Azubu

» see azubu.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Azubu's entire life fits inside the years I was an engineer with a job, which is to say the years I stopped having time to watch anybody play anything. When I did open a stream it was Twitch, because that is where the stream was. Azubu was a name I saw in esports coverage and never once typed into a browser.

It started in 2012. Lars Windhorst, a German financier, noticed that kids were watching other people play League of Legends and decided the market was real before most investors did. His firm, Sapinda Group, put about forty million dollars into Azubu over four years. The strategy was exclusivity: sign the players people wanted to watch, and the audience follows them off Twitch.

In 2014 Azubu announced fourteen contracted Korean League of Legends streamers, including Faker of SKT T1 and MadLife of CJ Entus. On paper that was the strongest roster anyone outside Twitch had assembled. It did not produce the audience. Viewers who already had a Twitch account and Twitch habits mostly stayed where they were, and the roster did not drag the numbers with it.

~ the record ~

~ the money ~

Windhorst later admitted he had funded the company badly. Sapinda drip-fed it rather than committing, which meant Azubu was permanently paying for growth it could not finish buying. Through 2016 employees left and the money thinned further. In April 2016 it shipped a better video player and a revenue network for creators, which is the kind of thing you ship when the product is fine and the problem is somewhere else entirely.

~ the actual end ~

In January 2017 Azubu said it could no longer stream League of Legends. The rights had gone up by two million dollars and there was nothing left to pay it with. Losing the game the whole company was built around should have been the ending, but in that same month Azubu bought Hitbox, the Vienna low-latency competitor, and announced a new platform instead. In May 2017 both brands went dark and came back as Smashcast, which lasted until November 2020.

~ the long tail ~

What outlived the brand was the unpaid prize money. Azubu had committed to tournament purses it could not cover, and the winners of a CS:GO world championship were still waiting long after the company had become somebody else's balance sheet. The incoming chief executive, Mike McGarvey, described it without decoration: the previous management had made commitments far beyond the company's means. That sentence is most of what happened here.

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