Oh, how little they realize the danger they’re in: Cloud9 secures $25M in Series A financing from various notable entities, including the WWE
In other words, the world of eSports has let the wolf known as World Wrestling Entertainment into the chicken coop. AKA Triple H, the de facto ultimate usurper and infiltrator has found his way into the burgeoning and profitable world of eSports.
And now that his foot is in the door, it’s only a matter of time before Triple H ultimately takes over every single C9 professional team, and then it’s only a matter of another time until Triple H, and just Triple H is the champion of League of Legends, Overwatch, Counterstrike and Smash Bros.
Granted, eSports will have been systematically ruined and destroyed, but hey, it would at least be a North American champion in some of these games, for once in the history of competitive gaming.
I can see it now: Cloud9 will hold a press conference to announce their successful financing, and have a bunch of suits in the background to represent the entities that ponied up monies to C9. Among them will be Hunter Pence and Triple H, and during the press conference, Pence will accidentally bump into Triple H, and he will immediately be triggered and spontaneously retaliate with taped fists to everyone on stage. He’ll finish the brutality with a Pedigree onto Hunter Pence through the podium, before picking up the microphone and declaring himself the new ruler and king of the Cloud9 organization.
Immediately, he will bully, manipulate and capitalize on international customs to marry daughters of other investor’s companies, and take control of all of the contributing parties to Cloud9, and with his ruthless aggression, actually give the organization the killer instinct they’ve lacked to compete and overcome their Korean overlords.
Triple H will make himself the mid-laner of the League team and wear the tightest and most muscle-accentuating jerseys to the stage, and all throughout the games themselves, he will spam /all chat to send intimidating messages to the players on the opposing team. The tactic will prove useful and C9 will storm through LCS and take over Worlds because scrawny Asian players are afraid of him.
Such tactics will prove effective in Overwatch and especially Smash, when a hulking Triple H is sitting next to a much smaller opponent, and he’ll have a specially made stick to support his massive taped hands from breaking joysticks (by MadCatz, naturally).
And after Triple H leads the Cloud9 organization to championships in all the marquee games, he pushes his luck too far, and makes an aggressive attempt to get some professional WWE2K started. He ends up bankrupting C9’s coffers, because it turns out that all the WWE2K games kind of suck, and nobody plays them, and no amount of development, having them sponsor just about everything and money thrown at it, can make it a game worthy of global professional play.
Cloud9 ultimately goes bankrupt, but Triple H survives on the strength of his snake-like business acumen, where his investment in 2017 was the last money in and the first money to be paid out on all the return on investments. Ultimately, the eSports revolution crumbles subsequently, because of all the dominance that Triple H cultured through the gaming scene with C9, suddenly losing the biggest and baddest dog in every fight, makes all gaming pointless and not worth watching.
All this, because Cloud9 didn’t know what they were getting themselves into, doing business with the WWE.
In all seriousness, this really probably means nothing at all. Maybe WWE gets some fat ROI from the all the fat profits that eSports are currently raking in, and whatever corporate stiff inside Vincent Kennedy McMahon’s empire gets a neat bonus for contributing a successful idea. Because if I’m a betting man, I’d imagine Triple H himself probably has no idea what eSports really are, and couldn’t be any further away from the business investment side of the company.
But damn if it isn’t fun to imagine that they’re a smaller and far more narrow-minded company that is hell bent on self-destruction and ruining things.
