David Diaz over at TechCrunch was able to complete an interview with MLG’s CEO, Matt Bromberg. Covering topics regarding aspects of their business, their business model, and where MLG is headed down the road, it gives us an interesting view into the growing organization. An excerpt can be seen below:
DD: When MLG first started, the gaming market was up for grabs–it was a pretty crowded niche–what did you do that either other companies didn’t do, or didn’t do well enough?
MB: We had a lot of competitors, and we drove them all out of business, kind of one by one. And I think that there were a couple of big misconceptions. The first one was that competitive video gaming would be about television primarily. That was a big mistake that a lot of people made. We’ve done television in our day, but we always knew that this was really an online activity. Focusing on television killed a lot of people. The other thing that I think we got that other folks didn’t get, is that in order to succeed in this market, you also have to own the online competition. It’s not enough to have live events, it’s not enough to make content. Because every other day of the year when people aren’t here, you want to be the place where people come to compete. Growing that part of our business was a major differentiator for us. And the third thing was a lot of folks came in from a very top-down corporate perspective, and sort of said “hey, we’re a big company, this is the way it goes.” And what they didn’t recognize is that this is an activity that people are already engaging in. We didn’t create it. What we did was shape it, codify it, package it, and build it up. We came in trying to sort of celebrate and appreciate what people were already doing and what they were already into and add to it; not roll in and change the whole thing because it suited our partners or it suited our sponsors, or anything like that.
Click here for the entire interview.