Clayton Larcombe’s eyes were opened to esports’ rivers of gold when he was standing in a Shanghai stadium in 2017.
After his time in Asia, where he rode out the tidal waves of the global financial crisis, Larcombe arrived back in Sydney in 2018 to discover that no one seemed remotely interested in esports or in the gigantic groundswell that had taken over Asia.“Nobody here had any idea, or if they did, they just didn’t clock how much money was being made,” he says.
At the time, Picklebet was running about $50,000 worth of bets on the platform each month. Three years later, the company books about $15 million worth of bets placed per month. The second pillar is software. But among the clearly defined sector winners, Larcombe has picked an “out of the box” stock in Bayes Esports. This business sucks up gaming data, scrubs it up and sells it to gaming platforms such as Bet365.
“It just feels like a long way away,” he says. Metaverses that belong to Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite are centralised digital environments where users are happy to hang out, play games and spend money. Watkins knocked back the offer on the grounds that his fans would think he was a “sellout”, but Larcombe says the revenue streams that come out of esports team marketing have been a good investment for the fund.