CEVO Articles

In this edition of CEVO Frontline we take a look at Gamefire and its owner, Hunter Luisi. Gamefire, born of the ashes of TSN, is the latest broadcasting project of Hunter Luisi, former owner of TSN. We caught up with Hunter and asked him about the future plans of Gamefire, what he plans on doing with Quake Live and what Tales of War is all about. Also, do you know where North American E-Sports is heading in the next few years? We asked Hunter to see where he thought the next few years would bring us, do you agree with him?

If you could please start by introducing yourself.
Hi I’m Hunter Luisi, CEO of gamefire.com

We haven’t heard much from GF lately, and viewing the site the only recent update is QL, should we be worried or excited?
We’ve been working hard on the backend, as you can see from our new site design. There are a lot of new features that will make some excited.

As mentioned, QL is latest announcement on the website, will GF being some special things at Qcon this year?
We are very excited about the game. It’s free, a 4 meg download, and quake… Whats not to love. As far as quakecon. Still too early to tell. Let’s just say that we want to be there

GF was born from the ashes of TSN, are there things that you wish you could have brought from TSN?
Yes and No. At first we wanted gamefire to be TsN 2.0, but we quickly dropped that idea. Gamefire is more focused on the commuinty now. So yes at first but now we’ve moved in our own direction.

Being the leading shoutcasting/broadcasting station in North America what do you feel your place is in the E-Sports community? Do you feel any pressure to help bring NA E-Sports back to what it once was?
Yes. It’s hard looking at esports around the world and then back at NA. Things have really slowed here in US. And not just on the casting side. The teams are feeling it too. Its part of the reason why we are so community focused now

What is Tales of War all about? It has been running for a few weeks now, what plans do you have for this project in the near future?
Tales of War is our new show hosted by Bridger and Caemdare. It’s based on the game Dawn of War II. Not sure if you saw Bridgers old show “Tales of Heroes”, but bridger is taking that format and applying it to a new game with a new cohost. He just released his first (pre) episode. The offical show should start this week. It’s great stuff. You can check it out at http://www.gamefire.com/shows/tales-of-war.html

What do you think the NA scene needs most of all to succeed?
It needs to come together more as a whole. The scene now reminds me of how it was back in 2002 (before you saw eSports on TV). Everyone going their own way without giving much thought to the sport as whole. If we are to succeed again then we all need to focused on the same goal, the progression of the sport.

How do you think the NA scene will progress over the next 1-2 years or so?
You’ll see a bigger focus on the online side of things and less on the large “e3 like” events of the past. That will slowly change over the next 2 or 3 years, but its going to take time. More small lans, smaller prizes, more playing for the fun of it and to hangout with friends

What does Gamefire plan on doing to help out the E-Sports scene?
Anything and everything. You’ll see a lot more community based shows, more online match coverage, and its all free. We’ll leave the tournaments to the leagues and continue to bring you great professional coverage of games that the community wants to see

Any last words?
Sure. I’d like to say thank you to CEVO for providing us with the some of the best matches out there, and thanks to all of our fans who make gamefire what it is today.

Interview conducted by CEVO|Carson. A big thank you goes out to Mr. Luisi for taking the time to participate in this interview.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Coverage Central. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.