The ‘counter-strike’: Guild Esports’ all-woman team takes on the world of pro shooter games
The universe of esports might be one of the most diehard of subcultures—and it’s boomed in recent years. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch in the United States, or Douyin in China, have popularized video game livestreaming, and viewership has grown to over half a billion globally in 2022. It’s even spawned a spin-off genre of watching other viewers’ dramatic or clownish reactions to footage of players executing complicated maneuvers, finagling clever trades, or braving chaotic melees.
But gaming isn’t just a fun pastime—there’s also lots of money to be made. The prize pot across gaming tournaments has swelled to hundreds of millions of dollars, and professional sponsorships are projected to top $1 billion by 2025, for a competition circuit that generates nearly $2 billion today.
This lucrative space is dominated by 95%-male professional gamers, according to the activist group Women in Games, despite that nearly half of gamers worldwide are female.
It’s a discrepancy that Guild Esports, a United Kingdom-based pro esports company that’s listed on the London Stock Exchange and co-owned by soccer star David Beckham, is trying to attack. On Wednesday, International Women’s Day, it announced the launch of its first competitive team in the esteemed first-person shooter game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—and the team is all women.
Known as “KiKi,” “Minnie,” “Pullox,” “Nea,” and “Ann4,” the players are all veteran gamers, three of whom currently compete for Norway’s national team. The five will train together at the company’s flagship Sky Guild Gaming Centre, in London’s hipster-cool neighborhood of Shoreditch, and will enter their first competition in esports company ESL’s all-female league with a prize pool of $500,000.
The news follows the launch, in 2021, of Guild Esports’ all-woman Valorant team, which competes in the hero shooter game developed by Riot Games and has scored several tournament victories. The CS:GO team, meanwhile, will crack into the world’s second-biggest competitive video game. (According to Guild, to be the best requires “lightning reflexes and hand-eye coordination.”) For the company and its players, it’s like a treasure chest waiting to be looted: In 2022, viewers sank nearly 450 million hours into CS:GO livestreams, according to Esports Charts.
Jasmine Skee, chief executive of Guild Esports—who took the glass office in January—said the time is right to recruit for CS:GO, as female participation in sports of all kinds, such as soccer and rugby, is on an upswing.
It’s also smart for business. “It opens up further revenue streams,” Skee tells Fast Company. “Brands are increasingly excited about esports arenas as they want to connect with elusive Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences, and they want to reach the entire demographic, not be split across gender divides. Subsequently, the response from our sponsors and potential partners has been phenomenal.”
Guild’s move is part of a larger trend. The presence of women in gaming is rising. Companies are luring in female talent with all-female leagues, while a coterie of women Twitch streamers have shot to social media stardom. Even the beauty and fashion industries, which are heavily tailored to women, have started to court gamers—in 2021, cosmetics brand E.L.F. created a Twitch channel to highlight makeup routines of female gamers, and that same year, British makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury’s eponymous line sponsored the Girlgamer Esports Festival. In December, Dove dove even deeper into the world by partnering with Women in Games and computer graphics software developer Unreal Engine to campaign for diverse beauty standards in female gaming avatars—which often tend to take one shape and size.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done, as demonstrated by major lawsuits over gender discrimination at companies including Riot Games, Activision Blizzard, and Sony’s PlayStation as recently as last year, which have accused the gaming giants of harboring an insidious boys’ club culture.
Guild Esports’ other teams compete in two soccer-themed games, FIFA and Rocket League, as well as Fortnite Battle Royale.
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