posted by GrandDesign,
Last night the CEO of Good Game more commonly known for his role as the brains behind Evil Geniuses, Alex Garfield, revealed in his AMA that they are supporting a third team. Furthermore, he gave his insight in matters concerning Good Game, other game organizations, sponsorships and much more. There have been a lot of rumors recently about Tinker's financial support and management. After se Alliance and us EG Alex Garfield brought to light that Good Game is supporting world Team Tinker.





Alex Garfield denies his direct involvement in the management of the Dota 2 rosters:

I haven't made a Dota roster decision in almost a year. Charlie works with EG, Kelly works with Alliance, and Brian and Mario work with Tinker


It is the first official mention that the company has anything to do with Team Tinker and Alex Garfield addressed the matter directly later on, when he was asked who was the third team under his wings:

Tinker. We'd love to support Secret as well - a few months ago it seemed like we'd end up working together, but as of now it's looking like they'll end up going elsewhere.


Moreover, he denied that GoodGame is monopolizing the e-Sports market, he took the blame of not opening up earlier and stated that their motivation is to keep on working at what they're good at and that is supporting teams and players.

I've heard about people saying that kind of stuff. I obviously don't agree with it, but at the same time, I don't blame people for speculating and being concerned, because up until now I haven't come out and explained what we're doing. When you do something that has the potential to be intimidating and you don't clarify, people usually expect the worst. So I view what some people have said up until this point as kind of being my own fault, because I didn't explain myself sooner.

Now, as far as our actual motivations go, they're really simple. We're good at supporting teams and players, and we want to support as many players and teams as possible. I've always felt that if the cool thing to do also seems like the right thing to do, then it's probably worth doing. That mentality, combined with the fact that we pride ourselves on treating players well, explains most of the things we do and have done in the past.[...]


Additionally, after getting a question about sponsors and what they value the most he shared his knowledge and experience claiming that every sponsor is interested in different aspects of the gaming culture. Some are performance-focused and others are data-focused and others are interested in other ways of getting involved with community such as featuring a player in a commercial or running some kind of contest.

It varies, really. Some sponsors are very performance-focused, and need you to be on the podium. Others are more data-focused, and want to see solid stream numbers (both from the players directly, and the tournaments they're competing in). There are also companies who aren't as interested in traditional sponsorship, but still want to involve themselves in the scene - for example, they might just want to feature a player in a commercial or run some kind of contest that touches the community.

The general point is that there are a lot of ways for sponsors to engage a team, player, or personality (you're basically all three of those, obviously) depending on what they're looking to get out of the money they're spending. Sponsorship is rarely uniform and almost always needs to be tailored to the sponsor's particular needs.[...]


Meanwhile, he commented on the possible problems that could come up with having many top tier teams in the scene, participating in the same tournaments.

I don't blame people for having this concern (again, I haven't really said anything to address it until now), but I think its validity depends upon the nature of my interactions with the players on the different teams that we support; the extent of my personal influence over our various players; and how our company is structured.
One thing I want to state very clearly is that I'm really not a traditional "team owner" at this point.





This article was written by gr Dimitris Kolovos, joinDOTA's writer.Dimitris has been a Dota enthousiast since the WC3 days. He's studying lingustics and loves Tolkien's works, Blind Guardian and Sports in generalLocation: Thessaloniki, GRFollow him on @DimitriosKolovo.

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