The Evolution tournament is this week, and it looks to be one of the biggest yet. I certainly don’t envy the task of running a 7K-person tournament, but it’s good to see the Pandemic didn’t affect every tournament running. While I had my problems with last year’s Evo, the first under new management, I trust that management to always try their hardest to improve. There’s also 100% less crypto (so far), so big props to that. I ultimately have optimistic feelings towards the event and look forward to watching this weekend when I get some time.
Unfortunately, I did not have that same admiration for another event that was announced earlier this week:
Waka Flocka Flame is a rapper and reality TV star, a pretty big name from the early 2010’s. While his music career has mostly cooled down, he clearly has a lot of hobbies, and I have little doubt that his love for fighting games is sincere. But when his opponent is not, say, a fellow celebrity but instead Dominique “SonicFox” McLean, one of the very best fighting game players on this planet, then the huge price tag for a ticket seems a bit steep.
Since this “competition” is taking place at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood New Jersey, a pretty classy theater, the seat prices reflect a night at the opera. But rather than Don Giovanni in two acts we get three matches of Mortal Kombat, only one of which is between two actual professional-tier players. You’ll have to forgive me if I, frankly, don’t see the appeal of paying more than the price of Evo (or, for that matter, any premiere FG tournament) for amateur matches with a music act and/or celebrity cameo in between.
So if this is an obvious marketing stunt, what is being marketed? It’s doubtful Waka needs a video game event to sell his latest endeavor, and while I don’t know them, I’m skeptical SonicFox has a big product or platform unveiling afoot. In that case, we have to look at the name on top of all that: Nobi Gaming.
What is Nobi Gaming?
After days of research, I have no fucking idea.
First things first, I pull the website, which…I don’t know, something strikes me as a bit bush-league here:
No ‘About’ section, no text on the splash page, just ‘BUY MY SHIT, GIVE US YOUR EMAIL’ and go. I also couldn’t help but notice the ‘NFT’ section at the top, and my curiosity got the better of me.
Oh boy!
My first thought upon viewing was wondering if perhaps, in some twist of fate, SonicFox had won the sweepstakes and gotten flown out to play Waka. While that would be funny, I suspect the universe isn’t really into my sense of humor. Either way, the very idea that there would be an NFT section on the website, loud and proud, while crypto and NFT’s have sunk to Titanic-level depths in the market, was another red flag. I’ve also usually known most people who are very into NFT’s to be way into them, so I thought it was time to get down to brass tax.
Nobi Gaming’s CEO and founder, according to LinkedIn, is Fashun Rivers, a music producer based out of Atlanta, GA. Rivers started off as a Hip-Hop performer before transitioning into consulting, producing, and marketing. As of 2018 he was the CEO and founder of KDRMG which does…something. Here’s what the website says:
Just give them $20K and they’ll make you go viral on your social media of choice! What a group. Also, I shit you not, KDRMG stands for “Klosing Deals Regularly Media Group”. The Mortal Kombat connection seems more and more obvious
But Mr. Rivers wears many hats, and one of them is the CEO and founder of NFTLuxe, which…You know what, let me just show the website.
Yep, definitely all in! Apparently the crowning achievement of this endeavor is the Drip Teddy Club, an NFT collection of, well, static images featuring a Teddy Bear, ostensibly dripped out:
Looking good, Waka! So much drip!
Apparently there’s big plans in the works for the DTC, as they apparently are partnering with Polygon, one of the biggest blockchain networks in the world, to make a DTC video game.
I wasn’t convinced before, but this is clearly going good if they’re doing an official collab, right? I took the post’s advice and went to follow the drip, to their official website, see what was the latest update on the DTC. And…
Oh…
Suffice to say, Mr. Rivers is in deep with NFT’s, although I have to imagine at this point he’s trying to sell them off for what little value there might remain. Even so, it’s hard to argue his commitment when his posts about them are indistinguishable from the most coked-up tech bro you’ve ever seen:
Amongst these different endeavors, it may become apparent that Mr. Rivers doesn’t really have a background in Esports or gaming that is immediately notable. Indeed, Nobi Gaming appears to be his first real foray into that arena, and like with the NFT’s, it seems to be largely based in the clout of his good friend and fellow ATL-based entertainer, Waka Flocka. And how much is that worth? Let’s check in on the group’s X account and see what’s cooking.
Not amazing! But follower count isn’t everything, I imagine Wacka being featured in the posts or tagged in them would drive engagement of individual posts pretty high. Right?
Swing and a miss. Pay close attention to that bit about “acquiring the digital assets and rights to one of the premier gaming companies in South America”, it will be important later.
Despite the celebrity affiliation, it sure seems like Nobi Gaming’s social media presence isn’t very strong. Even on TikTok, there’s not terribly high follower count and little engagement on the videos, even with Waka and other big names tagged in them. I would submit that, for someone who would sell themselves as an expert in social media marketing, this isn’t terribly impressive. Especially when they’d charge $20 thousand dollars to make someone ‘go viral,’ and even put out a 20-page ebook about how to succeed on social media. But I digress.
The biggest incongruence is when you peep the org’s YouTube page, which stands in stark contrast to the X and TikTok pages.
That’s a pretty decent subscriber count, plenty of videos, too! 14 million lifetime views!? Color me impressed. This would certainly indicate that Mr. Rivers, for all of the prior red flags, is obviously doing something right on YouTube. Having said that, something caught my eye. Notice the ‘Stats’ line, particularly the join date? April 12, 2012. Had Mr. Rivers been operating a YouTube account titled ‘itsNobiGaming’ for over a decade and only recently hit big? What’s his most popular videos?
These are all videos of the Korean freemium first person shooter game Point Blank, and…they’re all in Portuguese? Going through the videos, the vast majority are of a young Brazilian man posting up his sick gaming clips. What in the world is going on here?
Going back to the YT ‘About’ page, I noticed the lines right underneath the social media links:
“Some of the content featured is archived gaming files from Joshua Acriano”.
Who in the blue hell is Joshua Acriano!? He’s not associated with Nobi Gaming on any search, and the only thing I could find was a Facebook link to Mr. Acriano’s public page which had this link in the ‘Details” section:
http://www.youtube.com/JoshuaGamerBR
Click that link, however, and we go right back to the ‘itsNobiGaming’ page. Starting to make sense? Luckily, Mr. Acriano had a post on the FB page which nicely summed up the situation:
I’m a man of many talents, but Portuguese ain’t one of them. A basic translating software gets the meat of the message across, however:
Long story short, a ‘gringo’, foreigner, made an offer to buy the decently successful YT channel of a young Brazilian gamer and left the videos up while they used the channel for other means. The gringo in question is never named, but remember back to the reference in a Nobi Gaming X post to acquisitions of South American assets and rights?
Yeah, me too.
Mr. Rivers is so self-assured in his ability to bring a brand to viral prominence that he buys up the foreign assets of zoomer gamers so he can pretend to have a big reach. Some of the other statistical anomalies in followers and engagement the social media accounts of his other companies start to make a little bit more sense, in that light:
This guy is more botted up than Skynet but feels he has the business acumen of Warren Buffet. Fake follower counts with extremely low engagement, a seemingly dissolved NFT project, and an event that seems wildly incongruous with its target audience and their socioeconomic status…At what point does it become clear that this person has no idea what he’s talking about?
Put in the context of someone a little desperate to make a name for themselves in this space, the X postings where he calls out teenagers, issues vague threats, has anti-vaccine sentiments, they all make sense. And what it definitely confirms is someone who is, at best, a messy, desperate fool and a shameless narcissist mark at worst.
Mr. Rivers has shown, time and again, to have a lousy temperament and a worse acumen for business. In no way should he be taken seriously about anything esports-related, and I think it’s really unfortunate that this is pretty much the best the disparate FG communities can aspire to. No sponsors want to take a chance and burn the money, so it then becomes chum for sharks to come in, be pests, and ultimately do little of value for these communities. This wasn’t ‘for’ us, it’s so Nobi Gaming can hopefully become a big deal with its ill-gotten gains. To hell with that.
I thought everything to do with Daigo Umehara throwing a match for Lupe Fiasco so Evo could pretend he was the best player in the world was cringe and devalued any sense of sport, but at least that was cringe of our own doing. This is a vanity project to promote the brand of someone who literally has to buy his way into semi-relevancy, all on the back of his far more famous friend. It’s shameless, and it makes me sad to think that everyone will hop all over this as a means of sucking up non-existent clout.
If I could have a whiff of proof that celebrity endorsements have done anything for the esports space, I’d think there was perhaps a point to this. But I know that doesn’t exist, so I have to ask what the benefit is of getting in on the ground floor of something so monumentally fake. I had the same critique of Freshcut at Evo last year – a platform so obviously designed to fail, that will make all involved look like chumps, but surely this badly-constructed platform will be the right one!
I’m well aware that many will read this and accuse me of hating, of just being a hater to anything fun and that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Here’s an entrepreneur, hungry to prove himself to the FGC, and I’m shitting on him just to be an asshole. He’s got heart, why give him so much guff? Well, you got me – I hate this shit. It’s so trashy and it is solely a means to treat us, the players and fans of this genre, as marks to make easy money off of. Damn right I hate it! I will also not pretend this is ‘important’ for the communities, as the Lupe Fiasco one was utterly, utterly unimportant, and that was a far more competent exhibition. It’s not important, it’s not revolutionary, it’s just someone thinking we’re all dumb-dumbs who will pay him money to do stupid shit.
Enough. Just enough.
Them's fighting words!! 
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