In this July 28, 2019, photo provided by Epic games, Kyle Giersdorf reacts after he won the Fortnite World Cup solo finals in New York. Giersdorf, of Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania, who goes by the name “Bugha” when competing, racked up the most points and won $3 million as the first Fortnite World Cup solo champion. (Epic Games via AP)

By now you may have heard of 16-year-old Kyle Giersdorf, aka “Bugha.” The Pennsylvania teen won $3 million July 28 for coming out on top in the solo competition for the first-ever Fortnite World Cup. And if you have kids, you’ve probably heard of Fortnite, the online video game with a massive global playing audience. 

The tournament—with prize money that exceeded The Masters, The PGA Championship and nearly matched the U.S. Open—helped bring esports further into the mainstream. And for the year-old Esports Bar Association, and for the few large law firms that have established esports practices, the attention is most welcome.

Esports have a growing, dedicated following and a marketplace that is poised to surpass $1 billion this year, representing 27% year-over-year growth in valuation and more than double its sub-$500 million valuation from 2016. But the industry is still getting its footing, and while large firms, including Nixon Peabody, Carlton Fields and Greenberg Traurig, have launched dedicated esports practices, for the most part the fledgling industry is being represented by smaller, specialty firms that have spent time developing relationships with players, publishers and team owners.

ESG Law is one of those firms. Harris Peskin, senior counsel at ESG and executive director of the Esports Bar Association, has been working with players and teams for several years. ESG, he said, represents roughly 75% of the top esports teams in the world. The firm is small, with only four attorneys, and markets itself as the only law firm in the world to deal exclusively in the esports arena. 

Peskin said there’s no lack of work for his firm. Its lawyers deal with a great deal of intellectual property, labor and patent issues that arise from the mix of having a publisher, team management and individual players all working in cooperation, and sometimes in competition, with each other.

Benjamin Kim, a partner at Nixon Peabody, and Irene Scholl-Tatevosyan, an associate at the firm, head up the esports practice there. They described Nixon Peabody as a “progressive firm” in general, and when they pitched an esports-specific practice there wasn’t any pushback.

For now, they said, their clients tend to be on the publisher side, as those entities are larger and more established businesses than the individual players or teams. Fortnite publisher Epic Games, for example, had an estimated value of $15 billion in 2018.

While Kim and Scholl-Tatevosyan echoed the sentiment that there’s plenty of work to be done in labor law, IP, and immigration for nonpublisher clients, they said there might be a lag between the growth of the industry and the individual entities—players, teams, management companies for the players—being able to afford Big Law fees.

But if players such as Giersdorf keep making headlines, and publishers such as Epic Games keep building the market, it may just be a matter of time before more big firms get on board. 

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