Meet the king of Canadian eSports
Sorrow shoved him upward, now Kitchener man is a video game mogul
Charles Watson the Sixth has arrived as a Canadian electronic sports kingpin.
Maybe you’ve seen him toggling around town.
He’s a Kitchener resident, his daughter’s baseball coach, a post-modem mogul for a postmodern sporting reality.
In an eSports industry emerging from a joystick adolescence, he’s a prominent player at age 33. But what exactly are eSports? Well, eSports involve elite video game players being treated as professional athletes or performers.
Fans pay to watch the young experts play in teams and compete against rivals.
Crowds have filled the Air Canada Centre, packed movie theatres and gone online to watch countless video streams of gamers toppling opponents as well as the toughest virtual environments of their favourite titles.
And Watson’s SetToDestroyX franchise, with multiple teams in multiple games, is competing and winning in an eSports world market that will reach 385 million people this year.
A market that, according to a Newzoo
financial report, will grow to $696 million this year and top $1 billion worldwide by 2020.
Titles like “Call of Duty” or “Halo” or “CrossFire” are played in countless tournament and championship events held across North America and the world.
And amid all that electronic mayhem, Watson has emerged as a one-man Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment-style entity with his SetToDestroyX umbrella brand.
MLSE owns the hockey Leafs and Marlies, the basketball Raptors and soccer Toronto FC, among other traditional sports teams. Watson is — virtually — the same. His SetToDestroyX owns a bunch of eSports teams competing in different game scenarios, across different platforms.
“We’re operating in eight different titles — competitively, that is,” Watson said.
Those titles include “H1Z1,” “Madden,” “Pokken,” “Mortal Kombat” and an all-female team in “Halo.” Players do not crossover into other games. That would be like asking Sidney Crosby to play pro basketball or soccer.
SetToDestroyX bills itself as the largest and oldest pre-eminent eSports brand and gaming organization in Canada. Watson is founder and owner and manager.
So how did this happen in the span of less than a decade?
How did Watson go from the directionless 20-something kid from a farming family in the little village of Holstein — who shared a single computer with every other student at Egremont community school — to being a rising star in a global eSports industry with a respected brand he figures is worth $500,000?
Sorrow grounded him, activated his entrepreneurial genes, then gave him an extra shove upwards.
The phone rang at 1:06 a.m.
It was mid-November 2006, Charlie Watson, living with a buddy in Edmonton after going west on a whim, was told he had to take this urgent, middle-of-thenight call.
The woman on the crackling line, his father’s girlfriend Roxanne, was bawling. “Your father’s dead,” she said. Charlie, raised on his dad’s 850-hectare farm along Highway 6 between Mount Forest and Durham, was in shock. A million questions shot through his 23year-old mind as childhood memories overwhelmed him.
In his mind’s eye, he was still six years old, standing in a golden field with his father as they sorted through prized heifer after prized heifer. They must have eyeballed a hundred before choosing the boy’s first heifer to train and show at 4-H club.
He named her Awesome. She was perfect and would go on to produce prizewinning heifers of her own. That moment in the sun with his dad, who often seemed to have more time for his herds than his family, was perfect too.
And then the moment was gone. His dad was suddenly gone too.
Watson’s 54-year-old father — prominent Ontario cattle baron Charles Watson the Fifth — had been crushed in a horrible accident at a Regina agriculture show. The phone call floored Watson.
His dad’s body was found in an alley, between the exhibition building and the barns.
“It was like a hit and run,” Watson recalls.
“He was walking in between two vans and he was killed … That was probably a big wake-up call for me, back in 2006.”
His nickname as a toddler was “Digger” because he used to dig pots and pans out of the cupboards and let them clatter to the kitchen floor. It was time for him to dig into adulthood. The thought had first occurred to him a few months earlier, in August.
“It’s kind of like when you lay down in bed,” Watson explained. “You always kind of listen to that little voice. ‘Where am I right now? Am I on the road to where I need to be and doing what me dreams are?’ At the time, I wasn’t.”
What did his dad always say? Work hard, play hard. It was time he followed that advice.
After his dad’s death, Charlie moved back to Ontario with his now ex-wife. He became a recruiter for heavy industries. He could size up people just like he could pick a prizewinning heifer out of a field of a hundred or pluck a promising gamer out of a pack of slackjawed teens. He was thorough and successful. But he was unhappy. So he sold insurance. He was successful. But he was still unhappy as his attention turned to eSports.
Along the way, his heart was broken again.
Five years after losing his dad, Watson lost his grandfather to Alzheimer’s. That was tough, maybe tougher even than losing his dad. He was close to his grandfather, Charles Watson the Fourth. And his grandpa’s death allowed him to unleash the pent-up sorrow he carried for his father. Watson, whose parents split up when he was in high school, was in double mourning.
His grandfather, with a flair for public relations, was passionate about real estate and left his business development marks all along Brampton and South Florida.
His father was a cattle visionary, bringing the French charolais breed into Canada and exporting his cattle to at least 18 countries around the world.
“We were always entrepreneurs,” Watson said. “My father never followed my grandfather. I never followed my dad. We all should have just done the same thing and we all would have been very successful, but we never did. We all kind of wanted to do what we were passionate about.”
About seven years ago, Watson zeroed in on his eSports passion. The little voice in his head activated again as he clutched a gaming controller.
“I was playing with a group of people in ‘Call of Duty’ and realized I can lead a team more effectively if I could structure, control and manage it and then it dawned on me that this could be a business,” he recalled.
“After a couple months of planning, it became a reality.”
A hands-on eSports ownership model made sense to Watson, who grew up playing “NHL 94” and “Final Fantasy 7.” This could work for a guy who went to Fleming College in Peterborough for business. This could be a viable business.
This could make him happy. So far, it has.
“I have the opportunity to be my own boss and surround myself with great people,” he said. “And I’m doing what I need to do or what I believe needs to be done next. Not too many people in the world get to say that.”
These days, Watson lives in the Williamsburg section of Kitchener, in a house five or six of his gamers used to live in. He takes his daughter Kennedy, 7, to school and coaches her hockey, soccer and ball teams. His girlfriend of five years is Montana. Their bulldog is Tuffie. His mom Laurie, a magazine publisher, lives close by in West Montrose.
For Watson, it’s a winning lineup in the suburban home dugout of his eSports empire.
Funny thing is, Watson always figured he might grow up to be an NHL manager. After all, he was a pretty good defenceman when he was a kid. And he does admire the job team president Brendan Shanahan has done with his beloved Leafs.
In eSports, he performs many hockey management tasks, minus the megabucks egos and the chill of artificial ice.
He signs competitive gamers, some can earn up to $150,000, to contracts. He trades players to other teams too. His teams of gamers, with a general age range of 18-35, include pro, semi-pro and amateur editions. They have jerseys and apparel and various swag items for sale.
Recently, he sold his pro “Call of Duty” team, a Canadian champion, to a U.S.-based team called Allegiance. Watson wanted to put the money into another avenue. Management is always looking at the bigger picture.
Watson has 84 total members of SetToDestroyX, the brand he created in 2010.
He’s got 30 contracted competitors, none based in Waterloo Region at the moment. His 42 Twitch broadcasters are either online competitors and/or online personalities who stream daily on their personal channels or one belonging to SetToDestroyX.
Eleven managers help him run the overall operations, which include a “Destroyers” reality series online with the first two episodes following gamers at competitions.
Recently, in a span of four weeks, SetToDestroyX teams took home $30,000 in prize money from events in Toronto and Sault Ste. Marie. Two of his Madden video game football pros won $15,000 before getting knocked out of the worlds. The players get a share of the team’s winnings, Watson explained.
“In Canada, SetToDestroyX is one of the more premier, truly, purely Canadian up-and-coming franchises,” said Andrew Robichaud, a Toronto-based eSports producer for TSN.
“There are some notable names that are based out of Canada or feature Canadian players. But as far as people like Charlie in the Canadian scene, there’s not too many. I think that says a lot about Charlie.”
A month before his death, his father came to visit Charlie in Edmonton. They went to lunch. His dad could tell Charlie, like picking through a crowd of prized heifers to find his Awesome, had finally begun to sift through life’s selections to find his passion.
Charlie looked his dad in the eyes and saw a glimmer of happiness reflected back.
“I think he just understood I was on the path to where I needed to go,” Watson said.
“We kind of exchanged that look, without saying words.
“At the end of that lunch, we never saw each other again. But life was finally underway.”
We kind of exchanged that look, without saying words.” CHARLES WATSON