During a recent online merchandise drop, gaming fans eagerly refreshed a page waiting for access to a small range of limited edition sweatshirts, T-shirts, and hoodies. The prices were high, but the apparel didn’t last long: more than $500,000 worth of gear sold out in just five minutes. It’s the kind of thing that calls to mind established streetwear brands like Supreme. But in this case, the clothing was branded with a very different logo: 100 Thieves, one of the hottest names in competitive gaming.
E-sports is a burgeoning business, but it’s also an uncertain one. While it’s been around for decades and spawned ambitious projects like the global Overwatch League, it’s still largely unclear whether competitive gaming is, or ever will be, as big as many have predicted. Amid this constantly shifting climate, several e-sports organizations are attempting to hedge their bets by depending less on only winning tournaments. 100 Thieves is among the most successful to date.
The company was founded in 2017 by Matt “Nadeshot” Haag who started his career as a teenage Call of Duty star before eventually retiring and becoming a YouTube celebrity. With 100 Thieves, he’s attempting to bring the worlds of e-sports, YouTube, and streaming together, while adding in a successful apparel business to create a uniquely modern entertainment company.
“The best way to describe it is we’re a little bit like the Lakers, and we’re a little bit like Barstool Sports, and we’re a little bit like Supreme,” says 100 Thieves president and COO John Robinson.
Robinson previously worked at major game publishers EA and Nexon and also ran his own mobile game studio for a time. He says that this multiprong approach to building 100 Thieves is what attracted him to the company in the first place. “Everyone else was trying to apply the Utah Jazz business model to e-sports,” Robinson explains. “‘Oh, we’re going to be a professional sports team, and we’re going to sign a lot of players, and hopefully, if we win, we’ll get some sponsorships.’ And Matt was like, ‘No, we’re going to reinvent this thing. We’re going to build a huge fan base on top of not just winning, but also people coming to our content and social channels.’ It seemed like such an obvious answer, but Matt had the credibility to actually pull it off.”
The ambitions at 100 Thieves weren’t necessarily apparent from the beginning. When the company entered League of Legends, it seemed mostly in-line with other e-sports organizations, albeit with slightly better jerseys. The same was true of its video content; it was tense, documentary-style filmmaking but nothing that felt especially new. “At first, it was just getting up to the baseline of the best teams in e-sports, and they’re really making high-quality narrative content,” says Dahl. “From there, and what we really started to think about after those first couple of months, was what type of content does the gaming audience care about, and how e-sports-focused do we need to be?”
E-sports is a burgeoning business, but it’s also an uncertain one. While it’s been around for decades and spawned ambitious projects like the global Overwatch League, it’s still largely unclear whether competitive gaming is, or ever will be, as big as many have predicted. Amid this constantly shifting climate, several e-sports organizations are attempting to hedge their bets by depending less on only winning tournaments. 100 Thieves is among the most successful to date.
The company was founded in 2017 by Matt “Nadeshot” Haag who started his career as a teenage Call of Duty star before eventually retiring and becoming a YouTube celebrity. With 100 Thieves, he’s attempting to bring the worlds of e-sports, YouTube, and streaming together, while adding in a successful apparel business to create a uniquely modern entertainment company.
“The best way to describe it is we’re a little bit like the Lakers, and we’re a little bit like Barstool Sports, and we’re a little bit like Supreme,” says 100 Thieves president and COO John Robinson.
Robinson previously worked at major game publishers EA and Nexon and also ran his own mobile game studio for a time. He says that this multiprong approach to building 100 Thieves is what attracted him to the company in the first place. “Everyone else was trying to apply the Utah Jazz business model to e-sports,” Robinson explains. “‘Oh, we’re going to be a professional sports team, and we’re going to sign a lot of players, and hopefully, if we win, we’ll get some sponsorships.’ And Matt was like, ‘No, we’re going to reinvent this thing. We’re going to build a huge fan base on top of not just winning, but also people coming to our content and social channels.’ It seemed like such an obvious answer, but Matt had the credibility to actually pull it off.”
The ambitions at 100 Thieves weren’t necessarily apparent from the beginning. When the company entered League of Legends, it seemed mostly in-line with other e-sports organizations, albeit with slightly better jerseys. The same was true of its video content; it was tense, documentary-style filmmaking but nothing that felt especially new. “At first, it was just getting up to the baseline of the best teams in e-sports, and they’re really making high-quality narrative content,” says Dahl. “From there, and what we really started to think about after those first couple of months, was what type of content does the gaming audience care about, and how e-sports-focused do we need to be?”