Deconstructing Fame An Analysis of eSports Brand Value. The Case of Dota 2 Master Thesis (15 cr.) Department of Informatics and Media Media and Communication Studies Ilya Musabirov May 2016 Abstract This work is dedicated to studying pricing and valuation mechanisms of eSports brands in free-to-play game Dota 2. The object of the study are virtual autographs of Dota 2 professional players, which are traded on the market but, at the same time, do not provide buyers with any functional advantage in the game. The principal aim of the study is to reveal factors influencing the value of autographs and understand how the community of players evaluate them. Theoretical framework of current study borrows from economical sociology, in particular, ap- proach of Patrik Aspers who argues that standard and status markets have distinct forms of goods’ evaluation. Special attention in this work is focused on conception of status market on which there is no unified quality scale for evaluation, and all quality judgements are deeply entangled with market actors. Kornberger’s treatment of brands as ‘organising devices’ sup- plements the framework and supports the focus on devices of brands’ value construction. Mixed research strategy, combining qualitative, and quantitative methods is used to make sense of the data extracted from Steam community market and discussion from networking service Reddit. Results show that among the most influential factors explaining the price of autograph there are personal player performance statistics, team tournament performance, and media cover- age of player’s performance. The more detailed analysis of discussions on Reddit illustrates how evaluation devices are performed by the community of players and spectators. KEYWORDS: free-to-play, status market, eSports, evaluation, autographs, brand value, sport brands, netnography, conditional tree model 2 Preface For such a short paper this thesis has indecently not a straightforward history. My sympathy to the original topics was on its roller coaster ride for months. It was growing to breathtaking peaks during the periods of ideas being discussed with friends and colleagues, new relevant concepts being found in books and articles, and connections being made with problems in hand of other people. It was plummeting to the jelly-like abyssal swamps of apathy during the periods of data gathering opportunities being missed, communication-based approaches being lost, and time passed. Then the current topic emerged, from pieces, crumbs, and bits of talks, papers, walks and code. This part is not for a reader. It is for me-after to remind that I was ok with the topic in hand and this thesis – at least for a bit. Another year had passed and another loop with an adjacent, but new topic is on its way. Hopefully, for the better. For helping me get to this point I would like to thank a lot of people. My parents. My teachers. My friends. My relatives. Some of them are already not with us, others will, hopefully, hang around for decades to come. My students, who happened to be my teachers as well. In a humble hope that life will lavish you with people who will be pains in your arses to the same extent you are in mine. For making this work possible I would like to thank: • Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, all teachers and my fellow students, for being open and friendly • Swedish Institute for supporting my studies via Visby Scholarship • Sociology of Education and Science Laboratory, Higher School of Economics St.Petersburg, and personally Daniel Alexandrov and Valeria Ivaniushina for making a stranger feel like home • Paul Okopny, Denis Bulygin, Stas Pozdnyakov, Vadim Voskresenskii, Viktor Karepin (especially for drawing beautiful tree diagram used in this thesis, replacing quite fright- ening native R picture), Ksenia Tenisheva, Natalia Dmoshinskaya, and Valery Nechay for their support, patience, and friendship. 3 4 • Participants of ‘Money and Games’: 12th Game Research Laboratory Seminar in Uni- versity of Tampere, for the comments, discussion, atmosphere, and, the most important, providing an outsider with a snapshot of ‘what is going on here?’. Contents Preface 3 1 Introduction 7 2 Background 11 Gameplay .......................................... 11 Monetization strategies. Virtual items trading ..................... 11 F2P and Cosmetic Items ............................... 11 Trade Platforms ................................... 12 eSports ........................................... 13 Teams and Organisations ................................. 13 Streaming ...................................... 13 Virtual Autographs ................................. 14 3 Positioning and Theoretical Framework 15 Autographs ......................................... 15 Sport Brands ........................................ 16 Theoretical Framework .................................. 17 Research Questions .................................... 18 4 Market Pricing Model: Trading Autographs 19 Market Snapshot ...................................... 19 Virtual Autographs as an Object ............................. 20 Autographs as a Brand’s Imprints… ........................... 21 … and Dimensions of Their Value ............................ 21 Personal playing performance ........................... 22 Tournament performance .............................. 22 Media saliency .................................... 22 Team Roles ...................................... 23 Data, Method, and Model ................................. 24 5 CONTENTS 6 Market in Action ...................................... 26 Price-Predicting Factors … ............................. 26 … and Alternative Explanations .......................... 28 Model Quality and Validity ............................. 29 Chapter Discussion. Status Market, Brands, Rankings and Media ........... 29 5 Capturing The Process: Market Construction on /r/dota2 31 Data and Method ...................................... 32 Autographs ......................................... 33 Player and Team in the Eyes of Spectators ....................... 36 Personal Performance Statistics .......................... 36 Levels of players’ and teams’ evaluation. Player-team matching ........ 37 Community oriented performance and lifestyle ................. 39 Players and Teams Brand Singularity ....................... 39 Chapter Discussion. Organising Devices and Algorithms ............... 40 6 Concluding Notes 42 Practical and Theoretical Implications .......................... 43 List of Source References 44 List of Figures 45 List of Tables 46 References 47 Chapter 1 Introduction This paper is an effort to explore intersections of some topics and subjects which are of huge interest to me in the last couple of years, namely raising popularity of eSports (Hamari and Sjöblom 2015; Adamus 2012) phenomenon, virtual goods and game markets (Hamari and Keronen 2016; Lehdonvirta and Castronova 2014), and the increasing role of online reputation devices (Masum and Zhang 2004; Kornberger, Justesen, Mouritsen, et al. 2015), e.g. rankings, reputation systems, and reviews. It is difficult to find an object to study where all the topics you like are intersecting. Even more difficult if you want your study to remain readable, detailed enough, deep and scientific. Yet, over a past year, readings and discussions, especially with Denis Bulygin, who I like to thank again here, drove my attention to the strangest segment of virtual items market I have ever seen – market of autographed cosmetic items in Dota 2. My thesis is about one particular aspect and approach of this market – valuation of eSports brands on the case of Dota 21. Dota 2 is a free-to-play game with a monetization system based on the real money trade and the secondary market trade (Lehdonvirta 2008). This means that you can buy items for real money, and you can sell them to the other players. From a research perspective it is hard to overestimate the meaning of this: you can study a market, and the market means action. There are prices, and supply, and they can draw a picture of people preferences, which is usually much harder to find. Moreover, the goods traded on this market are mostly cosmetic items, which influence player’s game interface and character appearance, but do not provide a player with any functional advantage in game. Among this peculiar kind of goods, I choose even more peculiar – virtual autographs of Dota 2 professional players. I should mention here that Dota 2 is one of the trending disciplines of the eSports domain, gathering attention of millions of players and as 1http://dota2.com 7 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 8 of 2015, having the biggest prize pool on its main tournament series2. In this small market segment of the much bigger Dota 2 eSports picture, sketched in Chapter 2, as I show, all topics of interest, mentioned earlier, come to play. I treat virtual autographs as imprints of eSports brands. The secondary market trade in this particular case, supplemented with an access to market snapshots – data on what items are on the market, how many and how they are priced, provides us with an opportunity to go beyond studying purchase moti- vations and intentions (cf. Hamari and Keronen 2016), and to see what factors associated with personal and team sport brands do actually contribute to the price which people are ready to pay, i.e. how they together construct the notion of what is valuable, and to see how the value is constructed. In doing so I start from a theoretical tool box, set