Misfits, Team Dignitas Join Professional Esports Association
Published: May 30, 2017 - Last Updated: Apr 26, 2019
The Professional Esports Association (PEA), an association of North American esports organizations, has welcomed two new members.
Misfits and Team Dignitas have joined the lineup, which is now focusing its efforts on “contributing towards a productive and profitable North American esports ecosystem.”
PEA making moves after a period of silence
The announcement comes after a three-month period where not much news came from the PEA. That said, the affiliation with Team Dignitas owners the Philadelphia 76ers and Misfits backers the Miami Heat should help the organization move forward in its mission. The addition of the two newcomers ups the current member count to nine organizations.
“Dignitas is honored to join the existing PEA franchises in an effort to collectively work with publishers, players, the community, sponsors and media to further the development of the North American esports ecosystem,” said Dignitas CEO Jonathan Kemp.
“We are eager to work with our new partners to advance the ball forward on many team and player-based initiatives that we believe will have a lasting impact on the North American esports scene,” said Misfits CEO Ben Spoont.
Joining PEA for mutual benefits
In a recent interview with theScore esports, Spoont and Kemp shared their rationale for joining PEA.
Here’s what Spoont had to say about possible labor benefits:
“For us, at a base line, there are a lot of shared services that will make our collective business much more efficient and therefore help not only ourselves as the org, but also our players.
A simple example is a pooled health care plan. So rather than a single team, for example Misifts, we have 10 or so people here in North America, rather than going to an insurer and looking at rates for 10 we can look across the nine member teams and quotes for potentially hundreds of people.”
Kemp spoke to the power of having NBA franchises at their backs:
“We collectively believe we can represent ourselves better as a group … as opposed to individual teams.
[The Heat and the 76ers have] a lot of experience about running sports organizations across multiple territories and multiple sports themselves, and we’ve said right from the go that we’ve wanted to bring that knowledge and know-how to help grow the esports ecosystem for everyone: for fans, for players, for teams, for partners, the community overall, and this is a logical next step for us overall in that process.”
According to the interviewees, working as one body could also help with things like obtaining and processing visas, as well as having more negotiating power when dealing with publishers and media distribution companies. With the PEA now focusing more on growing the esports ecosystem, it represents a great incentive for the organizations to closely work together toward a mutual goal.
“Esports is still very much in its infancy, but the one thing I will say is that the coming together of this group of teams, we have an enormous reach in terms of social reach,” Kemp said. “I mean it is staggering. And in terms of our broadcast hours across various platforms, it is pretty unparalleled. As we look to the future what we hope is that we are able to bring that level of reach and harness that in ways that are positive to fans and the community at large.”
Since: September 12, 2015
