Misfits Gaming partners with The E.W. Scripps Company in a bid to bring esports content to Floridian television viewers

Esports organization Misfits Gaming Group yesterday announced a $35 million funding round led by a $10 million investment from The E.W. Scripps Company. Scripps’ backing of Misfits is the latest move into the gaming and esports space by a large linear and over-the-top television provider — and a reminder of the value of localized brand identities in the modern esports landscape.

Scripps’ $10 million partnership with Misfits is the largest-yet deal struck directly between a legacy broadcasting company and a major esports organization. It includes a seat on Misfits’ board of directors, to which the broadcasting firm has appointed its president of local media, Brian Lawlor. Lawlor plans to aid Misfits by leveraging his experience negotiating with traditional sports teams and distribution platforms such as Twitch and YouTube while staying relatively hands-off when it comes to the management of the organization itself. “I will let the experts run the team,” Lawlor said.

At the core of the partnership is Misfits’ status as the most prominent Floridian esports organization. Both its Call of Duty League team, the Mutineers, and its Overwatch League squad, the Mayhem, are based in the Sunshine State. Scripps already commands the attention of many Floridians aged 25 and up, according to Lawlor, but it lacks a loyal fanbase of both Gen-Zers and gamers — Misfits’ core audiences. “They have, I believe, five stations in Florida,” said Misfits CEO Ben Spoont. “It’s probably their largest overall territory, in terms of the number of people within the market.”

Lawlor is hopeful that Misfits’ gamer-oriented content will help Scripps reach Gen-Z viewers, a demographic in which Scripps’ advertisers are increasingly interested. “We’ve probably got tens of thousands of advertising relationships [in Florida], and many of those clients are looking to appeal to Gen Z,” Lawlor said. “So our ability to create content for them, to put it on those other platforms in partnership with Misfits, with their players, with their brand — all of it just seemed to really make sense.”

Indeed, the partnership will enable Scripps to feature Misfits talent and content on both its linear and over-the-top television platforms, though exactly how that will play out is still up in the air, according to both Spoont and Lawlor. “We’re going to treat Scripps’ Florida distribution as sort of an experimental content lab,” Spoont said. “So we’re going to look at producing more content that can first be distributed within Florida as a testing ground, and then expand it more nationally. And that’s going to look at digital literacy, more types of educational content — let’s not forget that Scripps’ audience is a little bit older.”

This older audience could present a challenge for the Scripps–Misfits partnership. “I think a lot of esports fans are younger, and they tend not to have cable subscriptions; they’re the typical kind of cord-cutter,” said Matt Boyd, vp of esports and games at Nielsen. “So I guess there’s a question: if it was more available, would more people be consuming esports content on [linear] TV? I would be curious to see how that plays out in practice with something like this new deal.”