Team Vitality Anne Banschbach On Esports, Women Players

They’re enough to make anyone worry, whether you’re a fan or someone who wants to get a job in the industry. But, while she’s sad to see all of these hardships, Anne Banschbach, Esports Director at the French organization Team Vitality, doesn’t see any need to panic yet. “This contraction doesn’t come out of nowhere if you look at life cycles of companies in general or industries that are fairly new. That, paired with the fact that esports was really fortunate to survive the COVID period like we did — we were able to go back online and still cater to fans — so of course there’s a little dip in things,” she said during Thursday’s Refinery29 Twitch stream. “We also experienced a bit of a bubble environment. Everyone was super excited about esports — it was a new, shiny thing that was going to explode. … There were hopes that we could commercialize that better, but now we’ve woken up to the reality and we need to do a bit of spring cleaning.”