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• Mark's companies and Social Media Links:
  • Origin.GG - Company website
  • Origin.GG YouTube Channel - You can follow his VLOG here and follow what he is doing
  • LinkedIn @Cashflo, which is his gaming handle
  • Twitter - @Thumbtalkin, this was also the twitter handle of one of his first mobile apps he developed a while ago
  • Instagram - @Cashflo, which is his gaming handle
• Mark can be contacted through:
  • His Social Media accounts - Contact him any time. Mark is happy to answer any questions
  • Email: cashflo@origin.gg
• Electronics Arts owns FIFA and the Madden franchise
• Activision Blizzard owns some of the massive games like Overwatch, HeartStone, Heroes of the Storm, Destiny.
• Twitch.TV - a very popular live game streaming service
• Gary Vaynerchuk

The interview:

Mark Flood is Founder and CTO of Origin.GG, a new eSports platform that takes the pain out of the hands of eSports organizations and -teams. Taking care of all technical and functional things building and running these businesses, so that they can focus on their core activities like practicing and competitions.

Origin.GG provides the platform as a SAAS model, offers Consulting, Software tools, and is a marketplace. Mark would like this to become the eSports version of Salesforce.

Before Origin.GG, Mark owned Gamerwall, a tournaments hosting platform, that he sold after two years. Mark is a Brand Strategist and Software Developer. He loves the early stages of product fit to market and working in an extreme agile mode to adapt his offer to client needs.

Jane met Mark on Twitter. Mark is an absolute fan of Twitter. He filters through the negativity, and he says that out of 1000 people he interacts with, he will meet one person he continues to have good (business) relations with. Twitter is also the medium that is used a lot in the gaming industry.

Mark has always been an entrepreneur. He always found something to do to earn money, like doing business as a child, watering his neighbours' plants or selling t-shirts in High School. He got his entrepreneurial spirit partly from his father, a real-estate agent. That in itself is entrepreneurial, because you do not have a set salary.

Mark moved towards extreme accountability early on, in whatever he does. He believes that "every human being needs to own its destiny!" "You cannot control your situation, but you can control how you handle it."

He loves owning his own thing, working on his own dreams. A piece of his soul is taken away when working for somebody else, he feels.

He has been involved as an active business participant in the competitive gaming scene for about two years now, with his former company, Gamerwall, an event hosting platform. He was drawn to the eSports Industry. He loved gaming as a child. His brother used to beat him at gaming, but it has always been a fantastic creative outlet. He was also always interested in internet technology startup. Then he noticed how this could intersect and from his passion and hobby, he could make a business.

eSports is competitive gaming. It is not yet as big as traditional sports, but very fast growing and trending in the right direction. Mark thinks eSports itself is more indicative of things that are more than competitive gaming. Many games are involved in eSports, but only a few have large enough competitive scenes to justify large prize pools.

Team games like Dota 2, League of legends, Overwatch are some of the top tier games where the prize money is very high and where you find the elite players who can live from competitive gaming. Behind these, you have 10-15 competitive games with much lower prize pools. However, eSports is all about professionalism and prize pools.

The current growth of eSports is due to the fact that more people start watching the games as audience and become fans of teams. That's why the industry is becoming so massive. Mark explains, a huge audience means lots of sponsors and media rights, just like traditional sports. 10-15 years ago, the only revenue source came from people buying and playing the game.

eSports demographics are young people between 18-24 yrs, and relatively high income earners. It's a fantastic demographic. Whether you are in eSports or not, anyone would like to target this demographic, and hence the enormous business around it. And for that reason, Marks loves this space especially, because he sees a lot of value in this demographic.

In 2017, the total audience audience for eSports reached 194 million people and this is expected to reach 303 million people by 2020.

When it comes to revenue, in 2017, $696 million was earned, including media rights, advertising, game publisher fees, tickets, and merchandising. This was already up 41% compared to 2016. It is expected that the revenue for eSports will reach around $1.5 billion by 2020. Extremely fast growing industry!

eSports audiences are currently mostly in Asia Pacific-51%, then Europe-18%, followed by North America- 13%, and the rest spread over the rest of the world. Mark's sees opportunities for Origin.GG in South America, because of the fact that eSports has not yet come off the ground in that region. He is currently building his foundation and proving value, but he believes Origin.GG is ready to start scaling up in the next 6 weeks to 2 months. So by spring time he might be trying to focus on markets like South America, as well.

Big gaming companies to consider are Electronics Arts that owns FIFA and the Madden franchise, and a company that is more involved in the eSports field specifically, Activision Blizzard that owns some of the massive games, like <a href="https://playov