We Survive Disasters; How I Went From the Worst iRacing Esports Productions to the Best One Yet. [Part One]
People who remember me from Cohost are possibly aware that I've been an esports broadcast producer for some time now. I got my start a few years ago during the 2019 season of Esports Drift Association as a commentator. Competitive tandem drifting was a fairly new and deeply fascinating concept to me; I'd previously enjoyed drifting in a variety of racing games before then, but hadn't known that a real 1v1 format existed until about a year or so prior. During the 2019 season ESDA switched its broadcasting team to a production firm known as Podium Esports, after their previous broadcaster had repeatedly no-showed after staying up way too late livestreaming video games the day before and had been reasonably accused of sexual predation. All ESDA knew was the inexcusable no-showing until that broadcaster was let go, but once they were made aware of the situation it was an immediate reaction of disgust from the organization.
Things were looking up for ESDA in 2019, and for me. I was livestreaming on my own channel more often, and had gotten close to a couple of people working as ESDA's commentary booth by then. Since they knew I had the commentary chops from the one-off drift competition I'd created and broadcasted called Ante Up, they pulled me in. This was the start of my broadcasting journey.
Over the years I'd be pulled into the booth as a temporary replacement if one of the commentators was unable to make it. When COVID lockdowns began, sim racing saw a large boom in participation and viewer metrics on livestream services; since motorsports were put on hold, motorsport fans still wanted to see cars go fast on a race track. Meanwhile, people with enough money and more free time purchased PC peripherals to start sim racing. This meant Podium saw big numbers, and the productions I helped put on were bigger than before. One of my new friends from this period of time was even involved in the televised broadcast of NASCAR's Pro Invitational races, which were NASCAR-sanctioned exhibition races featuring legends like Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Bobby Labonte going up against current-season drivers like Christopher Bell and Austin Dillon. It was kind of a golden era for sim racing; because sim racing games were the only virtual representations of real sports where gameplay was incredibly similar to the real thing, it kicked off pretty nicely.
Eventually, the lockdowns would come to an end - far too soon, and not just because it ended sim racing's golden era, mind you - and livestream audiences would mostly return to normal, aside from a slight permanent boost from people who'd been turned into sim racing enthusiasts through the pandemic. My skills as a commentator would slowly improve over this time, but never really got to the level of my cohorts in the industry of esports commentary.
Then there was the 2022 Podium 500.
This event was a near-catastrophe from the start. Given the approaching VTuber craze at the time, it was suggested that I and another commentator use our VTuber avatars - mine in 3D via VRChat and my cohort's in 2D - while using a 3D backdrop that would appear as though we were stationed at a news desk on the infield of the Daytona International Raceway. It was a neat idea; you'd be able to see cars actively racing on track during the practice session while we discussed the results of the qualifying events that were completed to determine the field for that day's race, and shared our expectations for the upcoming event. Everything was set up and looked ready to go the night before, but somehow everything had been ruined by data corruption just half an hour before our segment began. This wasn't enough time to fix what was broken, so we were given basic picture-in-picture portrait frames to speak from. This looked... incredibly silly at the time. Probably still would, even with the VTuber boom, just because of the lack of cross-pollination between sim racing enthusiasts and the VTuber community. It might have looked cooler if the stage had worked properly, but I doubt it.
The chat reaction to us was vile and toxic. One of them identified me (or both of us) as transgender, and immediately began making insulting comments that weren't handled by chat moderation staff. Most of the chat was just spam about how 'cringe' the segment was as it was happening; that was easy to ignore because it was likely a bunch of dorks who think sim racing is their ticket to NASCAR or whatever. The transphobia still clung to me, though. Overall, it was an overwhelmingly negative experience.
Eventually the green flag was flown, and nothing really problematic occurred - at least not in a way that would put the event organizers' reputation down the tubes. Crashes happened, risky moves were made, it was a race - that's what happens. Then everything went DEFCON 1 on the final lap.
Out of turn four heading down the final stretch to the checkered flag, the two frontrunning cars crashed into each other. Two cars - the #31 ahead of the #09 - managed to dodge the wreck and stayed foot-to-the-floor to the finish line. The #31 had reacted a bit too much however, and moved down the track to avoid the wreck - opening the door for the #09 to get beside him and 'sidedraft' him, which puts air on the #31's spoiler and slows him down. If they had stayed close like this, the finish would have been down to the thousandth.
Instead, the #09 puts fate into his own hands and turns down on the #31, wrecking the #31 before the finish line and giving the #09 the win. Now, at this point, Podium had done nothing wrong; this was a controversial finish, the same kind that almost always happens at superspeedway tracks. Instead, the catastrophe kicks off in the administration room after the race finish.
It turns out, the #31 submitted a protest to the racing stewards about avoidable contact, pointing out the rule that stated avoidable contact - whether intentional or not - would be penalized. After review, the stewards agreed and gave the win to the #31 instead. Problem is, incident protests are only allowed if a penalty was given in the first place. Since the #09 wasn't penalized for their incident in the first place, there was no penalty to file a protest for - and, thus, the decision Podium had made was against their own rulebook. The #09 should have won the Podium 500.
This caused an absolute shitstorm in the sim racing community. Numerous people who worked under the Podium banner either resigned or cut ties to the organization, me included. Everyone had their own reasons for doing so, but I quit because of the sheer lack of chat moderation that allowed numerous hateful comments and spam to go unpunished during my segments.
After this event, I sorta just licked my wounds and tried my best to focus on other things. I started sim racing more rather than providing commentary. It was rough.
A year later, ESDA brings me back on for another season. This time, as a producer.
I'd previously done broadcast production work here and there, but never ran production for a tandem drift competition. Since the sport is so aggressively niche, it needed to have scratch-made production tools and assets - and that meant it'd be very barebones and not as 'automatic' as grip racing productions were. I'd need to learn all the tech being used for the broadcasts and click a lot more buttons a lot more often just to make the production work. This was during a time when symptoms for the mental disabilities I dealt with were beginning to worsen, including a newfound struggle with depression and codependency caused by the death of my grandma among other traumatic events in my personal life. My capacity for this kind of work had shrunk, and I was now being asked to take on a lot more than I had previously chewed.
On top of this, Traxion - owned at that time by Motorsports Games - had purchased the broadcasting rights for ESDA, and really hadn't offered enough considering how much work went into a typical production. That being said, Motorsports Games had also recently acquired massive licenses to motorsport brands like NASCAR and Indycar, so they were presenting an image of excessive influence and power in the motorsports scene. Not only was I being asked to take on way more responsibilities during production that were already automated in grip racing productions, I had the added pressure of making sure my production looked industry-standard. On top of this, I was expecting only to produce the elimination tournament and not the qualifiers - we had been asked to broadcast both.
Over the course of a week and a half - a deadline imposed by no one but myself - I created brand new assets for the motion graphics tool we were using, changed various lines of code to use fonts that aligned with that graphic design, then wrote, recorded and produced eleven and a half minutes of original music to play in the background during studio segments to avoid copyright infringement. I also reached out to independent bands I was aware of at the time that would give us the rights to use their songs in our productions without payment, one of those bands being To Octavia. Another production member also suggested music by ONLAP, so we ended up using To Octavia and ONLAP's music for ESDA's teaser trailers for the 2022 season.
The season started, and everything pretty much fell apart off the hop. Numerous issues with the assets I'd made conflicting with the motion graphics tool made it look cheap and under-cooked. I was fumbling over which controls did what and what to click in what order, causing numerous issues in the backend. I was given a great deal of freedom to fail by the team I was working with - who, ultimately, were the same people I'd done ESDA productions with many times before - but the spiral had dug its nails in so deep that I couldn't realize I was being given that kindness. I made myself feel like failure wasn't an option, and heaped pressure onto myself to perform.
The next event went a bit more smoothly; I'd made further changes to the code and assets in the graphics tools we used that fell in line with what I had done in the 9 days leading up to the first event of the season, and polished what was already finished. Even still, I pushed graphics to screen before they were ready and failed to record instant replays for some of the runs we were supposed to be broadcasting. The long qualifying days were also exhausting the shit out of me, and the event itself would at times run hours behind schedule due to increasingly long scoring deliberations by the judges. This isn't to say I blame the judges for this, it merely showed the extreme level of competitiveness of the field we had for that season. Everyone was throwing down 100% on every single run, and it was hard to tell who would win each battle.
Despite the 2022 ESDA season calendar having each event spaced out by a couple weeks or so, it took me that entire time between events to recover from the previous one. Eventually, I broke.
I just couldn't handle the high-pressure environment I had built for myself. My teammates were doing everything they could to bring me back down to earth, but I was too beaten down and exhausted to believe them. Looking back, the season wasn't a total failure; I had done a phenomenal job punching above my weight and did so with self-imposed deadlines even professionals would refuse to take, and did it at a fraction of a percentage of the price. I was hoping it would land me a huge gig with big esports productions, but that was never in the cards; Motorsports Games was later found out to be basically, allegedly a money laundering scheme run by Russian oligarchs, with everyone at Traxion - including us - being laid off indefinitely and MSG eventually losing their Indycar and NASCAR licenses.
To be clear, Traxion wasn't at fault here; money was being flung around at them like it was going out of style, and they spent it like any reasonable one-stop-sim-racing-shop would. They had assumed MSG was acting in good faith as a parent company. Unfortunately it just wasn't the case and the money dried up. Almost as soon as Motorsports Games showed up in the gaming industry, it went insolvent and disappeared.
Two years separated from my self-fulfilled death spiral at ESDA and three years from the catastrophe during the Podium 500, I think I can confidently say that it's a miracle I'm still producing today. I only broadcast grip racing productions now, with future gigs lined up for a community-organized leagues on iRacing including a V8 Supercars league, a GT3/LMP2 sprint championship and the legendary Winstel Cup Series. The work I do isn't easy, but it's within my capabilities - and my broadcasts show it. All my broadcasts look and sound professionally done. I don't work on the graphics packages and assets anymore, but I still use the same background music I'd created two years ago for ESDA. The commentary and the game audio both sound professionally mixed. The camera sets I use are cinematic and exciting, built using either the baseline iRacing camsets or Blake Henderson's camsets as a foundation to work from.
We can talk more about the good stuff in part two, though.