Keeping what started on our couches alive.

If you’ve ever been to PAX, you’ve probably seen the PAX Arena, a massive, often elaborate stage where some of the world’s best eSports players compete against one another, complete with commentary from seasoned pros and promising up-and-comers. The Arena has played host to some great games, but in the last few years, it might be best known for hosting Tekken 8. If I’m ever on the floor between appointments, I head over to the Arena to take a load off and enjoy some competition. 

But how do you do that at a convention with a ton of moving parts? What’s it like to set something like that up? Running a tournament for anything is hard; I know because I run Golden Wiiklies, a fighting game tournament for games press. But something like the PAX Arena is something else again: a tournament at a trade show that pretty much anyone can enter, from pros traveling for that purpose to the unsung heroes of the local scene to amateurs who just want to compete in person for the first time. 

To understand how PAX Arena comes together every year, I sat down with Luke Thompson at PAX West, head of eSports at ReedPop. Luke also previously worked at Psyonix as Rocket League’s former event and eSports manager. We talked about the challenges of running an event like this, offering upcoming and amateur players opportunities, and building a community at one of the industry’s biggest shows.

The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Will Borger, Skybox: As long as I’ve been coming to PAX, the Arena has been here and there’s been Tekken. If there’s a time where I’m not on the floor seeing something or doing an interview or I’m not, I always come by and there’s always, as we say in the business, some good-ass Tekken on display. But it’s not just Tekken. There’s a lot to see at the PAX Arena. Can you talk about how all this got started?

Luke Thompson, head of eSports at ReedPop: Back in the early days when the Arena first started, we didn’t quite have the budgets that we do now. The beautiful thing about the [Fighting Game Community] is it’s not team-based, it’s solos. You can use consoles, it’s real easy to prop up a tournament with some low cost and actually get a pretty decent product out of that approach. 

But for us, the FGC has always just kind of struck home with our communities. We have a really strong FGC scene here in Seattle. Of course, PAX East pulls a lot of people from the tri-state area. So we just kind of found a niche in the FGC for offline tournaments on both coastlines. And then before we lost PAX South, we had a PAX Arena stage there as well to kind of service [the central US]. But I guess the last four or five years, it’s just a mixture of really the passion behind the FGC.

I also saw a hole in the market where not many people were doing high-end PCs with the FGC, and with our sponsors and our partners, I thought that was a really good opportunity to bring some really high production value. 

And lastly, after building a global pro league and then doing collegiate and then kind of fostering a little bit with semi-pros, it seems like the amateurs and the stepping stones leading up to a path to pro [is] kind of overlooked or they kind of get what’s left over of the budget at the end of the year from publishers. So I created an open called Almost Pro where it kind of bridges those gaps where our prize pool is big enough to bring in the big names, but it’s also anybody who has a PAX badge that’s within a certain region and age can just walk up and enter.

So we’ve had a really good success with our brands and partners, having direct access to fans, letting them play their equipment, and then also just creating some incredible storylines with our small tournaments. And I’m really proud of it because our registration numbers are hanging with some really eSports centric only events. This is a very big, wide consumer event with all kinds of cool things to do. Most stages at events like mine aren’t quite punching as high as we are, so I have an incredible production team that runs a lot of the major stages in the US as well. So I think I’ve stacked the deck as much as possible to have the largest and highest production value tournaments I can offer.

Will: You talked about how it’s really hard to break in if you’re trying to become someone who plays fighting games on a professional level or semiprofessional level. You have offered a stepping stone for people where you do get big names who obviously want to come and play for the prize pool, but it’s also really cool to see people who probably wouldn’t otherwise be able to get an opportunity at an event like this do that. How do you feel the community reaction has been to “anybody can come play at this massive event?” PAX is unique because it’s a fan convention and something that’s meant for everyone. It’s really cool to see that attached to a tournament like this.

Thompson: I think it’s played out great. There’s all kinds of small level opportunities out there. You can do some online tournaments, you can hook up with your local chapters and run some things there, but for someone who’s not a pro, to be able to walk up on this kind of stage is an experience that we love to offer to our PAX fans. We have a lot of cool stuff here and this is my baby and I’m really proud that some amateur who maybe doesn’t belong in the competition from a skill standpoint, we don’t care, [can come play]. We still want that experience for our fans. Take your shot at doing some kind of competition if you’ve never done it before, see if it’s something that you want to do. And it’s also not easy to get out of your own home environment and get into this environment or different systems with people watching and still perform well.

And I think that takes practice and so we don’t feature all of our matches on the stage at all times. We usually reserve that from the higher-end matches, [the] more seasoned players, but that LAN [area] back there has matches happening from the moment the door is open to the moment they close. And there’s some really good building blocks that are being created there in the back of the LAN when it comes to amateurs. So the response has been incredible. I’ve gotten more feedback from the FGC tournaments that I’ve done the last probably three years than probably anything else I’ve ever done here. And that’s one reason why I keep bringing it back. The fans want it.

Will: As someone who competes, that point you brought up is true, it’s really difficult to compete physically. It’s emotionally and mentally draining. You spend a lot of time waiting around and then you play very quickly and then it’s like, “Okay, maybe now I’m in loser’s, and it’s really stressful.” And to give people that opportunity is something I think that’s really cool. 

Earlier, you noted that there’s really no place where you can go play fighting games on high-end PCs at a tournament level, which is funny because that’s how a lot of players play at home. 

Thompson: Correct, correct. 

Will: And so you have to go to a console setup and maybe there’s a little bit of input lag on the console or it doesn’t feel quite the same way. Can you talk about the process of setting a tournament run on PCs and how has that worked out for you?

Thompson: It’s worked out really well. I mean, first and foremost, we have a lot of hardware partners and sponsors at PAX. PAX Arena has always had a healthy relationship with some kind of hardware provider, so we want to showcase that. And our hardware providers are really proud to be able to offer some really high-end PCs when it comes to setup. We actually come in about five days before and start laying down fiber and all of the cables and everything else. It’s also been a work in progress to be able to fit that many USBs and drivers and audios and everything else on the stage. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have a very battle-tested production crew and I’ve worked with some of these guys since my Rocket League years. We’ve been working together for almost a decade now, and I trust those guys.

To be quite frank, there are some other game titles outside of the FGC out there that have really tested the knowledge and expertise of my crew. And when it comes to FGC, it’s a little easier to set up and manage the tech flow. At the end of the day, we just want a seamless experience for the pros and for the fans. 

We’ve just had MenaRD, who is the global champion for Street Fighter 6, he saw our setup and he was like, “So I didn’t know Seattle had the best local LAN on the planet.” So the fact that these efforts are also getting the attention and approval of the upper echelon of pros is just the biggest compliment we could possibly get.

Will: I know you’ve talked about other games that you guys have done and that have been a little harder, but pie in the sky, if you could put any game at the Arena, what would you want to do?

Thompson: I do have my eyes on 2XKO. I think that’s going to be a really interesting title, especially with the 2v2. I think that game is going to be really awesome on high-end PCs as well. So that’s a game I’m really excited about.

I’ll also say that if there’s ever a time where internet is not such a rare commodity at a PAX, I would love to be able to do some really big content creator battle royales, where everybody is live-streaming their own perspective. That’s just not technically feasible at this moment in time. So that’s one of those things just kind of out of reach I’ve always wanted to do, but I’m really looking at 2XKO. I kind of want to continue what we’ve been doing with FGC and continue that momentum. 

At the same time, we also produce finals for any publisher or developer that comes in. In the past, we’ve had Nintendo come in and we’ve produced their North American championships in partnership with them and their production teams, as well. So there are going to be shows, probably in the years to come, where, even if we do have FGC as our main title PAX tournament, there’s still going to be a variety of other games that are being featured as well. Kind of like this weekend we did Games Done Quick with some retro speed running and we also did [Dungeons and Dragons Online] with their new expansion as well.

Will: The variety on display is one of the things I don’t think people know about because the Arena is, in a lot of ways, associated with Tekken and the FGC, but games of all kinds show up here, and so many of those events, like Games Done Quick, are difficult to experience in person. But here you’ve already come to PAX and now you can see something that would be pretty hard to be a part of otherwise. It’s a very unique way to build a community.

Thompson: And I think we’re going to feature a lot more influencers and content creators. I think that’s just where even the eSports industry is kind of headed, diversifying the partnerships and how they generate revenue. And so on the first day of the event, we do our Stream Stars competition that features content creators that are part of PAX. And I actually launched that at the same time as the Almost Pro tournament series, as well. So I think in moving forward, you’re going to see a really healthy mixture of competitions and also a lot of content creator fun.

Will: If you were talking to someone who is coming to their first PAX and they’re curious about checking out the Arena, what would you say?

Thompson: I would say first and foremost, there’s not a whole lot of places at the convention center here on the floor to actually sit down and rest your feet. I’ve got a lot of great chairs and I would suggest you just kind of sit down and look around you, look at who you’re sitting next to, the passion that they have as a fan, look at what’s happening on the stage. And if you like what you see, just take a few steps over [to] the LAN [area] and put your name down and sit down in a chair and be part of the storylines. That’s what I would tell anybody. 

eSports is still just part of gaming and to me, it all started with us just battling our friends on couches. And I think that theme is not lost here at all. So if you’re a gamer and you even have a little bit of a competitive edge, I think if you just sit down for a little bit, you’ll have a great time.