Former OpTic CEO Adam Rymer on Envy-Optic Merger, Rebrand
Last week as CEO of the company, Rymer offered insights into the merger of these giants in esports at SBJ's Esports Rising in NYC.
On Oct. 13, Adam Rymer was in New York City giving background on Envy Gaming being rebranded to OpTic after the companies decided to merge in November of 2021. That conversation was part of a 30 minute panel moderated by reporter Kevin Hitt, hosted at Esports Rising, an annual conference put together by Sports Business Journal to highlight the business of esports with top executives in the sector.
It should be noted that this conversation at ESR was overshadowed by the fact that after two years at Envy/OpTic as CEO, Rymer announced Wednesday that he was stepping down from the role (as reported first by SBJ’s Kevin Hitt) and would instead serve in an strategic advisory capacity directly to the board of directors—he will be replaced by OpTic President Hector “HECZ” Rodriguez as CEO. This news seems both odd and ill timed only because if Rymer knew he was leaving the role (I’m guessing he didn’t) there was certainly no indication in either his presentation or demeanor at the time to indicate prior knowledge of this.
That news aside, here are some of the most interesting highlights from the panel, “The Envy-OpTic Merger: A Look at the How, Why and What’s Next.”
Origin Story
Long before joining the esports industry via Envy Gaming in 2020, Rymer worked in entertainment for such companies as Legendary Entertainment, Universal Studios, Nerdist, Universal Music Group, and USA Volleyball, among many others.
“It's been wild. If you told me 10 years ago I'd be the CEO of OpTic Gaming, I would have pinched myself,” Rymer said during the panel. “My career for the last 20 years has been primarily in media and entertainment; and I spent some time in the music business so it's always been kind of in the intersection of entertainment and technology. I was in the music business when Napster happened and then transitioned into the film business, spent a bunch of time with Universal Pictures, doing the first deals with iTunes and Netflix.“
One of his biggest accomplishments when joining Legendary was putting together the cast of voice actors for the ultra popular Matt Mercer-led Dungeons & Dragons YouTube/Twitch show Critical Role, which currently enjoys 1.82M subscribers on YouTube and 1.2M followers on Twitch; has spawned a Prime video series based on one the campaigns (Vox Machina) and has brought Critical Role members and D&D maker Wizards of the Coast together to collaborate on multiple official campaign books and modules.
“So if you don't know the show, it's a bunch of voice actors that played Dungeons & Dragons and turned out to be the biggest show on Twitch at that time while Twitch was still just taking off,” he said of the show. “It had over 60K - 70K simultaneous viewers and taught me a lot about the power of live streaming, but also niche audiences and how to monetize them in various interesting ways.”
Rymer said that after leaving Legendary, he made the leap to Envy in the summer of 2020 because he saw that esports and tangentially related activities such as streaming were—in his view— the next generation of media and entertainment, and that Envy had the formula in this brave new world to be successful. After an interview process one would expect during the pandemic—all remote and over multiple video conference calls—Rymer packed his bags and made the trip to Dallas to join Envy in July of 2020.
Envy Year One
In the first three weeks after arriving at the company in July of 2020, Envy’s Call of Duty League franchise Dallas Empire managed to win the CDL Championship. Rymer joked that he received an undeserved championship ring just as he was getting acclimated to this whole new environment: “I walked in and within three weeks of me being there, we won the Call of Duty League Championship. So I got a ring and it was totally undeserved, right? And I'm like, ‘this is great. This is easy.’“
But jokes aside, over the next year he rolled up his sleeves and got to work on figuring out how to build content and programming strategies, grow the company’s audience, bring in new talent like producers and creators, and professionals capable of doing top-level film production. As someone who came from the film and music industry, Rymer already knew that to build out and deploy the kind of content Envy needed to create to be successful, would be expensive.
“I don't care what level of content you're making, we're not talking $200M films like Legendary was making [here], but even making YouTube content at a premium level that appeals to an audience base is expensive, and as I've talked to a lot of people about it in the past, the hardest thing to do in any kind of entertainment is building an engaged audience.”
Envy spent a lot of time on this during Rymer’s first year with the full support of founder Mike Rufail, and the results were tangible: “We had over 50% - 80% growth rates in our YouTube views, Twitter traffic, and everything else. So we were making some really good progress.”
OpTic-Envy Merger
In November of 2021—just four months after Rymer joined Envy—it was announced that OpTic and Envy would merge into one entity. Financial terms of that deal were never disclosed, but Envy had to buy out NRG Esports’ financial interest, who had a similar deal with OpTic and owned the Call of Duty League franchise slot for OpTic Chicago. Following the merger, Dallas Empire was rebranded to OpTic Dallas and OpTic founder Hector “HECZ” Rodriguez joined the combined entity's ownership group serving as president of OpTic Gaming. At first, the ownership group wanted to keep these two companies separated, with OpTic being used as the focus for all things related to first-person shooter competitive efforts such as Call of Duty, while Envy would focus on content creation and other titles the Dallas Fuel in the Overwatch League, participation in the Halo Championship Series, Rocket League Championship Series, and Valorant.
Rymer, who spoke glowingly of Rodriguez’s expertise in building brands and engaging audiences with content outside of esports or even gaming over the last 10+ years, said the one thing OpTic really needed was infrastructure:
“Gaming is a lifestyle and esports is a vertical within gaming, and OpTic has always been about gaming, but with esports [at its core]. So what Hector did not have when he got the OpTic brand back is infrastructure. When we start really getting into it, Hector's got this massive audience base with OpTic; the ‘Green Wall’ is unbelievable, the number of countries that we deliver content and merchandise to is a lot (you know, we shipped up over a hundred countries last year), but what was missing was the infrastructure side of it. So it was kind of this unique peanut butter and chocolate combination of, 'Hey, we've got this infrastructure, you've got this audience base, there's gotta be some way figuring this out.'”
Rymer added that merging these two companies was no small feat, and part of that process was Envy doing its due diligence to see whatever problems might have existed with OpTic at the time because the organization had been sold and resold multiple times. Rymer said that he had many conversations with Rodriguez, Rufail and the executive teams at both companies to make sure everyone was aligned on the vision, goals, and strategies to be successful.
“I don't know who's been involved in mergers and acquisitions before, but anybody who thinks that they're a walk in the park is lying to you, on both the front end and back end,” Rymer said.
The Name Change
Less than a year after Rymer joined Envy and seven months after the merger with OpTic, it was announced that the newly-merged company and all its operations would be branded to OpTic Gaming, save its Overwatch League team Dallas Fuel. In a video released on YouTube on June 27, Envy founder Mike Rufail and OpTic founder Hector Rodriguez officially announced that the Envy brand would go away and OpTic would remain.
Rymer gives a lot of credit to Rufail for making this change within the company, because it is always difficult to sunset a brand that you’ve spent so much time building and finding success in. At the end of the day, Rufail accepted that it was better for the entire business to shift towards the OpTic brand, which was stronger, had higher visibility, and had a rabid audience of fans.
“A lot of things in a merger look great on paper,” Rymer said. “So when we put the merger together, we had this idea and notion of keeping these two brands separate and saying, 'Okay, OpTic is this FPS structure, and Envy is going be this great place for things like Rocket League and some of the content creators, and we'll be able to separate it that way.’ There were lots of ideas going around like, 'Hey, OpTic will be the premium elite level brand inside of the Envy architecture and, like I said, [it all] looked good on paper.”
But what all involved found was that having these two separate brands under one umbrella is complicated and often creates extra work when it comes to merchandising, partnerships, promoting deals in public, etc. All this is to say that it creates complications that are ultimately extraneous, costly, and unnecessary.
“Ultimately we all sat down [and talked because] this was a decision that was not made lightly. It was all of us kind of talking together as a team and really saying, `What are the pros and cons of this, what's the impact going to be to our fans, what's the impact going to be to our players?’”
Inevitably, this led to the entire organization being streamlined in how it plans long-term, who it creates content for, how it handles merchandising, and what it does to have the best engagement with its overall audience.
“We're now doing much more long-range planning across our teams,” Rymer noted. “It has let us really shift the focus of the company to be more of a media and entertainment company as opposed to an esports company. Esports will always be core to what we do, it provides the engine for everything else that makes OpTic what it is, but being a media and entertainment company means that we have to be dedicating resources collectively across the company into longer-term planning of [figuring out] how to grow our audience.”
Musing on the Industry
Speaking more broadly about the esports industry as a whole, Rymer thinks that the lack of diversification when it comes to revenue generation is going to be problematic for some esports organizations in the next few years. Esports organizations can no longer lean on prize winnings, partnerships/sponsorships, and the occasional revenue share from in-game sales; content and media are important in his view. Rymer sees his (now former) employer as a “media company” and not a pure esports organization.
“...content creation is a pathway to us having more control and say over how our revenue grows and how we develop our business over the next three - five years. Not to say that the publishers won't continue to be an important aspect of what we are and how we grow and what we do (and Call of Duty is extremely important to us, a number of other games continue to be important to us), but content is the through-line for everything that we do in terms of how we reach our audience to tell them not just about our teams and our players, but also about the live events that we have with Esports Stadium Arlington, with the merchandise that we have coming out with other programs that we're releasing… so content is just the communication tool for continuing to engage our audience.”
Finally, in the context of this merger and subsequent rebranding, Rymer echoed what a lot of other panelists at Esports Rising said last week: OpTic is a entertainment/media company. He thinks that anyone who hasn’t figured this out yet—whether they are in traditional stick-and-ball sports or esports—could face some issues in the future.
“Scale matters if you're in the media business and arguably if you were in the esports business, you are in the media business. If you're in sports, you're in the media business. I mean to be honest, if you're not reaching and talking to an audience, you're missing something. So scale matters, and if there's opportunities to combine with something else to achieve that scale in a smart way, then I think there's going to be a lot more opportunities. Whether that's two esports organizations coming together or it's a traditional media company, or [a] more focused media company combining with any sports organization, I'm not sure.”