WIPOD – Arbitration and Mediation Matters: Transcript of Episode 11

ADR, videogames, and esports

Oscar Suárez

Welcome everybody to another episode of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Matters. My name is Oscar. Today we'll explore the space of competitive video gaming or esports, intellectual property and alternative dispute resolution. And for this, we have invited a very special guest and a very prominent figure in this industry, Sergi Mesonero, Head of esports at Video Games Europe.

For those who do not know, Video Games Europe is the voice of the European market video games industry, representing European and international video game companies and national trade associations across the continent. The organization plays a crucial role advocating for the industry's interests, promoting responsible gaming and driving growth in the European gaming market. Sergi Mesonero, with over a decade of experience and a deep passion for gaming, has been instrumental in advancing esports within this vibrant ecosystem.

From founding space's first esports university program, to being part of one of the biggest esports competition organizers, to leading strategic initiatives at Video Games Europe, Sergi has helped shape the future of competitive gaming across Europe. Today, we'll dive into Sergi's journey, explore the latest trends in esports, and get his insights on where the industry is headed. But before we begin, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to be informed on these and more topics surrounding alternative dispute resolution, intellectual property, and innovation.

And now, let's dive in. Welcome.

Oscar Suárez

Well, Sergi, thank you so much for being here with us. We've been having some conversations before - in the past month - about all the esports industry. It's a pleasure to have you here with us.

Sergi Mesonero

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Oscar Suárez

Absolutely. So, if you agree with me, let's start with one of these questions that we discussed and that you've been looking into. And for me, the most intriguing always is what drove you into this video games and esports industry? What drove you to this?

Sergi Mesonero

Well, it's kind of a funny story because in my previous life, I was working in the film industry - not in film production, in film distribution and exhibition, and actually non-commercial distribution and exhibition. So, short films, documentaries for festivals, for art houses, things like this. After 10 years, I was a bit tired, a bit burnt out, I think, and I've always been a gamer. Unluckily, I don't have the time to play as much as I would like now.

But I've always been a gamer myself since my first video game console was an Atari - that also highlights how old I am. But anyway, the fact is that I was feeling a bit burnt out and at the time I was also teaching some classes at the film school. And with one of the pupils, we were discussing - he also is a big video game player, a big fan of video games - we were discussing about video games and then at some point we said, it would be nice to our experience at use, to use it for something around video games. So, we became friends with the pupil, [we said] let's do something and we've been doing things in the film industry, let's try to take our experience and do something with video games.

So, at that time - I'm talking about the early mid-2000s - there weren't that many video game events in Spain. So, [we said] let's do some kind of video game festival. Now, of course, there's a lot of video game events in Spain and anywhere actually - from LAN parties to give video game awards. So, there's a plethora of events, but at that time it was not really the case. And so, we started drafting a plan for a video game festival. And at some point, when we were discussing a program, we were brainstorming, we also introduced there video game competitions. At that time, we were big fans of Halo 2, and also of StarCraft and so on, but mostly for the Halo 2 and the competitions that we were trying to follow because at that time it was very difficult to follow those competitions. There was no Twitch, there was no YouTube, so it was downloading demos, and it was also some on-demand videos that were very low quality. And I said let's introduce in our plans video game competitions – esports. The concept of esports was just starting. But in iterations of the plan, for some reason, every plan that we were doing, we were including more and more competitions and less and less festivals. So, at some point around 2006, 2007, we thought, maybe what we should do is just take the activities that we are seeing in other countries, like in North America and South Korea mostly, bring them to Spain and organize esports competitions.

And that's how I ended up there. I quit my job at the university at the time and we started a company. That were the 13 years of my life until 2020. I'm quite happy about starting that company, LVP, the most important tournament operator in the Spanish speaking market. It was very, very nice, I learned a lot, and that's how I ended up after those 13 years in representing the video games industry in Video Games Europe, as Head of esports inside Video Games Europe, the trade association for the video games industry.

Oscar Suárez

This is fantastic. And what would like one of the big things that you would take from that experience, from creating the scene from scratch basically to where you're now looking at it at a policy perspective?

Sergi Mesonero

I think that we would have engaged with the Spanish Trade Association earlier than we did. During half of my time there, I was the CEO of the company and after that we sold to a big Spanish company, and I became actually the vice president for corporate and institutional relationships. At that time - it was around 2016, 2017 - one of my main goals was introducing the company of joining the Spanish Video Games Trade Association. It took a while because at that time video game publishers were not as involved in esports as they are now, and the first years, the esports sector and the video games industry were running parallelly because at the end of the day, esports is using video games for competitions. But there was not that much involvement of the publishers, the owners of the video game. And the other way around is that the esports competitions were not engaging with the industry. That brought a lot of misunderstandings, I think. Probably I would have engaged earlier with them, and although also maybe at the time we were too small - the first year, the first years - but I would have tried.

I think it's very important, I mean without the video game companies, there's very little that one can do in the sector, and I think that the main teaching of that time is that if you want to succeed in esports, you need to understand very, very well the video games industry.

Oscar Suárez

Absolutely. And what kind of disputes did you face? What kind of problems did you face between maybe the publishers, maybe the competitors? What did you see in this kind of issues?

Sergi Mesonero

Well, I can speak a bit about my previous personal experience. The first thing I think that is kind of interesting is that actually the esports sector has not been very problematic in the past. Probably because the economic importance was quite small. So, at the end of the day, if there's not money involved, there's no problem. Of course, as the sector has been growing, this has opened the sector to bigger challenges. And I think it's kind of part of a natural evolution. But now we are seeing how, for example - and we discussed this when we met in Geneva - how, for example, arbitration has been increasingly introduced in the contracts around esports between publishers and tournament organizers, tournament organizers and teams, etc.

So, in the beginning, there was a lot of uncertainty - not necessarily legal uncertainty, because at the end of the day, copyright law is copyright law. But I think that there was not a lot of knowledge, not on the side of the industry, but on the side of esports stakeholders about intellectual property and other types of rights, image rights, etc. So, the sector was small, there was not a lot of knowledge and a lot of things that shouldn't have happened, happened, like using brands and using art assets. For example, the use of a brand for, let's say, naming a part of the program of an event. And at the time we were bringing influencers and content creators about that game to this event in Madrid. They were content creators in a specific game, and I said, hey, we are having this let's call it game X activity to our event in Madrid. And, we got a, hey, please do not use our name. And, and the other one was about organizing competitions with a game - online competitions. Now I can laugh about it. Of course, at the time it was very stressful.

Oscar Suárez

It was not too funny.

Sergi Mesonero

It was not too funny, but it was very formative. And that opened my eyes to the realities of IP and copyright, of image rights, broadcast rights, all that. I got to learn the part the hard way. But I think that opened my eyes and that's why I always suggest anyone that wants to get involved in the sector to be very aware of IP and to be very knowledgeable about the industry, which is not an easy industry, it's quite complicated.

Oscar Suárez

It goes exactly to the point of what we've been seeing. And I love the part of you saying the industry has been becoming more professional in facing these challenges, which may not be too evident when you're starting something. And as you're saying, there's more money involved, there's more people involved, there's more publicity involved. It's becoming so big. From our side, we've been discussing how we can help the industry by having this kind of procedures that we have with us, with the different IP disputes that we administer here, how we could use that experience and help the industry face these challenges, solve the disputes in an amicable way that would allow the industry to develop and keep being more professional and bigger and bigger in a way that is compliant for every stakeholder that is in line there.

So, what are the challenges that you're seeing? Why do you say that it was different and now it's changing? What do you see there?

Sergi Mesonero

For the most part, we already are in a completely professionalized sector, looking at esports. Of course, the video games industry has been very professional for a long time now. But the esports sector has, of course, there's also grassroots, a big grassroots community. And there have been also increasingly rules for these grassroots communities that all the part that's like professional competition, which is the most upper one, the one that when you think about esports, everybody sees the image of these arenas with audience and professional players there, the big audiovisual show. So, that part is now completely professional.

It's a very contractualized sector, so everything runs on private contracts among the parties, and they are quite complicated because in many ways they involve many parties. When the publishers have, for example, a contract with tournament organizers, tournament organizers may have contracts with the teams participating in the competitions, the publishers may end up also as well having some kind of contracts with some of the teams, for example, or for image rights of the team's logos and the brands and so on. You have the reality of content that is co-created. For example, tournament organizers create their content around their competitions, but it's using the intellectual property of a third party and it's using the image rights of players and teams. So, everything is contractualized, but it's quite complicated. I think that's why increasingly arbitration has been used. It can help a lot because of the sector's complexity. I think it allows for a much better development if disputes are solved, as you mentioned, in an amicable way than when you end up in court, where it may take a long time, where courts may not currently have the knowledge for tackling some of the issues involved.

When you also have another issue, which is the sector is very transnational. You are, for example, as a Spanish company contracting with a publisher that is based in the UK or Germany or even in North America, with teams that are not necessarily based in Spain -they might be a Canadian company, an Italian company. So, in all that very complex panorama, arbitration may help a lot in allowing the sector to keep running without hiccups, going to court that may take a long time, may involve money - a lot of money - and it may also have a question mark at the end. They have a lot of uncertainty. So, the sector is complex because of this multi-faceted and multi-country. And I'm a big believer that it's better to - how we say in Spanish - to clean your clothes at home than doing it with everybody seeing it.

Oscar Suárez

Which I will translate into the confidentiality of solving disputes amicably, fast, in this environment.

I have a question for you. What is the thing that you like the most about this industry?

Sergi Mesonero

Well, of course, its creativity. Video games are a bit a total work of art. A bit like film was considered, and still considered, where you have performance, have music, and you have the audiovisual qualities. It is exactly the same in video games, plus the interactivity, plus, much more complexity, because the video games may, because of that interactivity, involve as well a bit of uncertainty. What's the player going to do? How are they going to use our software? And that's when there are glitches and there are things that players do that the developers have not thought of. So, all that massive amount of creativity is what attracts me about video games. Absolutely fascinated by the amount of work that goes into releasing a video game, which is not just software development, but you have artists, you have writers, you have musicians, you have actors, and also how the players take that piece of software and they create, they play in unexpected ways or may create things that the developers have not thought of.

Oscar Suárez

That is fantastic. What advice would you offer somebody - to a young or aspiring gamer or somebody that wants to work in the industry - from the policy side? What is it? What would be your advice to them?

Sergi Mesonero

I've already mentioned the importance of understanding how the industry works, and that's not a minor thing, because different companies work very differently. The way that the companies market the products is really very different. But not just the companies among themselves, but even the same company may have very different ways to market one game and market another game. Especially if I'm thinking about esports. It may even be that the same game has very different esports policies in Europe and in China and in North America. So, if you think that every esports works the same way or all the companies for all the titles and every territory, you are mistaken. Increasingly, I think that we are seeing how it's going to a more standardized way of working, but still the case is that it has different policy for example, for tournaments or for dash tournaments, or for any type of tournaments in Europe than they have North America, that the same companies have different policies for different titles. So that's very important to know.

The second recommendation I would give besides knowing very well the industry is that you want to have a future. I think that's much more important that you also learn skills from other sectors or from general skills that then you can apply to the esports sector.

Oscar Suárez

That's excellent and noted down. I think that many people listening to this podcast will appreciate that because it's a growing area, it's a very interesting area. We particularly have been immersed more and more in this environment, which we find fascinating, of course, from the side of helping solve disputes, whether it be between the publishers, between the competitors, any way we can help the industry, we're trying to develop something for it.

So, it's a real pleasure to have you with us today, Sergi. Thank you for all this insight. I think it's very valuable. You're a very knowledgeable person in this environment. Everything you've been saying has been quite on spot and quite informative.

Sergi Mesonero

Thanks so much for inviting me. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I will be very happy to keep the conversation ongoing with you folks and help each other make the sector bigger and more successful than it already is.

Oscar Suárez

Absolutely. That's the mission. Thank you so much, Sergi. And for next time.

Sergi Mesonero

Thank you. See you.