Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Rufail.
Mike, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I have always had a love for video games. After graduating from college with a degree in media studies, I worked my way through a number of jobs in commercial film production, all while playing video games online. As I got better and better, I started meeting other people interested in competitive gaming and started winning tournaments online, then tournaments held in small venues. By 2009, I made the jump to esports as a full-time career. There were no guarantees then – we lived rent check to rent check based on tournament prize money and the hope that a sponsor check would be delivered, but we kept growing year after year.
The organization I lead today, Envy Gaming, was founded in 2007 as a professional Call of Duty team. We’re now one of the winningest organizations in the world in esports, and Forbes ranks us the eighth-most valuable esports organization in the world. I grew up in Lufkin, Texas, and North Texas is home for me today. Thanks to my amazing partners in Ken Hersh and the Hersh Interactive Group, our organization is building the Esports and gaming competitive environment and community in Texas to rival that of any other location in North America.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Esports organizations face many of the same challenges that other businesses face, but we have an added layer of pressure because of the competitiveness of sport. Some of our toughest obstacles to overcome stem from our team’s ability to perform in competition.
Additionally, we are an entertainment company. It is our job to host and produce live events and broadcasts that become experiences for our fanbase. Those things are major undertakings.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Envy Gaming Story. Tell us more about your work.
Envy Gaming is the owner and operator of multiple esports teams, including the Dallas Fuel franchise in the Overwatch League, the Dallas Empire in the Call of Duty League, and Team Envy, which competes in a CS: GO league called Flashpoint as well as in other esports across the globe.
We’re based in Dallas, with a headquarters and training facility at Victory Plaza. We employ a full-time staff of 35 people in the front office and have more than 50 players, coaches, team managers and team support staff under contract. The majority of our teams and players live and work from Dallas, even though we have internationally diverse rosters with the top talent from around the globe.
In 2019, our live events business was born. Esports is becoming a mainstream attraction, and here in North Texas, we had the opportunity to host the first-ever home game in the history of esports. Nine thousand fans showed up and made the Dallas Fuel Homestand Weekend a roaring success. We’ve expanded our event staff and our production staff to host more and more live events for fans to come out and cheer on our teams in 2020 and beyond.
In many ways, our business is the same as traditional sports. We deal with agents, write contracts, have dedicated marketing staff and employ full-time mental skills coaches, interpreters for our foreign players, and even have a physical fitness instructor who works with our players on their diets and overall health.
Envy also operates as a media company. Having grown up in the esports industry for the last 15 years, I know firsthand the power of connecting with your fans through engaging content. Today, that content lives online. As an organization, we have hired talent and people with video production skills that publish weekly shows dedicated to games and leagues that we participate in, which are then distributed on YouTube and across social media for fans all over the globe to watch.
What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?
On the night of April 27, 2019, the stars in North Texas burned bright blue. As the last confetti dropped, the blue pyro flames extinguished, and the raucous cheering of 4,500 fans subsided, I stood on stage with our team in the Overwatch League – the Dallas Fuel – who had just won the first home game in esports history. The Overwatch League, the first professional esports league to geolocate its teams in specific cities, had hand-picked Dallas – and our organization – to host the first “Homestand,” a test of home and away matches designed to attract fans of esports and gaming out to watch their favorite teams play live in major sports arenas. Eight teams played eight matches over two days at the Allen Event Center and we sold out both days. That moment meant a lot to me to see how far we’ve brought the esports industry in the last decade.
We proved to the world why Esports is one of the fastest-growing forms of competitive entertainment that fans of all ages from all over can enjoy. Since then, we’ve hosted the Overwatch League’s 2020 season-opening weekend and added two new franchise positions for our teams to compete in the world’s premier professional Esports leagues (the Dallas Empire competes in the Call of Duty League and Team Envy competes in the Flashpoint CS: GO league).
Contact Info:
- Email: mike@envy.gg
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/hastr0
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