PicoBlog

As you will know by now most of this month will see this publication focus on the esports organisations directly taking money from the Saudi Arabian state while simultaneously promoting LGBT causes. Here I want to outline how I plan to do that and give you an outline of what to expect over the coming days. This will not be in lieu of other reporting and content but will be the priority in a limited timeframe. While I hope this doesn’t make you reconsider your support for the publication, if it does you have my blessing to suspend or withdraw your patronage. I feel very strongly about this issue and this year I want to really try all I can to put the absurdity of what is happening within esports into the spotlight.

I was taught a valuable lesson by modern games journalists and that is the power of pestering. Ever since the digital landscape became mired in culture war bullshit journalists, under the guise of it being journalism, have harassed the employers and sponsors of people who have thought different, voted different and posted memes they don’t find funny. These methods have mostly never been used for anything positive but I figured I could apply them to this project and so I spent most of May firing off emails to the sponsors and partners of the teams that were now business partners with the Saudi state.

Of course it couldn’t be all the sponsors of all thirty teams for a number of reasons. The first is fairly obvious… There are a number of teams who are from parts of the world that simply don’t engage with Pride Month nor would ever dream of celebrating LGBT status in any way. Writing to them and their sponsors seemed a waste of time and energy as they weren’t going to be exposed as hypocrites when June came along. Second some of the sponsors themselves had already debased themselves when it came to maintaining a consistent line between support for the LGBT community and taking money from governments who would persecute and execute people simply for being who they are. Given that they’d already had a public lashing – no pun intended – in the press one more email being filed away in the crank archives didn’t seem like it would achieve much.

So the focus was the sponsors of the organisations that weren’t disqualified by the first two criteria. They were all sent the following email:

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Richard Lewis and I work as an independent journalist that covers the entertainment and tech industries. I am reaching out to you today in your capacity as a sponsor of <esports organisation>. 

As I am sure you are aware they are currently partnered with the Esports World Cup (EWC) which is owned directly by a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) and has the country’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman as the chairman. The nature of the partnership is accepting six-figure sums of money to fund teams to enter the upcoming Esports World Cup event in Riyadh, where your logo will be prominently featured on the team jersey. 

It is a matter of public record that the Saudi Arabian government criminalises homosexuality and imprisons activists speaking out for women’s rights in the country. Your decision to sponsor these PIF owned entertainment products seems at odds with your stated values of diversity and inclusion. 

As such I wanted to seek clarity on how you reconcile your business relationship and whether you were in fact aware of the Saudi Arabian state’s actions against women and the wider LGBTQ+ community. In addition to any statement you provide I also ask if you have any plans to promote Pride causes this June. If so I would further ask if your position as a promoter of Pride Month and a sponsor with a business relationship with the Saudi Arabian state seems in any way contradictory.

For full transparency I will be seeking to publish your statements prior to June 1st as part of an article I am writing. Any input you have would be gratefully appreciated.

Now of course what I expected was to get mostly stonewalled (also no pun intended) and at best receive no comments. As of the time of writing this I can say the majority of sponsors have chosen not to comment or have simply ignored the request for comment. I don’t feel this is a failure because in a broader sense it is also illustrative of how pervasive the problem is. Many of those sponsors will engage in performative support for the LGBT community in June, some even having pages on their website all year round to say how dedicated they are to championing diversity and inclusion. Those same companies will see no problem with being part of an esports ecosystem that is funded and controlled by a regime that persecutes LGBT people domestically and is looking to use entertainment products to obfuscate that reality among many things. Naturally we won’t be letting them off the hook either.

In addition to that letter I am also in the process of asking the organisations themselves for an outline on how they reconcile their public support for the LGBT community and taking money to promote the Saudi Arabian state. The letter sent out is a slightly modified version of the above so I will not publish it in the interests of brevity.

It stands to reason I have received some criticism for doing this from some of the parties affected. In one such exchange I was accused of singling out the organisations who I was told are simply hostages to their needs. They need the money to run and employ people and it just so happens that the Saudi Arabian state is the group giving out the money. “If [organisation name] doesn’t enter a game, or a tournament are there not 100 other teams to replace us” argued one team owner in an exchange after being contacted by their sponsors. On this point I will simply say it wasn’t me that took tens of millions of dollars from venture capital groups, betting platforms, cryptocurrency and NFT bullshit only to piss it all up against a wall and build nothing with it. It wasn’t me that failed to create a sustainable business model despite having years to do so. It wasn’t me who said support for the LGBT and women were CORE VALUES when it was convenient to do so only to renege on that when it wasn’t. I contend that if you truly believe in a principle then it isn’t for sale and if it is then subsequently sold you should probably apologise for lying about holding those principles and then shut the fuck up and never speak on the matter again.

That silence by the way will also be damning and as part of this month’s content deluge we shall also be comparing and contrasting previous Pride months to this one. Failure to promote Pride Month in 2024, after agreeing to take money from the Saudi state, would raise a question as to why not. After all, we’ve been told repeatedly that everyone is welcome and actually this is an exercise in value sharing, that we’re going to help foster change in Saudi Arabian by highlighting that we don’t discriminate against people due to their LGBT status. I see no issue then with you not only continuing to post about LGBT causes this June (beyond the rank hypocrisy of course) but why not do it using the Esports World Cup hashtag as well. After all, we already know some of you aren’t even above using an explanation or apology for the purposes of monetisation.

I also want to make it known that I did not “single out” the thirty organisations that entered into the Esports World Cup Club Program. I made sure to contact all of the sponsors for ESL as well, with the notable exception of the US Air Force because while I know they will absolutely post about Pride this month writing to an entity that still has to answer for war crimes seems like another waste of time. In one instance, Gaming Malta, I also asked them how they felt about ESL’s Pro League essentially promoting Qiddiya as a tourist destination over Malta as that seems like it would be a dealbreaker in a sponsorship designed to encourage tourism.

In addition to that I also went and made a complaint to the FTC and European Advertising Standards Alliance. Part of the Club Program “deliverables” appears to be the organisations promoting the event in slick video packages all of which are presented under the guise of an “update” or “news” or “invitations.” The reality is that part of the quid pro quo of receiving the stipend is to promote the event via the organisations social media reach and therefore I think an argument can be made that this advertising. None of the posted content, which was made public in what seemed like a co-ordinated effort, contained disclosures that they were essentially paid for promotions. Now I am not an expert in that field but I gathered it all up and sent it to the FTC who responded to say it had been forwarded to their influencer department for review. As of the time of writing I am still waiting on a response from the EASA. If you want to get an understanding of the promotion and why it feels like it might be an issue you can watch the below video on it or you can read this excellent summary by James Fudge at The Esports Advocate.

The approach to publishing the responses will be straightforward enough. We will collate the responses by each organisation and present them in an article. Over the course of June we will be also collating all the organisation’s Pride Month activity and presenting it alongside the realities facing the LGBT community in Saudi Arabia.

I understand many of my colleagues are upset about this approach but I’m past caring about that. If you want to operate this way I cannot stop any of you from doing this, from betraying your own values and values that are core to what esports is for millions of people around the world. You’ve taken what used to be a place of commonality, solace and even sometimes retreat and have now brutally kicked the door down to bring in government regimes and human rights abusers. There has to be a cost for that even if it is only your reputations. I doubt any of you are capable of that kind of reflection as I know most of you no longer have the mechanism through which to feel shame but I can assure you that this June the community will absolutely call you on your bullshit repeatedly and relentlessly. That might not feel like much right now but it’s the only achievable victory in reach as you continue to bastardise and destroy esports for your own selfish interests

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