clients and teams come and go like it’s a revolving door. We think that you need to build an environment in e-Sports where you can do things long-term. We need to think about how we can build win-win scenarios with the IP holders. We are just getting started with this ourselves and have made many mistakes, but if I was giving advice to someone that wants to get into running a team, if you want to get results immediately that is going to lead to failure with a high likelihood. I think it’s important to work with people that believe in e-Sports and start off by running small scale events locally. You also need to communicate with the IP and content rights holders and cooperate with them. You aren’t the main focus, the entire eco-system is what is important and if that improves it will be good for everyone.

I thought that during Corona we needed to make venues for our Street Fighter players to have appearances, and if they would be in it anyway, it would be best if we made our own team. Capcom also talked about doing local based development, and since we have a sponsorship with Chubu Telecommunications, I thought it would make sense for us to have Nagoya as our base of operations. However, our players are in Tokyo, and we have a lot of sponsors and clients in Tokyo as well. There is fierce competition for e-Sports players in Tokyo, and it would make sense to have long-term relationships with Tokyo clients. It’s like with sports, during Corona if their ticket sales go down, teams’ income goes down as well. But when I looked at different data, sports teams’ sponsor’s revenue didn’t decline. I think that’s amazing. When you have local teams and people that support them, the team can partner with local business and you have to help them improve their sales. I think it’s good for teams to have long term partners that can help them grow the e-Sports scene for a more stable team. Building a local fanbase is a great benefit to e-Sports teams and is a merit for us.

e-Sports is a big keyword with the youth now, and even businesses have heard of it. I thought we couldn’t pass up this timing. If the fire is striking now, I thought we should let it burst out nationwide and join SFL. We also didn’t have any barriers preventing our entry into SFL. Detonation Gaming has been around for a long time and we know how to put together and run teams, as well as get sponsors. We’ve been doing this for 10 years and so knew where to start. There are new teams getting started here in SFL based in Tokyo, and they will have to deal with the competition for sponsors and fans. That’s one of the qualities of this league, so teams shouldn’t have any regrets about that. We see the existence of other teams as rivals and a good impetus for improvement.

I’m super happy that SFL exists as a venue that our Street Fighter players can appear in. I’m also happy for the CPT that was held last year, but with the rule changes that was held online, and the number of tournaments people could join really decreased. So I’m happy for the opportunity for players to appear and show up for the fan base. The way that our players reacted to the Corona situation was clearly different based on the player’s age. Itabashi Zangief uses large body wrestler style character Abigail and Zangief, and his personality is that he likes stability so he actually was quite worried (lol). So he kept asking me things like “Is the company going to be ok?” and stuff. The younger players on the other hand, weren’t as concerned about it though. It wasn’t that they were irresponsible, they could see that team activity and sales were continuing to increase, and they talked about how they hoped the company was doing ok.

For our SFL team, we were going to build around our two Street Fighter players Itazan and Nauman, and I thought we would use rental free agents for the other two spots. However Street Fighter League isn’t going to end in just a year, so I wanted to choose members that we could work with for a long time. Just around that time, Takeuchi John’s contract with his team ended, so he became available. He’s around the same age as Nauman, so I thought we could build around Itazan with him and Nauman as two young players. Once I started thinking about young players, I thought there was no other choice by Tachikawa. Originally he was part of our team, he’s the same age as Nauman and Takeuchi John, and with this composition we have old man Itazan as the Master (lol) leading the young students as our team concept.

I’ll talk about how our company compensates players. For fighting game players, we hand over 100% of tournament winnings to the player. My image of fighting game players is that they always lived off of their tournament winnings, and I didn’t want to interrupt that history. “Everything that you win is yours.” On top of that we give a monthly salary that can cover a bit over daily living expenses. The standards for our players is that they make contributions to the team. First of all that means winning in tournaments. Winning a tournament is the best kind of promotion that we can get for our team. For example when Nauman won EVO Japan 2020, he also got a nice salary increase. Itazan put in a lot of work on the CPT and consistently had a high results, and also worked really hard appearing in team events and other things, so he got a nice yearly salary increase as well. That kind of system helps support player’s motivation.

Otherwise we don’t have a lot of direct input on what players should do. We do ask that they stream. Anyway, Nauman streams every day on his own even if we don’t say anything so it isn’t like we have to push much there (lol). During the CPT and other long events, we do say that there is a lower limit that we would at least like them to stream.

I talked about a theme of our team on raising and developing new players, and we have lots of other teams, but speaking honestly there are lots of established and old players now and it is difficult for new players to join the scene. I think Street Fighter is relatively a good place for younger players, but even then veterans are still overpowering. One of the reasons we are excited with the local based SFL this year is because we want to go to high school and universities to help develop and find new talent there. While we’re here to support young players, another thing that I tell people is to talk directly to me. I tell people that a lot, and we aim to have a good company environment. Of course there are individual managers for each player, but having information filter through them, or people thinking that “Umesaki is a busy guy so I can’t talk to him” or that they really would like an increase in salary but it’s hard to bring that up, these kinds of things build walls between us. So I talk to our players directly to try to reduce those barriers. It might be a bad sign for the CEO to be so hands on and deep in the details though (lol). But that does help reduce barriers between the players and myself.

Going back to the SFL, when we said that Detonation Gaming would have a home base in Nagoya, we heard from a lot of fans about “Why Nagoya?” (lol). The response from business in Nagoya was great though. The really thought it was great that a well established team like DNG was putting down a base there. We chose Nagoya because we have lots of examples of doing things in Nagoya, starting with the Cosplay Summit. Also, we have a lot of players on DNG whose home town is Nagoya. Nauman’s from Nagoya. The 2006 Asia Tournament was also where e-Sports in Japan first got real recognition on a world stage. Everyone says that Japan got into e-Sports late, but that was a chance for us to show how far Japan has come. It’s a bit off for me to say this, but I think that we were pioneers in Japanese e-Sports and accelerating the market, and that’s why I’d like to make Nagoya a base of operations.

Japan still has a gap to the rest of the world even with it’s fast growth. Particularly there is a Galapagos of games that we play here and I think there are real weak points for the Japan scene in some games. This is also my personal opinion but looking at streaming culture, from where we started with Nico Nico Douga and moving on to the competitive scene, Japan is one or two, no even three!, steps behind. I think the best way to change this is to start with changing how younger people think.

From a business perspective I think we have no option but to grow the market for Japanese e-Sports. For example, doing something with manga or anime, or other things that kids read. There has always been hesitation for adults to say out loud that they like it. It’s the same with games. But as 10 or 20 years pass and the generation changes the number of people that criticised these things decreases. And kids that grew up enjoying anime, manga, and games will think that a culture of e-Sports is assumed and obvious. That’s why I believe that in 10 or 20 years e-Sports will be as big as soccer of baseball now, or maybe even bigger. Because we all love games. lol.

Actually, young people know a lot about e-Sports. For example, middle school kids who don’t know about e-Sports do actually play the games that e-Sports use, so that’s why I think it will become common in the future. My nephew really plays a lot of games, and when I see him he even says “Uncle, I’m doing e-Sports!” lol.

For SFL this year of course all the players are excited to get into it, but relatively speaking many of the teams have a high average age. These people have a lot of accomplishments. On DNG, we have Itazan leading a cadre of young bucks and I look forward to them defeating people like Daigo and Tokido on the big stage. I think that will really motivate them, and get people excited to cheer for us. I really hope our team can work hard to show you that kind of action.

I’d like to let Capcom know that I understand how hard it is to host events like this online in the middle of Corona. I feel it’s important for people that don’t know about e-Sports to see how passionate we are and the excitement of our events and not just online stuff only in order to entice them. So to the extend possible, please plan with that in mind. For people or businesses that want to get into e-Sports, I’d like to warn you not to try to do anything half-hearted. You might have heard that e-Sports is popular and think you might be able to make some money, but I’m telling you that there isn’t money money in it at all. Not only is this just limited to games, if you look at the financials of soccer teams I’m sure you will see it is the same. In the end you have to do it because you love the game, you love the team, you want to make it great for the fans. If you still say that you are interested, I’ll tell you to first start with playing the game. I myself started out by getting close to the level of representing Japan in gaming, so I understand the joy and the misery of it. You can have any kind of motivation, like “I am of fan of this player and want to support them”, “I want this player to show everyone how cool they are”, “I want players to be able to live just off of gaming”, or “I want to work with this player on their second career after they quit playing”. I was people who have a real passion for the scene to join.

We had taken part in the previous SFL seasons, and when Capcom reached out to us we decided to join. In the past we had a team leader, and then took part in the draft process to build out the team, but it was a bit of a shame because those teams were one-time-only things. We thought we could put together a great team of our own this time and were happy to join. Since businesses are team owners this time, I think it really makes more of a team feeling. It’s also great that we are able to take part as a full Shinobism team since we have so many Street Fighter players. I’ve always thought this is the kind of style that SFL should have been, so I was unequivocal in accepting. It’s also a great merit that this provides a venue for our players to shine domestically. Particularly since for Pro fighting game players having good results in overseas tournaments is a big part of our exposure, and during Corona those tournaments have all but disappeared. It’s a boon to Shinobism that we have a domestic event that is of such visibility and importance for our players to get exposure.

When we started talking about joining, we had 8 potential team members who could be on the team, but due to timing constraints, only 6 were up for consideration. While we were super excited to make a team, we had the unenviable task of deciding who to leave out. Back when we were in the previous SFL and I led a team, I selected Shinobism players Fujimura, Johnny, and Haitani. This time I chose Fujimura, Ohtani, and Higuchi, and one of the reasons for that was to give exposure to players of different generations. Specifically, Ohtani and Higuchi are young players, and I thought this would be a good chance for them. Of course, Higuchi also did very well in the 3rd TOPANGA Championship, and of the young players is very strong, which also played a factor. Higuchi really wants to prove his worth and do well, and I was sure that if we didn’t select him he would be picked up by some other team in the SFL. So he was super excited to join on Shinobism’s SFL team and said he would give all of his effort to do well.

As for Ohtani, he’s quite close to Johnny in terms of age and strength, so he might have thought that maybe he wouldn’t be chosen. So when I asked him he was half surprised and half ecstatic. Fujimura is a veteran on the team, and a core pillar so he was happy to do whatever was necessary for the team to succeed.

I thought this for the 2020 SFL season with our team as well, but team Shinobism has the longest history in SFL and we have the best teamwork of all the teams, and I wanted to continue and build on that this time. Of course that means having good results, but also we want to put on a good show for the fans that support Shinobism, and those that support individual players too. This time I’m expecting Fujimura to be the core of our mental and physical strength, so if he can concentrate on that I’ll be happy.

Higuchi unfortunately wasn’t able to win the 3rd TOPANGA Championship, but immediately after that he told me that he would like concentrate on the SFL and get his revenge there. He’s hungry to win, and I hope that he can use that motivation in our matches. Ohtani’s in a difficult spot (lol). He’s a noncommittal easy-go-lucky player but that’s a bit of a different look for our team, and I think it’s important for us. I also look forward to seeing how he will handle the pressure of these matches on his way to a Pro level. As for myself, I’m leaving the mental aspect of the game to Fujimura, so I just want to focus on playing the game, and make contributions to the team that way.

One of the other things that we would like to do through SFL this year is build up a connection with our local area. So far Shinobism has not done much there, and I hope we can gain experience in that domain through SFL. I also hope that we can use SFL to get more interest from other sponsors. Up to now, surprisingly Shinobims has sponsors that are not related to gaming, so I’d like to expand the field that we operate in for sponsorship.

When we announced that Shinobism was taking part in SFL, we had a lot of fans tell us that they were very happy about that. We also heard from our sponsors that they are looking forward to SFL. In 2021 we partnered with Megane Super (Glasses Supermarket) but due to Corona we really just haven’t had many places for our players to get visibility. So we’re happy that SFL can provide us a venue for that. We also think that it takes a while for sponsors to get used to e-Sports and we’re appreciative of our sponsors so far, and plan to have long-term relationships with them. So we’d like to work hard to partner both with SFL and our sponsors for mutually beneficial relationships.

So far our activity has centered around running events and managing our team. For example, since 2015 we’ve running open team events that anyone can join called “Tokyo Offline Party”. During Corona we haven’t been able to run offline events so about 3 or 4 times a year we run “Tokyo Online Party”, and many people have enjoyed those. We also haven’t limited ourselves to domestic events, and have run global events with team matches between Chinese or Korean teams and Japan because we think it is important to continue global communication.

We also do things like host invitational Street Fighter tournaments for people that don’t play Street Fighter in order to reach audiences that normally wouldn’t have a chance to see fighting games at all. We also help run tournaments for titles other than the ones that we are mainly involved in. We also think it is very important to develop the younger generation and intentionally concentrate on that.

As for player payment, we believe that all tournament earnings should go 100% to the player. Any prizes that we get from SFL will also go 100% to the players. Whether it’s bad or good, Shinobism was started by us (Momochi and Chocoblanka) and so we want to make sure that can continue to have a supportive environment for our players. From the point of view of income, player activity, and player mentality, there were big changes with the onset of Corona. We had to put more of a focus on streaming, and each of our players needed to think of different ways to reinvent themselves under this environment. We used to have this view that practicing for tournaments and then going out and getting good placements was what being a Pro gamer was about, but it is very hard to make a living as a Pro gamer like that now. So since 2020 each of us has been grasping around trying to find out what we can do. And while you can certainly say that it has been a difficult time, within that we’ve had interesting results when each player changes how they think about things. While there may be players that return to the old ways once Corona has calmed down and we can go to international tournaments again, I also think there are many players that have found a new way to operate and will continue that.

I’ve shared with our players how I think we should act as a company. Even before Corona I asked players to stream or do other activities to get them closer to their fans, but now with Corona that becomes more of a main focus. So in that sense, it isn’t like since Corona started Shinobism has been in a massive rush to try to change how we do things. While the range of activities that our players take part in has increased, I also hope that our players can always understand that as Pros their words and actions have weight and importance. Also, we’re only able to do what we do at Shinobism because of the support from many different types of fans and partners. So please don’t take that for granted and act with gratitude.

When e-Sports tries to capture business, I think it’s important to deliberate about how much you should involve fans and spectators. Of course it is important to increase the number of players, and the number of people that buy and play the game and that should be the main focus. However, lately there have been more people that don’t play the game but are fans of certain players, and thing things like “That player that I like plays this game, so it’s good”, so there are other types of ways for people to enjoy e-Sports. I think it is important for us to also capture this kind of player for Street Fighter and Fighting Games if we want to increase our market. I think that game makers and pro players have done a good job of making the game more enjoyable and approachable for beginner players.

What they have not yet done is work on ways to appeal to people who don’t play games at all, but can become fans of certain players, similar to how many people spectate but do not play sports. That strata of demographic has not been developed at all yet, and so from a business perspective I think that is what we need to work on for the future. We need to pile up more and more people like that. We can try to build trust and confidence by running tournaments, or doing new types of streaming for fans, or streams to connect with new audiences. By doing things like that we are able to build up a fan base, and new relationships with businesses, like we did with Megane Super (Glasses Supermarket). It’s easier for us to do our business in that environment. For example, when you want to advertise something, instead of just showing the advertisement instead we frame it as “This business supports our SFL, or tournament, or e-Sports or whatever, so let’s support them.” That builds a better PR cycle for everyone.

One example of new projects that Shinobism is doing is that we have done various collaborations with V-Tubers, and we ran a V-Tuber tournament. There are many fans of V-Tubers that don’t know anything about Street Fighter and Fighting Games, so this is one way that we can appeal to them. We’re actively thinking about ways that we can reach out to people outside our normal circle.

What I want to impart to people looking to get into e-Sports is that first of all, you need to love games. Of course there are many business reasons to want to get into it as well. There are people that think that e-Sports is getting popular so if they enter they think they can make a lot of money, and if people like that enter the area it would be good for the industry as a whole by accelerating development. But if you don’t really love games, then when you enter the business you might not have the will to continue long-term, or find that there is gap from what you imagined to what you can realize, or there can be many other obstacles.

Gamers have critical vision, and they can tell when you don’t have a real love for games. If people think that you joined the industry even though you don’t have a real love of games, it will be hard to get support from fans and users. You really need to have a good understanding and love of the games. For example if you don’t really have a good understanding of the game, or want to all of a sudden run a team, or start a business, there are businesses like ours that you can partner with as one way to get into e-Sports.

So if that is your situation, please come and talk to Shinobism! (lol)

DouYu Japan is a company that works on developing our live streaming platform. It was founded in August 2019, and focused on game streaming, but lately we’ve been expanding into non-gaming areas as well. Still, we’re at about 70-80% of our streamers and users who focus on gaming. Since we started we’ve had good relationships with gaming companies, starting with Capcom, and have streamed many tournaments. We also support people running tournaments, have run tournaments on our own, and are looking to build communities with gamers. When we first started there were not many good examples of how we as a streaming platform should partner with e-Sports and we had to search for ways to do that ourselves. We’ve done so by partnering with many people, and over time have become a neutral party that connects up others. We think in we can provide value to viewers, publishers, the community that holds tournaments, and gaming teams by hosting tournaments. We’re constantly thinking about how we can run a tournament that leaves everyone happy without inconveniencing anyone. Since there are almost no domestic examples of what we should do, we were heavily influenced by what people did overseas.

However, the environment that e-Sports grew up in overseas is different from what happened here, so if you just tried to do what worked overseas here you run into many problems. Since our parent company is the Chinese company DouYu, examples of what worked in China are often shared with us, but just because it worked in China doesn’t mean it will work in Japan. We’ve actually tried many different things from overseas, but still need to keep experimenting. The gaming titles that are popular in Japan for e-Sports is very different from what is popular worldwide. Also, the number of people in Japan that are interested in e-Sports or want to get involved in it is small. In Japan, if you want to run a tournament, instead of trying to gather up pro gamers, you really need to work with V-Tubers, YouTubers, and streamers if you want to get good viewership numbers. Of course, that isn’t the case for all titles, for example for Street Fighter you can focus on pro gamers, but I feel like there are few titles where that is the case.

Our motto at Mildom is “with Community” – it’s very important for us to build things with the community. That’s important whether we’re talking about competition between streamers, or whether we want to run a tournament, we’re always thinking about the community. Even if there isn’t a benefit to us, there are examples where if there is something that people want to do to stream on Mildom, we worked with them in a positive manner to do it.

At Mildom we like to have a representative for each major streamer, and create an environment where you can always talk with someone at Mildom. We don’t just say “We’re a streaming platform so do whatever you want with it!” but instead we spend our days getting close to streamers and thinking about what we can do to grow their viewership. Should we run an online event, or a campaign, and we try to come up with things that will match the streamer’s play style and games. For example, if you want to run a tournament we will cooperate entirely with the streamer to run one as they envision it, we’ll invite some guests, contact the game publisher, and support what is needed from the community side of things. That’s what’s great about “with Community”.

We think that e-Sports content is very important at Mildom. It’s the majority of the traffic at our parent company DouYu, and we have data showing that if you have lots of e-Sports traffic that is good for business. We’re still at the point in Japan that we say that e-Sports day is still to come, but we think it is critical for us to grab that traffic as it goes. We think that there are many sleeping stars in Japan that can help us grow the platform into one that people will love for a long time. People who love fighting games on our platform have a higher retention rate than people from like, for example social games or other non e-Sports titles. We have a chance to get many more viewers from a tournament than we do with normal streams. In order to get great users, we have a real chance by putting on very good tournaments with the community, and e-Sports are very well suited to that.

Like I said before, Street Fighter has a very strong community. It’s an important game where there are lots of strong Pro players in Japan that compete on the global level, and we’ll do our best to support it in the future. We’re taking part in the tournament this time as “Mildom Beast”, and we think if we can grow within the Street Fighter community, or even in the larger e-Sports market, we think that would be great both for us and the community.

Mildom has been supporting “Team Beast” since April 2020. Team Beast has an un-severable connection to the fighting game community. We support them so that these critical players and streamers will never have to leave fighting games. We aren’t looking for short term business gain here. Of course we need to build some sort of sales off of this to sustain the business, but we’re still in the phase where e-Sports is growing. We made our sponsorship contracts with them thinking about what things will be like in 5 or 10 years as we grow with them. Thinking of things that way, when Capcom contacted us we quickly agreed to join SFL because there are lots of merits for our company. We left the team composition up to Daigo and Fuudo. We thought it would be good for the team concept to align with what they want. Since they want to have good results in the tournament, we thought the best we could do was to support in them in what they needed for that. We’ve always done things in that way, for example for Daigo we give him monetary support to join tournaments, make his uniforms, and give support for running things for his community like “Beast Cup”. We always take our player’s opinions and thoughts as the most important things. Of course one of the biggest hopes we have is that people watch SFL on Mildom. We think one of our strengths is that we have lots of related content you can enjoy, and we hope you enjoy our platform and follow content creators on it.

I think it is a paradoxical way to say it but if you want to see e-Sports as a business I think you have to not think of e-Sports as a business for it to grow and become a business. To be more concrete, you have to think that things are good as they are without trying to force money out of e-Sports. It goes back to “with Community”. You really have to build the community and streamers and viewers. It’s important to think about how you can make money, but the way that Mildom as a platform will grow is by having people think things like “It’s fun to run a tournament on Mildom” and stuff like that. e-Sports is now a well known term in society, so now we have to think about how we can increase the number of people that want to watch e-Sports. The big difference with physical sports is that a large portion of the viewers are either players or used to be players. We need to figure out what we can do to get people who haven’t played the game to watch it, like how it is with Soccer or Baseball. Japan has always had a lot of game players, so much so that it used to be called the “Gaming Country”. I think there are lots of e-Sports fans hiding under the surface still. If you can get users like that interested in tournaments and then other content creators, get them to realize how interesting e-Sports are, get coverage on SNS and mass media, that can expand the audience and you can monetize things from there.

Right now if Daigo talks about a tournament, he’s really only going to reach his followers, who are either street fighter fans themselves or viewers. How will we be able to do PR to get outside of the usual target audience is a real topic recently. We’d like to do something like put real time player stats at the bottom of the stream or in a browser similar to the kinds of stats you can get in physical sports. It’s a long term goal because you need help from the publishers and game creators for that, but if we can do that it will make for a better viewing experience. They’ve already done this in China and there is lots of interesting information around the screen. They have information about the teams, and league stats if it is a league game stats up until now. Right now you need to either go to the publisher’s site or get that information from within the game. Getting that information right in front of users on a streaming platform would be a big change and we’re looking at that for the medium to long term. We think a streaming platform like Mildom is different from television; TV is a one way broadcast but on a streaming platform you can have the viewers interact. What if for, example every 100 comments a player gets they get an in-game point, so that viewers can have some small influence on the outcome of tournaments or results. That would really increase viewer engagement and the entertainment aspect. You wouldn’t do this for the top level tournaments of course, but community run ones. It would take a lot of work on the product development side though! (lol)

The main thing I want to say to people getting into e-Sports is that you really need to have a long term plan and not think that you can make money in the short term. You really have to reflect on what you want to get out of it. For us as a platform we have long term goals we are trying to accomplish. You can’t just get into this without out plan. The community is very sensitive to that sort of thing.

More specifically, at a large scale there are 5 sectors of people involved in the scene: there are publishers, streaming platforms, people involved with teams, the media, and finally sponsors that support everything. If you want to get more specific there is software that supports streaming, but if you want to have an impact in business you stick to those larger 5 categories. You have to think about which of those sectors you will end up in, and how you monetize differs across the categories, so you really need to do that analysis before you get into the business. Even within those sectors in many of them you aren’t likely to make money so you need to have medium to long term plans. Also it’s really important that you love games because if not you won’t be able to continue for long. There are also lots of people that have a real passion for growing the business so that is also an important part of your business.

Before explaining about founding TOPANGA, let me first talk with you a bit about myself. I myself played a lot of fighting games as an elementary school student, and then for a while I wasn’t able to play, but back when SF4 came up I was sucked back into that world by just how amazing it was. I did a lot of research on tactics on the internet, and entered tournaments.

When I was away from the fighting game world I was working part-time at a Mahjong parlour, and about a month after I started working there Daigo started to work there too. Daigo was taking a break from gaming just then, but as I got to know him I realized that he was a famous player. I thought it would be a real waste if there was such a world famous player near me but I didn’t have a chance to see his greatness, so we started to go the arcade. At the time I had just started player SF4 so no matter who I’d play I’d lose in ignominious defeat, so I couldn’t really understand just how good Daigo was by playing him. But when the person who beat me played Daigo he just demolished them. I really wanted to improve to the point that I could understand what this difference between us was, so I got completely absorbed in becoming better at SF4 myself. It took about a year for me to understand just how great Daigo was. And even then I still didn’t beat Daigo. (lol)

At that time, I took part in the “GODSGARDEN” tournament that was held at Asegaya Loft A, and I thought “It would be great if these kinds of tournaments got more popular in Japan!” I had taken part in nationwide tournaments before, but the feeling of a tournament from a company is different, and there is just something about the feeling of the passion from an underground event, and I was really drawn in by that. This was still before Daigo went pro, but he was invited to a few overseas tournaments that I was able to go to with him. Back then in Japan people who played games weren’t thought very highly of, but overseas game players were starting to get some of the respect that you see for physical sports players. When I saw how people looked at Daigo with respect, I thought that if I worked hard, I could make it that way in Japan as well, and I founded TOPANGA.

I founded the company in April of 2011. I had planned to do it earlier, but due to the shock from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake things were delayed. I didn’t really have a plan for how to recover from that, but thought that I should at least start with founding the company and doing what I could do. I had planned to start with tournament running, but given the circumstances I thought a charity tournament would be good, so I held the “TOPANGA Charity Cup”. Electricity supply in Tokyo was short at the time, so it would have been difficult to hold the tournament at a game center. I heard that there weren’t limits on electricity usage in Chuubu (a region of Japan) so I contacted a game center in Shizuoka and they said I could hold it there. So I talked with Capcom and got approval, then held the charity tournament. I hadn’t had any experience running tournaments before that, so I had to learn everything from scratch.

I had thought about streaming on the web before starting the company. But I didn’t really have much in the way of equipment so I started “TOPANGA TV” with just a small web camera. At first we streamed on Saturday, but as there were more tournaments and the CPT, with players going out of the country and coming back in, I thought Wednesday would be the best day for it, so I changed to Wednesday where it still is. We also started “Kachitagari TV” about a year after “TOPANGA TV”. Since I had just founded the company I was still the only employee, and all I had was time. If I just waited it wasn’t like work was going to come to me, so I’d hold events and run TOPANGA TV. Nico Nico Douga saw this and asked if I could run a tournament and stream it on their live streaming platform, so that is how “TOPANGA League” got started. It started as a paid streaming event, and was successful, so I started to see how I could make money. By working on things that I and the viewers wanted to see I was able to run “TOPANGA WORLD LEAGUE”.

Up until 2019 I would hire part time help or use temp staff for events, and I ran everything myself, but thinking about how e-Sports was growing, and how there were lots more things that I wanted to do beyond what I could accomplish on my own, I decided to take on a challenge and grow TOPANGA to the now 10 people that we have. I’ve been able to continue to maintain the stance that I started with, as a company that stands between the players and the game makers. For example, there is a huge number of players but they aren’t able to all directly talk to Capcom. TOPANGA is able to talk to both sides, and come up with various proposals. If you get too close to either side you lose sight of the other, so I really have to work to keep a balance there. I also don’t want to duplicate things that media companies or other large companies are doing even since I started. I think TOPANGA should focus on doing things that large companies can’t in order to hype up the scene.

For example, holding events that impart the feeling of just how much fun games are to people, or events for people that want to become pros. I try to think about what things we can do outside of the CPT and SFL to support the scene and raise it up.

Currently TOPANGA is running an e-Sports team called “Gyogun” but I didn’t plan on running a team when I started TOPANGA. At the time there weren’t many teams run by companies then, I was the only staff, and I wanted to concentrate on the area that I knew well: fighting games. There weren’t any team leagues like SFL then, and I still thought of fighting games as 1:1 affairs, so I just didn’t have any image of them as a team. It was common for people to perform individually, and individually get their own sponsors based off of that. I think that kind of thinking changed from 2014 to 2015. Daigo and Tokido’s activity really increased the number of eyes on fighting games, and lots of teams started to get founded around then. But young players would enter the team as kinds of interns, and it wasn’t rare for the kind of support they would get to be inadequate. I thought that after Daigo and Tokido retired, we don’t have the kind of environment that can bring up the next generation of players. Top pro players would go to 20 or so international events a year, while the young players would only go to 2 or 3. It just wasn’t likely for a young player to be able to get enough points from local events to be able to make it into Capcom Cup.

It would be more like a miracle if a young player would be able to go to one of the overseas tournaments on the money that they’ve saved from a part time job and place well enough to leave a mark. It would be really tough for young players under that kind of circumstance to take over one the old guard of Daigo and Tokido retire. I thought that I could do something help these young players develop so I started a pro gaming team.

I thought if I was going to do that, I didn’t want to do it just for fighting games, but for all sorts of games and try to build interest for gaming in general. That would be a new challenge for TOPANGA. If TOPANGA could get something going with a non-fighting game, and that picked up popularity, people from fighting games and that other game would both become more popular, and that would connect back to profits for TOPANGA.

Of course, if TOPANGA just jumps into some scene that it has no connection to people would probably have a bad reaction to that. While I have confidence and people believe in us for “Street Fighter”, if I jumped to another title there’s a negative chance of people thinking we’re just trying to do the popular thing. I’d feel the same way about someone suddenly trying to get into fighting games. So when I made a team I thought I’d include people from various games and have events for those.

Recently, the singer Eir Aoi and Idol Totsuka Otoha joined Gyogun, and that’s because from many years ago TOPANGA has been putting in effort in media related endeavors. When I formed the company in order to solidify our position I put a lot of effort into running large tournaments. But around 2017 when people starting saying things like “e-Sports are sports” I thought it would be good to start putting a lot of effort into a different direction from that. I thought it would be good if we could start doing things on terrestrial television. So from 2018 to 2019 I asked Tokido and worked with him to get many appearances on regular TV shows. He’s a player that needs to reserve a lot of time for practice, and is a very important weapon for TOPANGA, so I felt bad about it, but I thought it was important to get out in front of ordinary people so they would know about our activities. Actually because of all his efforts people really got to know more about e-Sports, and Eir-san and Totsuka-san joined Gyogun, and I hope we can continue to work together in the future. Young people accept e-Sports, but older people still feel uneasy about it. TV is the best way to change their viewpoints. Now it is the age of internet advertising, but I think it’s important to advertise and get on normal TV as well to appeal to people that don’t know about us. As we let the older people in the world know about e-Sports it will come back around to the business, and that is an important role for TOPANGA now.

When Capcom talked to me about SFL, there was no reason not to join: TOPANGA always joins all the large tournaments. With the amount of effort that Capcom is putting into it and the potential to create intense interest in Street Fighter, there was no option for us not to join. There hasn’t been a tournament that puts the spotlight on the team players and features them so much, so I really resonated with this. I started with the idea of making it possible for pro players to exist and so I’m fully supportive of ventures that build the foundation for pro players to succeed. The SFL has a tryout which is great for young players, the winners and runners-up get pro licenses, and it isn’t just limited to Tokyo but also other areas, which increases the possibility for people to become pro players. This also connects to the SFL idea of becoming a regional based league, so I hope this continues in the future.

For TOPANGA I’d like to increase the number of players that we have and the number of games that we support. If we can accelerate and promote one genre, that will help the entire e-Sports business, and I think that’s one way that I can contribute. The four people from Gyogun that are in SFL always put in a lot of hard work, so all I had to say to them was “keep on doing your best”. Of course they should continue to excite people with their game play, but they should also do things outside of the game to garner interest and have an exciting presence. I hope that they can keep a positive outlook and work well with the people from other genres and help us develop and expand further.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind for e-Sports as a business is to push how interesting you can make things outside of the game itself. I’m aiming for something like Pro Wrestling. For soccer and baseball players, even if they don’t give good interviews or do anything interesting outside of the game, if they are good at the game they can become super popular. But in our current situation, you can’t just be good at games and think that things will work out due solely to that. If you look at SFL as one example, there isn’t a single person on a team that doesn’t do things like stream or make youtube videos, and you need to do something outside of your play to gain popularity. You need to have the capability to promote yourself in some way, which is an aspect that pro phsyical sports players don’t need.

So how can you work on your showmanship to make things fun and exciting for an audience? It’s important to not just go to a tournament, but to go and have stories that are interesting to people. Pro Wrestling has been doing that for a long time, and I think we should put effort into growing in a similar way. Of course, that isn’t the only way to go. Capcom and people that tournaments and other people all have their own ideas on ways to go, and we’re all trying to promote the popularity of possibilities of gaming and we should all keep doing that in our own ways. We will grow by letting people see how interesting we all are as people, and that’s how I plan to continue moving forward.

I’ve felt this way since the founding of TOPANGA, that we’ve built a lot of stuff along the way, we’ve created a lot of our own specific culture, and even though it is hard to create new things, e-Sports is still a very new and young field. I think it’s very hard to create new things, and I’m ecstatic that the people of TOPANGA are with me on the front lines trying to do new things and leave a mark on the field. I’d like to impart this to people interested in getting into the business: it’s still an area that is under development, and it’s a real joy to create something new, there’s real value to be doing this work, and please join us to help develop and improve things in this exciting field.

“Nagoya OJA” is a team born in 2016 when the Japan e-Sports League was founded, and we thought that e-Sports is likely to increase in popularity similar to regular sports and we believe Nagoya should have a team here. Our CEO wanted to contribute back to our home town where our business is based, and so we started this Nagoya based team. OJA pays homage to the three prides of Nagoya, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, and has the image of rippling out from Nagoya to the three surrounding mountains of Owari Sanzan, Japan, and Asia.

Since its founding, Nagoya OJA has had three principles: “Invigorate Nagoya”, “Invigorate Japan”, and “Create a kinder society”. Invigorating Japan comes from our company’s HQ being started here, and is our economic contribution back to the region, and showing Nagoya off to the world. For “Invigorating Japan” we want to make sure that Japan, which leads the world in games and is in a continual battle for that position. We want to be able to help young talent develop, make sure that older talent can have a business career after they retire, and foster good sportsmanship. We think that “creating a kinder society” includes linking to inclusive sports. We like that e-Sports allows for people of different genders, and people regardless of physical capability to compete on an equal playing field.

Nagoya OJA’s Pet Theory is that “Sports are incubated by the Media”. For example, the Yomiuri Giants baseball team started out as a content source for Yomiuri Newspaper. At the time, Asahi Newspaper had a huge sales lead on them, but by making articles out of the Yomiuri Giant’s activity, they finally surpassed Asahi in sales. That was how Japanese Pro Baseball first started to develop.

As TV started to diffuse throughout the world, then baseball became popular content on that too. Now there isn’t a person in Japan that doesn’t know about the Yomiuri Giants. The Pacific League also grew in popularity in the same way as TV content. The Japanese soccer league J-League started in 1993 and has really grown in popularity by attracting lots of people that have never seen soccer before. This boom also came about because of TV.

So Sports and media have always had a relationship together like this, but at Nagoya OJA we think that the new generation’s boom isn’t going to come from TV but from the internet. When we were trying to figure out what kind of sports would work well with the internet, we came across e-Sports and thought “this is the kind of sports that will work well with growth via the internet media” and “e-Sports is going to be central to the new sports business” and we started our e-Sports division. Since we joined the Japanese e-Sports society in 2016 we’ve been a supporter of locality-based e-Sports. The Japanese e-Sports society has merged with other entities and become the Japan e-Sports Union, but we’ve continued to work with them and have received official recognition for the Aichi-ken region.

As one example of the kind of work we’ve done in e-Sports in 2018 we created the concept of the para e-Sports athlete. The reason we did this is because we were contacted by a company for a certain game that was interested in hiring people who were differently abled and wanted to hire someone for e-Sports. We introduced them to the player Rahat from the soccer team Nagoya Grampus Eight. Rahat works with gaming companies to create events within their games, and outside of work travels around Japan talking about the kinds of things that he is able to do within e-Sports even though he doesn’t have use of his legs.

The reason that we joined SFL is because in the CPT rule book there was a clearly specified aspect of Diversity in the CPT rule book, which didn’t exist in other titles we were looking at. If we look overseas, there are players that are differently abled that are fighting at the top level of the game and playing under the same conditions as other players, and we think that’s really amazing for the game. We would like to be able to have a player like Rahat if possible, and so we joined the SFL. We think this is a good title for us to advance our “A kinder society” cause, but on the other hand would there be any business merits?

Nagoya OJA has put a lot of effort into other titles to support young players in their teens and 20s. Street Fighter is popular with people in their 30s and 40s, which doesn’t overlap with that. So we can join the SFL and play in our existing pro leagues which will get Nagoya OJA exposure to this new audience as well.

One area we were really concerned about when joining is what our team composition should be. We really wanted to recruit people that are local to Nagoya to keep with our “Invigorate Nagoya!” principle, but when we looked into the available players there weren’t many that are in Nagoya. I feel a lot of responsibility for that since I’m the regional president of the Aichi-ken e-Sports union division and bear responsibility for the growth and support of e-Sports in this region. I plan to focus more on fighting games so that we can raise up some home-grown competitors for SFL.

So we recruited Dogura and MOV. Dogura has a base of operations in the region, is a top-level player, and has been in previous SFL runs sharpening his skills. We also think he’s an excellent athlete, and just a super human being all around that is well-respected, so we’re super glad that we can join with him. Of course MOV has superior skills, and he also runs the gamer’s share house [name redacted] in Showajima, he has a lot of knowledge about gamer’s second careers and lots of business acumen around the e-Sports ecosystem. We really respect that and asked him to join our team as well. It might not be well knows, but actually the two are very close, and were very happy to be one the same team.

Other than our team owner, we have a lot of people with experience in running teams from pro baseball and pro soccer, and we now live in the times when young players in those sports can become millionaires. We want to work to make sure that Street Fighter will exist on a level similar to those sports. I’m sure that would also be good for the players.

As we looked toward the draft to fill our other two spots, we thought of course about what they would be able to provide for the team, but also what their connections are to our base of operations. Of course I would build out a space that everyone could gather in for training and practice purposes. More specifically, I would build a training center not just for them, but for other people that want to become pros where everyone can practice. I also want to make sure that our team will naturally be able to gather together to help us realize our principles of “Invigorate Nagoya”, “Invigorate Japan”, and “Build a kinder society”. I’d like to be able to make data out of how our players are practicing and playing, and do academic analysis to understand how they can get better, and what makes a strong player. Players who are interested in learning about what kind of data they should measure, and how they can become stronger will be attracted by this idea. It would be ideal for our team to also attract staff who think in the same way, and our analysis will become more and more interesting.

Everyone knows that Dogura and MOV are strong players, but I would like for them to become even stronger. I’d like for them to believe in their strength, and use that to expand the worth and appeal of e-Sports to let people know just how great e-Sports are. I’d like them to expand the word of e-Sports to an even larger audience of people that don’t know about it, and if I go back to baseball again, be similar to Ohtani Shohei.

Of course Dogura and MOV will coach the players that we pick up in the draft. Dogura will also continue uploading videos to YouTube and sharing his knowledge of fighting games with people, as well as videos for people who are beginners in order to get better. MOV continues to run his gaming house and helps to raise up the newer generation of young players so that they can achieve their dreams. So I’m not concerned about the competitive side of the games at all, and really want people who don’t know about the greatness of competitive e-Sports to see how great it really is.

Right now we are in the middle of Corona, so it is hard to hold offline events, but when things calm down I think what will be important for e-Sports is to hold small events. Hold small events where people can feel a connection to the players, and I think you can sell tickets based on that. You will get some real ardent fans that way, and gradually they will increase and you will be over capacity for your small venue and the scope and scale will increase. Then you won’t be able to provide that deep service to everyone, so you will have to sell things like premiere tickets. Continuing on like that you will eventually get to the state where Pro Baseball is at now with a large venue where lots of people can watch the games. There are a lot of things out there competing for consumer’s entertainment time and money. We would like fans to spend their time and money with e-Sports instead of alternatives like movies, other sports, or hobbies. I think we need the will to complete with the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Disney. It’s great that people run tournaments as a hobby, but you really need to have strong determination to make things into a business. I think that e-Sports is something Japan is good at. Japan is a world leader in video games, and since we fight on that battleground Japan needs to aim to be number one there. I think e-Sports as the younger generation starts to develop it can bring back an economic boom to Japan. If you think the same way, please partner with us!