Chris Park, the previous CEO, will become an advisory role with emphasis on Gen.Gs sports and education segments. Since becoming COO in 2019, Hur has continued to oversee the development of strategic definition and execution for the company and led the esports team. In his new role, Hur will focus on the Gen.Gs esports training program and develop new community initiatives both with fans and partners. He was a third person in 2017 at the company where the founders Kent Wakeford and Kevin Chou met him. At the time, the company was called KSV Esports, and Hur helped get its content marketing operations off the ground with a video project aimed at helping the esports players become YouTube phenomena. They were creating new jobs and a new company in the modern era of sports. Hur was the president of Memebox, a Y-Combinator startup that has raised more than $196 million. He worked on the travel vertical product and strategy integration with Google, the management consulting at Boston Consulting Group and the investment banking with Goldman Sachs. Gen.G is an exciting time and its unique position within the esports industry, said Chou, chairman of Gen.G. Arnold built huge momentum around the organization to capitalize on some of the exciting game changer opportunities that are surfacing. Above: Arnold Hur splits his time between Seoul and Santa Monica. Image Credit: Gen. G. She added that, We are in great position helping new partners enter the space every day, and leading new developments in Web 3.0 and the integration of the metaverse. He has a deep understanding of and a passion for sports. I can’t figure out who leads the Gen.G organization in these exciting times. Hur said that the company is studying the Web 3 space, where nonfungible tokens are booming and gaining the popularity of game-end games. The company isn’t diving yet because it wants to get out of some of the superficial projects that others have been doing. Our angle is a little different. I think a lot of esports, publishers and other companies fail to do that. I think they don’t really embrace the community side. They look like the commercial side. We made mistakes on the way. We wanted to know what it takes to build these communities and then turn them over. Then we learned these lessons and began to morph into music into fashion. But I think a lot of esports teams and publishers are just trying to cross over the crypto and Web 3, and then again, so they really have the opportunity to understand what the crypto community is like. The integration of esports, NFTs and crypto needs to be more authentic. Arnold Hur thinks it is an esports solution that will make sense with digital-firsts. Image-thanks: Gen.G. How do you actually build meaningful activations and meaningful partnerships that are not just about putting a patch on the esports team like your Dodgers, but also more like how do you work with content creators? How do you make sure you create special activations for sponsor? I think those areas require native understanding of the gaming industry, says Hur.
Esports challenges
Under the leadership of the Parks, Gen.G was able to work together with different esports teams. Park had some sports experience, so he also led a general affluent slang line, and thus, he put a toe in the direction of the game in which it became possible to establish ties to universities and other interconnected parties. In some ways, Hur was frustrated that esports has moved two steps up and one step back in its growth. They attacked the disease and hid from the whole country. However, they also found new business models like the emphasis that created and media traffic is essential not to big media deals that are related to physical sporting events. Hur believes that the right way to stay in touch with the esports community is to stay the same way as to keep this message. He said that the largest part of our business is solving a question: how can we bridge communities? We onboard new partners in the arena of gaming, like Puma, an apparel brand. Those brands want to meet young enthusiasts who don’t use traditional media for the same amount of time. It was really exciting, growing the company and learning about what esports is. Hur said about playing games by the company. I feel like the space has changed a lot. How do you get the correct franchise? The right publisher? I think we did good work doing that. And I know what we are good at. We’re really trying to double down on those parts. One of the biggest challenges is building community around the teams, the games and esports in general. Gen.G is good at blending games and sports with other cities, such as fashion and music. He said we have even released a music video with Korean hip-hop musicians. We forged bridges between local communities by collaboration with streetwear designers. Above: Arnold Hur is studying the crossover between sport and industries. New Delhi Photo Credit: Gen. Gen.G is a multicultural organization, which operates a company that has offices in Seoul in South Korea and Santa Monica in California. One of the biggest challenges that esports faces is the transformation of a digital-first model, Hur said. Gen.G built a fancy headquarters in Los Angeles for its teams in Playa Vista. But that was before the pandemic, and the thought was that the teams would always live, work and play together in a pretty typical area. In the aftermath of a devastating event, the company turned on Santa Monica and embraced the idea of the headquarters as a hub that the team could visit. He said that the distributed model makes sense for us. As we get older with events related to sports, Hur believes, the big tournament companies should focus less on long tours across cities and more on tentpoles, because traveling can be more difficult for teams.
