The impacts of the pandemic stunted the growth of e-sports in Australia, which means rebuilding and advocacy are crucial for the efficacy of the e-sports law sector, said one lawyer.
In a recent episode of The Boutique Lawyer Show, Mat Jessep (pictured), Game Legal principal, talked about the current state of e-sports in Australia and his experience navigating e-sports law through advocacy and impact.
“At my peak, maybe five years ago, e-sports [was] maybe 20 to 30 per cent of my practice. I am a corporate and commercial lawyer who works primarily in the sports and media space … At the moment, e-sports is probably less than 1 per cent of my practice. It has been impacted by what’s called the global e-sports winter off the back of COVID,” Jessep said.
While Australia was hit hard by the “e-sports winter”, he noted, “the Asian market is accounting for around about half of the global e-sports market with strong growth”.
Advocacy
He said: “The value that we can add to a traditional sporting organisation or a stakeholder in sports as [an e-sports] lawyer is having that rigour around the types of legal issues that are unique to [e-sports], whether it be from a governance perspective or an integrity perspective, or those commercial and those corporate type issues or regulatory issues.”
He highlighted that there is still a lot of interest out there in the e-sports space; however, “it’s still out there in Australia [because] it’s just very different”.
“I always saw [e-sports law] as being complementary to what I do for traditional sporting organisations through sports law, sports integrity and sports governance,” he said.
“I still teach in the space … I’ve got the master’s course at Melbourne Law School – e-sports and the Law – back up and running from March next year in first semester … it has been very quiet, I’ll have to admit.”
Jessep said that he wants to get into e-sports in Australia to help organisations, teams, and new investors come into the space and be “more self-sufficient”.
“I’m still wanting to help train up the next generation of lawyers in the space,” he said.
‘Green shoots’
“There are murmurs of an e-sports spring following an e-sports winter. But I guess the term would refer to the exposure of the financial models in the e-sports industry in general. Not every stakeholder e-sports, and not every e-sport itself was exposed [however],” Jessep said.
“As we see in other jurisdictions, such as in Denmark, there’s a government e-sports strategy … Scandinavia is very different to Australia. Obviously, the EU Parliament has a focus on e-sports. New Zealand, the Kiwis, our cousins across the ditch, they’ve recognised e-sports for a few years now.”
He argued: “I think there’s a lot that we can do [in Australia], whether it be around integrity, around the legal issues or structuring and helping the [e-sports] scene develop, whatever those green shoots are coming out of the e-sports winter to remodel and come up with a better, more self-sustaining, more economically viable and a much better competitive space in the future.”
“So I still see it in terms of my mission, I guess, if you could see [success] in the e-sports space here in Australia. I still feel like there’s unfinished business.”
