Yeah I can see this is a much more 'top-down' push into esports...

Yeah I can see this is a much more 'top-down' push into esports where they're focusing on partnerships first and using that to drive growth. In the past I think most of the ones I named above took control in their niches through more 'bottom-up' organic growth, except maybe ESEA (ESL). So that is something a bit different, and it's why I'm following in this stock.

But there are a lot of mountains still to climb. A few things that worry me about ESH:
- ESH and Razer do not have much experience operating a competitive esports platform and they aren't partnering with traditional specialists. Logistically, this is not necessarily a straightforward venture and as much as ESH is great at releasing announcements about paying for a payment gateway (sorry couldn't resist), it would be great to see an announcement of a senior hire that has a name and background in the industry from one of the established players.

- there seems to be a bit of a trend of the biggest games led by Riot (LoL) and Valve (DoTA) inhousing their esports arm. Instead of letting local specialists like ESL, Garena, Cybergamer run events (historically been the case for SC, CS 1.6, Quake etc), they are bringing tournament play as a native function in their game clients, and event production is going internal to get better control of the full player experience. Is this practice going to spread to other game studios?

- assuming that there is a lot of money to be made here, what is the risk of an existing giant like Amazon (Twitch) releasing something that 'competes with' ESH? They don't operate in this space at the moment, but they certainly have the mindshare, funding, data and expertise to launch a very serious product.
 
@perth_punk I'm more positive on ESH than I probably seem, if the right milestones (for me) start coming through I'm looking to put some money in at the right price. But there are a few wildly positive posters that seem to have no understanding of the esports industry and historical challenges in monetising, so I feel somewhat compelled to provide a counterpoint.