Inside Esports Foundation: EWC's Chief Games Officer Fabian Scheuermann vision
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A conversation with Fabian Scheuermann, Chief Games Officer of the Esports Foundation, one month before the Paris edition.
Fabian Scheuermann is in Paris at the moment, stringing together meetings with what he calls the founding publishers of the Esports Nations Cup, the second tournament the foundation is about to launch.
"This workshop had been scheduled for six months, before we even knew we'd be coming to Paris," he points out, as if to defuse any suggestion of coincidence.
The meeting gives us, at RFT GG, the rare chance to sit face to face with the man entrusted with a piece of behind-the-scenes work: making the communities of twenty-five video games — which sometimes have no reason whatsoever to cross paths — coexist under a single banner.
His title of "Chief Games Officer" rather poorly captures what it actually involves.
"My job is to make sure all the publishers feel well represented, with their licenses and the communities that come with them."
Twenty-five games for the EWC and sixteen publishers, sixteen games and eleven publishers for the future Nations Cup — Scheuermann acknowledges the complexity, he says, that arises precisely from this accumulation. From the number of games, the number of publishers, and above all the number of regional differences.
Compare the League of Legends community to that of Crossfire, deeply rooted in the Asia-Pacific region, or to that of Mobile Legends: same genre, sometimes, but two different worlds. "Every fan, when they watch their game, needs to feel well represented."
The art of saying no
One imagines the difficulty of convincing publishers to join a competition born barely three years ago — but Scheuermann flips the picture. The problem, today, is no longer about convincing:
"We have all the titles we want. The hard part is saying no to some of them."
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Each year the lineup shifts a little: this edition reintroduces Fortnite and adds Trackmania, while StarCraft drops off the list.
Game selection follows three criteria: first and foremost, audience as the cardinal indicator. Next, the existence of a pre-existing esports ecosystem: for a game like League, already massive and regionalized, the real difficulty is finding an open slot in a calendar saturated with events. Finally, the commitment of the publisher itself.
"We want to be sure the publishers are truly invested in our goals, that we're doing this as a partnership."
The publishers fund it, but above all they broadcast it — nearly half of last year's audience came from their own channels; the foundation describes itself as a platform.
The question that always comes up
It's hard to talk about the foundation without addressing Saudi investment; we ask about the impact of the PIF's stakes on publisher negotiations. Scheuermann cuts it short. "We are not tied to the PIF. We are an independent, non-profit foundation." And when the project got started, three or four years ago, the fund still owned almost none of the esports companies that matter today.
Still, he presents this foundation status as an asset, one that allows him a simple goal: to make esports a top-tier sport. "Not football, maybe, but let's say tennis." His personal dream, he lets slip, would be to create a sort of Wimbledon of esports, a place where fans gather and have a good time.
League of Legends and the rest
Could an EWC have existed without League of Legends? "Yes, it could have." Then the qualification, immediate: the title generates too much value. Last year it was the one that racked up the most hours watched, with particular weight among the Chinese audience.
The late announcement of the game, in 2024, had fueled speculation about tense negotiations with Riot Games. Scheuermann prefers to speak of exacting standards. "Not more difficult, but it took much more explaining." Riot is attached to its community, and every concept had to be documented in detail. Will the players be protected? How will the format be presented?
"They had all the questions, and we needed all the answers." Once obtained, the publisher agreed to give it a go for one year.
Yet League gets no special treatment in the underlying mechanics. The heart of the event remains the club championship, and there, every title is worth the same number of points. Fabian admits the temptation did exist, though, to award more to the popular games or to the team titles rather than the solo ones.
The foundation ruled against it.
"I don't want to tell an EAFC fan: you play a solo title, so you're worth less than the others."
On a symbolic level, on the other hand, he readily concedes that League runs through much of what they do — if only because its community is, unlike so many others, viscerally oriented toward esports.
The fairness puzzle
We turn to the matter of the tournament's fairness, of club managers who point to an imbalance: the cost of building rosters, the number of games to cover. Some are calling for a cap on games or on budgets. Scheuermann says he understands the argument while turning it around.
For him, the foundation's logic pushes mechanically toward more games, because the objective is to bring people together. The number of new rosters built for these titles is precisely what he's after — clubs investing, as he reminds us with "high risk, high reward."
Could alliances between clubs be considered? "Yes, they're allowed between traditional sports structures and esports clubs," but as for alliances between esports clubs, he describes the strategy as counterintuitive to the tournament's aspirations — notably the development of clubs' individual brands.
As for the organizations for which the EWC has become the most important date of the year, he refuses the word "dependence" but reminds them of their responsibility: "each club has to gauge the risk it's willing to take."
A Nations Cup the publishers dreamed of doing
The Nations Cup now takes up a good part of his agenda. The calendar constraint dictates a tight format: "we can't decently occupy the field two months a year." The foundation makes no secret of it: it would like to slip in one or two more titles; nothing is set in stone yet.
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For this event, Scheuermann's work no longer consists of convincing but of building, for the first time, a worldwide nations tournament. Including in League of Legends, where nothing equivalent has ever existed at this scale. How to compose the rosters? How to make sure the best players are represented without forcing anything?
"We want the Korean community to look at the roster and say: yes, that's the one we wanted." There will be dissenting voices, and that's intentional.
Scheuermann admits it: several publishers had long nurtured the hope of a nations cup.
"When I showed up with this project, a lot of them told me: my God, we've always wanted to do this."
Hence the need to take the time to listen to their very firm ideas, while preserving the upper layer that lets a fan follow nations across several titles without getting lost.
Game selection followed the same three criteria as the EWC, with one additional parameter: geographic representation. Which titles are flagship games in Brazil, in China? And which titles, conversely, are global enough that everyone finds something for them — League, Valorant, almost automatic choices. For the others, the arbitration was trickier.
Before wrapping up
Who will win the EWC on League of Legends this year? He dodges with a smile: he never makes predictions, he's bad at that game. He'd rather talk about the interesting results from the various play-ins and the format change he hopes will keep surprising people.
A final word on the EMEA qualifier, which opened the door to second-division teams — a notable fact, and one limited to that region. An experiment, he says, with the franchised leagues: the best teams had to be guaranteed their spot, but the foundation's philosophy holds that everyone should, as far as possible, be able to lay claim to taking part.
"We said to ourselves: let's test it. Let's see how teams from the regional leagues measure up against LEC teams, and whether any interesting stories come out of it."
The verdict: they weren't disappointed.
It's perhaps in this never-quite-resolved tension — between openness and hierarchy, between the dream of a Wimbledon of esports and the rigid mechanics of a sixteen-title calendar — that the foundation's true future plays out. Scheuermann doesn't claim to have won it; he says only that they're working at it, meeting by meeting, game by game.
