People of the Month (May 2011)

Silviu Stroie is President of Professional Gamers League in Romania. IeSF interviewed him to introduce him and what he has been doing in e-sports field.

1. How long have you been working in e-sports field and what motivation brought you into this field?
   I became part of the e-sports field since 2001, when my journey with PGL began. I used to play games since 1991 and the first “e-sports” events that I’ve participated in were for Mortal Kombat and Quake1, in 1994-1996. After 2000, when Counter-Strike became a huge hit everywhere and international e-sports competitions came up, I’ve decided its something that we need something similar in Romania. I am very proud of my work all these 10 years, I am proud that Romania is a country where everybody knows what online-gaming, e-sports and Counter-Strike is.

2. Please tell us about history and current status of e-sports in Romania.
   PGL was formed in late 2001, and we got the formal government approval in February 2002. All the people that at that time were involved in the newly formed e-sports and all the major gaming websites, magazines, cybercafes came together and we all formed the Professional Gamers League. I was elected president and I am running it since then. We’ve started to build up the national championships for Counter-Strike, FIFA and StarCraft, championships that still exists and happening 2-3 times/year. Afterwards we’ve started to organize national qualifiers for most of the international events : World Cyber Games (we are the veteran partner of WCG in the world, we will do it this year for the 10th time in a row), Electronic Sports World Cup (we did qualifiers in 2003,2005,2007,2010), KODE5 (2007, 2008, 2009), SEC/ECG (2005-2008, 2010), World Gaming Tournament with ASUS (2006-2009). From 2011, we will also start to organize DreamHack qualifiers. PGL became full member of IeSF in 2009, and since then, we are competing in the IeSF tournaments, with very good results in nations ranking: 3rd place in 2009, 2nd place in 2010.

3. Please introduce us Professional Gamers League and major projects of it.
   PGL is the only Romanian organization that is doing day-to-day e-sports operation, one of the most active organization on European level. PGL members spend around 40 weeks/year playing in our competition. I think we are one of the only organizations in the world that provides access to almost all international events out there: IeSF, WCG, SEC, ESWC, KODE5, DreamHack. We are now investing a lot of money in our future online platform for online competitions, we plan to launch it later this year. Once its operational we will have an state-of-the-art platform where any kind of game can be played in any kind of tournament method. Also we are in process of getting e-sports officially recognized as an sport in Romania, we hope we can made it by the year end. We are working closely with Sport Agency in order to have it recognized.

4. If there is any difficulties or obstacles to operate national league and manage a national federation?
   I am a true believer in e-sports and this is one of the main things that kept me going for past 10 years. Without proper enthusiasm and proper ways to get funding, its almost impossible to survive in today’s e-sport. There are a lot of obstacles out there, because there are too many competitions, too many companies that are trying to do e-sports events and there is no coordination, standardization, which are basic needs for corporations that want to put their names along ESport events. Its very hard to get proper funding in order to have an ongoing ESport operation. I hope in the near future the entire e-sports scene wont be so fragmented and true international events will make big influence all over the world.

5. What do you think is crucial and necessary to make a national federation better?
   There are three crucial things that any national federation needs in order to improve their activities:

6. Government support ? funding, access to governmental facilities, easy access to press/media

7. Dedicated board members ? people that are running each federation have to be either proven gamers or individuals with skills that gaming/e-sports require.

8. Media ? since most of the players now are from YouTube / Facebook generation, all federations must build strong ties with media, and should start broadcasting on TV/online their events

9. What do you think should necessarily be taken to raise and develop global e-sports?
   Right now there are way too many competitions for e-sports, most of them have trouble paying the prizes, a lot of them run into operational problems. I think it’s the right time that a very strong international organization must step in and organize everything on global level, same titles everywhere, same rules everywhere, international referees, continuous communication with members, audience, media, governments.

10. If there is any recommendation or supplement point that you want to comment on IeSF for being the global leader of e-sports, please tell us.
    I hope there will be more members of IeSF that will play an active role both in their countries and also in IeSF. The foundation of a very large, stable and growing international organization was laid when IeSF was born. Now, when most of the international / local events are suffering and are making a lousy job, its time for IeSF to step forward and present to the world in the proper way their goals. Now its time that all IeSF members should start work together on implementing the standardization of proposed rules, ranking, etc.