Six-year-old St. Louis youth and community esports league management company Mission Control has been acquired by Chicago competitive gaming platform LeagueSpot for an undisclosed amount.
Esports refers to competitive video game-playing; Mission Control has set up recreational esports for more than 300 organizations, including municipal parks and recreation districts, college recreation departments, nonprofits and for-profit brands.
"Our business was dedicated to gathering and growing communities by utilizing recreational esports,” company CEO Austin Smith said in a statement in announcing the deal last week. “We are thrilled by Mission Control’s new home with LeagueSpot because it will allow us to continue to gather communities on the LeagueSpot platform, the most impressive platform available to the market, as well as start gathering communities utilizing traditional sports, taking us back to our roots.”
Smith and Mission Control’s other co-founder, Byron Abrigg, are joining LeagueSpott, aiming to help it expand into traditional sports through sales and strategic development efforts. The two Saint Louis University graduates in 2020 had closed a $1.75 million seed financing. Mission Control also was the recipient of a $50,000 equity-free grant through Arch Grants in 2020.
"The folks at Mission Control were very, very focused on deploying esports programs into traditional sports spaces like youth parks and rec and YMCAs," LeagueSpot founder and CEO Andrew Barnett said in a statement. "We have a huge focus on youth-protection and data security. My background is in enterprise software, and the goal was to build the safest place, where we could go to schools and large enterprises and sell this in."
The release announcing the acquisition set revenue of the youth sports tourism and organizations business at more than $10 billion a year, and Barnett said purchasing Mission Control will allow his company to expand beyond its original footprint.
"You would think it's targeted towards the end user, who are typically kids anywhere between the ages of 10 and 24. Our clients, as more of a B2B-focused business, are the youth institutions that those kids are basically ignoring these days," he said. "If you're a YMCA or a college that's facing the upcoming tuition cliff, you are trying to find new ways to get kids in demographics you're not currently reaching out to back in your doors and paying memberships."
Barnett said their pitch to stagnant, revenue-challenged organizations is that 60% of video game-playing youths are not doing any other extracurricular activity. LeagueSpot provides a customizable marketing, communications and competitive-gaming software project that enables clients to build and maintain esports communities. The company can also set up video game hardware and networks for clients through third-party partners. LeagueSpot charges clients $4 to $5 per user per month.
LeagueSpot saw massive growth during the pandemic, as video-gaming replaced traditional face-to-face sports in scholastic and youth spaces. Since then, increasing numbers of its clients are looking to combine video games and traditional sports into a suite of youth activities, which is why it bought Mission Control, Barnett said.
"If I'm a YMCA and kids are playing soccer, they would want to put a Rocket League or an EA Sports FC 25 soccer game in some of that same programming, so kids can play both the traditional sport of soccer and a video game that resembles soccer," Barnett said, explaining that it combines youth interest in video games with a coach and physical activity.
