AEG MAKES SECOND ESPORTS INVESTMENT WITH IMMORTALS
AEG Invests In eSports Team Immortals (Graphic: The Next Level)
TNL Take: For eSports owners with decent teams, popular fan following but more importantly - being business savvy - it's like mid-1800's California gold rush or mid-1980's Los Angeles crack era: the money is pouring in.
eSports team Immortals raised another round, this time from massive sports and entertainment conglomerate AEG. Immortals were also one of the first teams to receive investment related to the NBA with Memphis Grizzlies co-owner Stephen Kaplan back in November 2015:
TNL Infographic 027: NBA Investment In eSports (Graphic: Jordan Fragen)
This investment makes sense for a number of reasons:
- AEG is based in Los Angeles just like Immortals
- Immortals already has an impressive investor list including Lionsgate, Crosscut Ventures, Michael Milken, Machine Shop Ventures, March Capital Partners, Kaplan and others
- Immortals will play their events at LA Live, an AEG venue
- The music, entertainment, and content production opportunity
This is also the second investment within eSports, having first signed a long-term partnership with ESL to host their events at AEG's locations including Barclay's Center, Oracle Arena and London's O2 Arena; which all have held eSports events previously.
While the round was undisclosed, you know I'm going to take a stab anyway: I'd venture that it was at least $10M+ - more on why that amount when we get to the recent Overwatch League "news" Soon™