This article was taken from the July 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Today Patrick Sättermon has killed thirty-two people. Right now, he is crouched on top of a pile of crates, covering the entrance to a sandy courtyard with his rifle. Sättermon stays there, still, for a long while: he knows that somewhere in this dusty maze, three terrorists are looking for him. He can't wait any longer: he jumps down from the boxes, hurls a flashbang ahead of him and sprints into the courtyard, scanning left and right for movement. He reloads and cocks his M16 in less than a second, one-handed. A grenade flies back at him. There's a dull thud and smoke fills his field of vision. Sättermon rushes the corner anyway. A waiting terrorist, in balaclava and body armour, leaps straight up at him. The rifle crack is fast and brittle. The edge of Sättermon's vision thumps red: he wheels clumsily and drops to the floor, and then he sees his own body from above. The crimson on his blue-suited corpse deepens, quickly staining the tawny ground.
The real Patrik Sättermon, blond with a slim frame, slumps back in his chair, watching the replay of his death on screen; the 20-odd specators who have been following his progress sag on their feet. Sättermon didn't die; his Counter-Strike avatar "cArn" did. The kill isn't life and death, but it does matter: at stake is $35,000 (£21,000). That's the prize money for first place at the Intel Extreme Masters, now in its fifth season. Sättermon earns $4,500 a month playing in competitions such as these. At just 26, he's a veteran of electronic sports (or "esports") -- competitive, professional video gaming -- who has planned to quit many times: "But how can I not justify a salary, travelling the world playing video games?"
The IEM is "the most prestigious esports tournament in the world", according to Sam Matthews. Matthews is Sättermon's boss and CEO of Fnatic, a Soho, London-based startup that employs 33 professional videogame players. He's a serial entrepreneur with two other companies and he sees a significant business opportunity in esports: in this giant hall in Hanover, banners carry the name of sponsors such as Intel and Deutsche Post, which have paid millions for the privilege. In all, 274,986 people will buy tickets to visit the hall over the five days of IEM; 94,256 will attend the final day alone and 2.15 million will be watching it online. Matthews is turning this attention into revenues, from prize money, consulting, shares of advertising, merchandising and sponsorship. For Matthews, the Fnatic brand "is the most powerful thing we have" -- and much of it is built around Patrik Sättermon, his star player.
Sättermon has a special place in esports. He has been playing
Counter-Strike since he was 13 and making money from doing so since he was 17. As leader of Fnatic, he spends 200 days a year on the road, from South Korea to the Netherlands to the US. He is not the most talented of his peers and he doesn't have the fastest reactions. But he bosses matches because of his experience, anticipating opponents' moves and tactics and directing his own teammates in a game that's actually less about killing than communication and strategy. "Counter-Strike was the game that made esports big [in Europe]," says Ralf Reichert, the CEO of the Electronic Sports League, which puts on the IEM. "And cArn is one of the very few players who have helped to shape the history of
Counter-Strike."
Sättermon might soon be history himself, though. As cArn falls on screen, the player who fragged him, Christopher "GeT_RiGhT"
Alesund, a short, very pale young man with jet-black hair, leaps shouting from his chair on the other side of the arena. This time last year, he was sitting next to Sättermon as part of the same team; he thought Sättermon was too old to win any more. Matthews fired Alesund, who then joined rivals SK. And even if Sättermon can prove he isn't too old, Counter-Strike itself may be. The title first appeared in 1999 -- a lifetime ago in computergames terms. More recent titles such as StarCraft II are attracting new audiences. Fnatic has teams playing
Call of Duty 4, Halo and
StarCraft II, the newest versions of which were all released in 2010. In the most modern of sports, cArn is the last pioneer left standing. The young guns that he trained are now coming for him.
Sättermon never thought that he could make a living playing computer games.
A week before the start of IEM, he's at boot camp in Gothenburg, training eight hours a day (the hours stipulated in his contract) for the tournament. He's dressed in a smart grey shirt and has pale-blue eyes. His teammates are still in bed at 11am as he begins to talk over coffee. "I've always enjoyed team games -- I played soccer for a long time," he says, in flat, Scandinavian English. Sättermon gave it up when he was 15. Instead, he started playing Counter-Strike competitively, with school-friends from his home in the suburbs of Karlstad, a town of 60,000 in the centre of Sweden. In 2003, he joined xPerience.se (Counter-Strike team and player names have an all-comers-welcome approach to upper and lowercase alphanumerics) where he met Harley "dsn" Orwall, his teammate and best friend in the sport. They played across internet-relay chat networks. The pair started competing in tournaments, usually held in the basements of internet cafés. In December 2003, he got a call from the Cyber X Games competition. Would he put together a
Counter-Strike team to play in Greece that Friday?
Sättermon told his parents that he wouldn't be going to school that day, but to Athens, to play computer games. He came back with
€5,000 and a ticket to Las Vegas for the championship. "They started to appreciate the hours I had put in," says Sättermon.
Nevertheless, he walked away from esports in 2005. "I wasn't sure I could see a future," he recalls. "I stopped playing and was about to go to university -- I thought I should gain a normal lifestyle."
But in midwinter 2006, Orwall got back in touch. He had been signed to Fnatic and was putting together a new Counter-Strike team. "I felt like I had to give this a final shot," Sättermon says.
Orwall and Sättermon built an extremely successful team. They signed Patrik "f0rest" Lindberg, whom Sättermon still rates as the most naturally talented Counter-Strike player of all time, and GeT_RiGhT, a highly rated youngster. To date, the team has won $470,655 in tournaments, making it the most financially successful ever. In 2010, though, f0rest and GeT_RiGhT, concerned about a run of poor form, went to the team owner and said they wanted to kick cArn and dsn off Fnatic. "They said that cArn and dsn were too old, past it -- they're 25, these guys are 21," says Sam Matthews. "GeT_RiGhT, he lost it a bit," says Sättermon.
Matthews kicked out the dissenters and decided to rebuild Fnatic around his veterans. "If I had to kick [Sättermon] out, I'd kick him out," says Matthews. "It doesn't matter, it's business. But he's been the pivotal leader of the team."
F0rest and GeT_RiGhT are now with SK, arch rivals of Fnatic. The two teams have been drawn in the same "group of death" in IEM. It will be the first time that Sättermon has faced his former teammates. "This has history. It's a bit cooler now between us," he says. "Yeah, they wanted to get rid of me...But I'm fine with it. I was the one who came out on top."
A few days later, in Hanover, in one of the thousands of branded stalls that crowd the halls of CeBIT in the Exhibition Centre, Matthews is standing on stage, holding a microphone. CeBIT is the largest annual digital and IT trade show, and also hosts the Intel Extreme Masters; 339,000 people attended in 2011.
Matthews, dressed in a black coat, is playing ringmaster, trying to convince some of those passing to play Sättermon and Orwall at
Counter-Strike: on offer to anyone who can beat the pros is a Fnatic branded headset. A 14-year-old comes close, knifing Orwall.
Sam Matthews sold his car to set up Fnatic in his first year at the University of Southampton in 2003. His mother Anne, also an entrepreneur, stepped in as CFO. "We thought [esports] was going to be massive," says the 26-year-old. "People have seen the potential, but gone about it the wrong way. They tried to make it really mainstream, so they took away all the esports elements and made it artificial." From the early 90s, esports has experienced cycles of hype every few years. Its early champions, players such as Dennis "Thresh" Fong and Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, earned large amounts; Fong, who never failed to win a major tournament he entered, estimates that he earned $100,000 a year in prize money and sponsorships between 1995 and 1999.
But the Cyberathlete Professional League and the Championship Gaming Series, both launched with huge publicity and prize money, no longer exist. Neither do the Electronic World Sports Cup and numerous smaller tournaments. Matthews, though, realised that LAN parties and dingy basements were the grassroots of esports, and suspected that a sustainable business could be built around them. "We thought of it as a sport for a new age."
According to Matthews, Fnatic's annual revenues are around £500,000 (although the company made its first profit only last year after years of heavy investment in player salaries). Around 80 per cent of that comes from sponsorship. The Counter-Strike players can afford to live off the game, but team members playing other titles can't: Kévin Baéza, a Fnatic Quake Live player competing at IEM, works in a mayonnaise factory. "It's not necessarily a scalable business yet," Matthews says. "The next stage is getting those mainstream lifestyle brands [as sponsors]."
Larger companies are taking notice. Adidas and Volkswagen have sponsored IEM in the past; this year it's Deutsche Post.
Traditional broadcasters are also paying attention. Last summer, STV, the Swedish public broadcaster, commissioned an esports show; its first episode featured Fnatic. And in February this year, Eurosport broadcast the first of six programmes centred on the IEM.
Ralf "Griff" Reichert founded the ESL in 2000 when he was 27, after competing as a pro gamer and reading economics at university. "We played Quake and knew this was going to be a sport," he says. Today ESL employs 130 people full-time, with around 2,000 freelancers, and has offices in Germany, France, Italy and China. This year, it expects $55 million in revenue -- and to make a profit. "We don't want to hype and sell out. The mission isn't just to have a profitable company, but to make esports big."
Much of that growth will come from one sector: "Online video is incredibly important for us," says Reichert. "It's the video, as in any sport, that makes you big. It elevates it from a couple of thousand watching live to hundreds of thousands watching." Online has also helped the US market: Major League Gaming, the US equivalent of ESL, generated $20 million in revenue in 2010. It hopes to be profitable in 2011 and says its online audience is 95 percent male and under 30, three to six times larger in that demographic than US broadcasts of traditional sports.
But console games, and one PC title in particular -- StarCraft II -- are also driving that expansion. "StarCraft II has become massive this year," says Matthews, who has been adding StarCraft II players to Fnatic's rosters. And Matthews is building new businesses around Fnatic, such as UGAME, a social network for gamers; his other company, web design agency EVISUA, powers Fnatic's website and e-commerce.
For now, though, CS is Matthews's focus. He's in Hanover to oversee the Fnatic brand -- and the team. The bad blood between Fnatic and SK has ignited fan interest; myriad internet forums have been critical of Matthews's reconstruction of Fnatic. In the grudge match against SK, Sättermon and Orwall want revenge, Matthews vindication.
The play area at IEM in Hanover is a sectioned-off pit, filled with about 40 desktops, arranged into banks of five. There are already around 50 people watching at 10.45am on a Tuesday; hundreds more mill around the hall, trying out game demos or having their photos taken with the models selling peripherals.
Fnatic won its first match of the day -- against highly rated Swedish team Lions -- surprisingly easily. The grudge match, against SK, is next. The players drink some water and eat fruit; new team member "pita" watches a YouTube video of "Billionaire" by Bruno Mars and reads the match report, already on HLTV.org. "Delpan", another rookie, checks Facebook; the rest -- "Xizt" (at 19 the youngest new signing, whom Matthews describes as "our little Ronaldo"), dsn and cArn -- practise a bit more. "We just played one teammate now, and then we're playing two of them. I haven't played SK this year, it's a lot of emotion," says cArn.
Before the match, Sättermon gathers Fnatic, all wearing black-and-orange jerseys decked with sponsors' logos, and takes out a black-leather book. It's full of scribbled notes and diagrams; the night before, Sättermon stayed up studying SK's game-playing style. After he explains each player's role, the players gather in a huddle, exchange a few words and break: "Dodga!" (a term for dodging flashbangs which also serves as Fnatic's battle cry). The crowd behind has grown to 70 people. The game begins.
Making sense of a match played across ten screens is difficult, even if you're familiar with Counter-Strike. Players do apparently bizarre things. They walk up to walls and shoot them (bullets can penetrate even thick ones); sometimes they'll stand on top of one another, a manoeuvre called stacking, to double the firepower covering a particular angle; avatars leap manically and gracelessly around the maps, to present a more difficult target.
But after a while you can see patterns emerging and you enjoy an advantage that esports has over traditional games. It's one of the the few sports to include dramatic irony: the audience sees more than the players do. In Counter-Strike, you know when a player is walking straight into a death trap.
SK soon goes 5-0 up. It's very quiet. Every time SK wins a round, GeT_RiGhT jumps from his seat, shouts and exults. "Revolting," someone in the crowd mutters. "That's just nasty." SK is fiercely ganging up on the boy wonder Xizt and the whole team is suffering. At halftime, it's 11-4 to SK. cArn, extremely agitated, gathers the team and speaks in low, forceful Swedish.
To get back in the game, Fnatic has to win the second pistol round. They kill three SK players, lose one man, then take the fourth and fifth men out. A message appears on the Fnatic screens, typed by cArn: "game on modderfuckarz". Fnatic takes two rounds, but then so does SK. They're 15-7 up. You can still win from 15-7 down. SK takes it, though. GeT_ RiGhT jumps like one of the avatars in the game and hugs his teammates. He's hopping as he comes over to shake hands: "I wanted this victory more than anything because of all the fights we had when we were quitting the team."
Patrik Sättermon looks up. "Maybe we got a bit shaky in the heat of the moment, playing our old teammates," he says. Fnatic wins its next two matches and loses the last, but thanks to an unlikely combination of results, still manages to qualify for the knock-out stages. By the end of play, the players are exhausted, nerves frazzled. In the last match, cArn comes bottom of the leader board, with only seven kills to 20 deaths -- a very poor performance. "It's a long day and I did bad work," he says. "I need a beer."
Two days later, the Fnatic team loses its quarter-final against Frag Executors, a team from Poland. A fortnight after the defeat Sättermon is back in London, where he works from Matthews's Soho offices. Fnatic will practise for the rest of the year's tournaments, but Sättermon isn't looking much further beyond that: "There's so much doubt."
Counter-Strike still has around 100,000 users playing one another at any one time. The prize money for CS at IEM was $15,000 less than in 2009 but still well ahead of the StarCraft II pot; Reichert says CS will definitely feature at IEM in 2011. Beyond that? Michael Blicharz, the manager of IEM itself, is blunt: "Esports is 100 per cent tied to its game. We haven't had a good release for ten years. We need a successor to
Counter-Strike."
When and if that game comes, it will come too late for Sättermon. He wants to stay with Fnatic and likely will: when Matthews removed the three young plotters, he said: "cArn is a natural born leader, and will be in Fnatic long after CS has lost its competitive edge." Sättermon hasn't dipped in and out of whichever esport was in vogue, though, as Thresh and Fatal1ty did.
It seems that the game he's played the whole of his life will become obsolete before he's ready to stop competing. "I won't switch games. This is my sport. This is what I'm good at," says Sättermon. "At 26, my skill is my experience. But picking up a new game? I've lost that. I'm not the kid I was."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
