Enthusiast Gaming, a Toronto-based gaming platform with a worldwide customer base of 300 million gamers, has applied to be listed on the Nasdaq as early as next week.
While gaming is the company's bread and butter, CEO Adrian Montgomery described Enthusiast as a full media ecosystem, including 100 websites and 1,000 YouTube channels.
"Enthusiast Gaming is a media company," Montgomery told Cheddar. "Think of it as a media company that caters to Gen Z and millennials who love video games."
The company spent the last few years acquiring smaller gaming companies. Now it's pursuing a direct listing in a bid to expand its appeal to investors.
It also owns Luminosity Gaming, one of the largest esports organizations in the world, which hosts competitions and teams from around the world.
Montgomery highlighted the brand's potential as a "content factory" that fuels engagement on their platform and helps generate corporate partnerships.
"Yes, we own esports teams, but our DNA and our mission is to build fan communities for gaming and esports and to create and share content that engages our audience and keeps them coming back to our platform," he said.
As a result, influencers are "everything" to Enthusiast's business model, he added.
Increasingly these influencers are coming from the same territory that Enthusiast has staked its ground: online gaming.
"Companies are falling all over themselves to get these stars to promote their products and services," he said.
That doesn't mean Enthusiast doesn't care about the games themselves. Montgomery said he has high hopes for a free-to-play shooter called Valorant developed by Riot Games, the same game publisher behind the popular League of Legends franchise.
"We're bullish about that game," he said, adding that Luminosity hosts one of the biggest Valorant teams in the world.
