PVP Live

» see pvplive.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

My competitive gaming happened in Turkish internet cafes between 2002 and 2005, on Counter-Strike, in rooms where the prize for winning was that you got to keep the machine. Nobody was covering it, nobody was streaming it, and the word esports would have sounded like a joke. By the time the thing had leagues and prize pools and a press corps, I was in my thirties and reading about it the way you read about a sport you used to play badly.

PVP Live was part of that press corps. It started in 2012 in Frisco, Texas, owned by J. Casey Wehr and Chester Srp, and came out of its last beta on 8 June 2015 as a news site with a statistics database attached. The stated ambition was a twenty-four hour online show along the lines of SportsCenter. Around two million dollars of private money went in.

It also ran events. That is where the story turns, because running a tournament means holding other people's prize money, and a media company that misjudges its runway is a media company that goes quiet. A tournament operator that misjudges its runway owes players.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the sixty thousand dollars ~

The Hearthstone Pro League was announced on 27 May 2015 with a sixty thousand dollar prize pool and partners including Twitch and Blizzard. It ran. It produced winners. PVP Live was then unable to actually pay the top finishers, which is the detail that follows the company through every retrospective written since.

Unpaid prize money is the recurring wound of that decade in esports, and it lands harder than a shuttered website does. A site closing costs readers a bookmark. A league closing after the bracket has resolved costs a player rent they had already counted on.

~ the scoop that got denied ~

On 23 May 2016, PVP Live broke the news that ESPN and Riot Games had signed a five hundred million dollar deal. Both companies issued statements saying it was false. For a young outlet trying to establish itself as the authoritative voice in a young sport, being publicly contradicted by both named parties in one afternoon was expensive in a way no correction fixes.

~ what the domain sells now ~

In September 2017 the site moved off pvplive.net onto pvplive.com and kept publishing into the winter. The end came on 5 February 2018 and the notice went up the same day: "To the #PvPFam, We are sad to announce that we will be ending operations effective today." Remaining account balances were withdrawable for 180 days by emailing support. The archive caught it at 23:43 UTC.

The old .net domain lapsed and by May 2018 it was a Namecheap parking page. It has since been re-registered by someone else, who runs a WordPress site under the same PVP Live name and the same masthead, publishing posts about charter bus rentals in Nebraska and personal injury lawyers in Georgia. The helmet logo is gone. The name outlived the company and is now doing search engine work for strangers.

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