Bringing together the worlds of heroes and professional gaming
Sport is an industry that includes a wide range of high-profile partnerships, such as Emirates Airlines sponsoring a number of large football clubs, Redbull’s Formula One team, or Michael Jordan’s famous Air Jordan collaboration with Nike. However, esports were, until recently, too new and too untested to draw these kinds of large partnerships.
In 2019, Team Liquid, one of the most prominent esports teams, announced a partnership with Marvel Studios, called Liquid x Marvel. This collaboration was strategically sound for both sides but looked substantially different than typical sports sponsorships. It leveraged the positioning of Team Liquid in esports and gave them surprisingly deep access to Marvel IP, including copyrighted and trademarked designs for characters and teams drawn from Marvel Superhero films and TV shows.
The collaboration met with enthusiastic response from fans and was the first in a number of partnerships not only for Team Liquid, but for other esports franchises as well. The nature and context of the Liquid x Marvel collaboration are instructive regarding the future of the esports and broader media industries.
Liquid X Marvel merchandise
Team Liquid is one of the most well-known and successful esports teams. They have won national and international championships in a range of games including League of Legends, Dota 2, and CS:GO, and both hosted and participated in a large number of major international tournaments.
In 2019, Team Liquid launched Liquid x Marvel, a new series of limited-edition merchandise in partnership with Marvel Studios. The merchandise began with team jerseys, and expanded to other apparel, custom keycaps, pins, mousepads, keychains, and more. This was the first partnership between a major intellectual property outside video games and an esports team and likely represented the largest brand partnership in esports.
The collaboration was launched in parallel with Team Liquid representing North America at the EU vs NA Rift Rivals League of Legends tournament, a high-profile event for one of the most popular esports games. Following an announcement video showing off the merchandise and discussing the partnership, Team Liquid competed in jerseys based on the movie design for Captain America, one of the headline Marvel Studios characters.
Athletic sponsorships generally include the use of trademark, but the combination of trademarked and copyrighted material for players in competitions made this a unique case. Marvel did not simply put their logo on Team Liquid uniforms or promotional material, and it was not a simple endorsement or advertisement. The team plays in selected tournaments wearing uniforms based closely on Marvel character designs and sells those uniforms through their website. That level of IP overlap is remarkable.
While Marvel Studios remains the largest partner Liquid had attracted, it has used the model to partner with Marvel’s sister brand Star Wars, and the creators of anime series One Piece, Death Note, and Demon Slayer. Other collaborations have taken off across esports teams. Gucci, Ralph Lauren, BMW, Nissan, McDonalds, DC Comics and more have signed collaborations at different levels. Further collaborations have taken place with tournament organizers and game design studios.
The “Geek” connection: Marvel fans are esports fans
The partnership built on a substantial audience crossover. Esports and Marvel both hold a place in geek culture. Esports and video games have a history of connections with superheroes in a number of forms:
Before sponsoring Team Liquid, Marvel was no stranger to the video games industry. Marvel has developed or licensed a series of superhero video games based on Marvel characters across a range of genres for decades. Outside of Marvel, many other superhero franchises, notably DC Comics have created or licensed games based on their IP.
Beyond full games, there are character skins for Fortnite, Overwatch, and League of Legends based on superheroes, some specific, such as Marvel or DC characters, and some more generic, such as the League of Legends Silver Age skins, which add capes and masks to established characters from the game.
Finally, a large number of players identify with Marvel and DC superheroes, using branding for games and streams, gamer tags, profiles, and social media.
In an interview around the launch of the partnership, Team Liquid’s COO Mike Milanov said:
“We’re all huge Marvel fans, so we were intrigued by the possibilities of what a mashup between our two brands could look like. When we were introduced to Marvel, we realized that we shared so much creative energy.”
Pitching Marvel to esports audiences
In addition to overlapping cultural interest, the announcement came shortly after the premier of Avengers: Endgame. Endgame was Marvel’s most ambitious film and the completion of a 20-year narrative arc. As such, Marvel was in the process of large-scale promotion along a variety of channels.
Esports were being pitched at the time by the CEO of aXiomatic Gaming, Team Liquid’s parent company, as a critical channel to reach young people, especially 18–34-year-old men with disposable income. This audience is highly connected to the ecosystems of esports and gaming more generally but often challenging to advertise to in traditional ways. This positioned a Team Liquid partnership as a means for Marvel to promote their content at a key moment to a key demographic where they would see the message and respond.
Finally, though not a strategic consideration, Liquid X Marvel was a sign for many esports players and fans that the industry had “made it”. Getting recognition and an intensive brand partnership between an esports team and the largest film franchise of all time cemented the place of esports and gaming not as “fringe” or “geeky,” but as an essential part of global pop culture.
The details of the negotiations that led to Liquid x Marvel are obviously not public. However, a factor that likely influenced Team Liquid’s access to Marvel was investment ties. In 2016, aXiomatic Gaming, a gaming-focused investment group, purchased a controlling share in Team Liquid. The following year, aXiomatic took part in the Disney Accelerator program, which was explicitly intended not only to allow Disney to make financial investments in emerging companies but to develop strategic relationships with those companies for Disney and its subsidiaries (including Marvel Studios).
The role of investment and capital flows is always relevant to the discussion surrounding IP negotiations and brand partnerships. In this case, the working relationships between parent companies seems to represent a critical piece in seeing the agreement come to fruition. Obviously, if the brand overlap, timing, and respective interests had not been what they were, the deal would not have been feasible in any case. However, the catalyst to turn those factors into a successful agreement appears to have been investment and acceleration.
Setting example: Esports as a key marketing channel
The Liquid x Marvel partnership represented a remarkable collaboration within esports. A team wearing uniforms fully taken from third party IP to compete in events and selling those on their websites is a profound IP partnership. It was a strategic marketing move by Marvel Studios and represented a coming of age for esports as part of global pop culture. While details of how it came about are incomplete, the positioning of esports as a mainstream competitive pursuit combined with investment relationships between the parent companies of both brands, undeniably played a role. The collaboration holds important lessons for those seeking to create similar deals going forward.
