How SoaR Gaming Built an Edge Beyond Esports | CanadianBusiness

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In the 2010s, esports emerged as the next frontier of professional sports. The global industry, built around organized competitive video gaming, grew from US$194 million in revenue in 2014 to nearly US$1 billion by the end of the decade, while its audience worldwide more than doubled to 435 million viewers. Games such as Fortnite and League of Legends produced professional leagues and stars like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a professional gamer and streamer who amassed tens of millions of followers and became one of gaming’s most recognizable personalities.

The industry’s momentum soon caught the attention of Big Tech. In 2014, Amazon acquired  livestreaming platform Twitch for US$970 million. Team owners and athletes from traditional sports followed, drawn by the idea that esports could be a natural digital extension of their own domain. But as the industry boomed, several high-profile ventures floundered.

In 2017, Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, paid US$20 million for the Boston Uprising, a franchise in the Overwatch League, which modelled itself on traditional sports with city-based teams competing in Overwatch. But the league struggled to attract viewers and generate revenue before dissolving six years later. In 2020, former soccer star David Beckham became a co-owner of British gaming organization Guild Esports, which listed on the London Stock Exchange at a US$52 million valuation. By 2024, it was sold for just US$134,000 and delisted. The following year, it shut down entirely.

One Toronto-based, athlete-backed esports venture, SoaR Gaming, has followed a very different trajectory. In 2019, Canadian NHL star Zach Hyman and marketing executive Oliver Silverstein acquired the digital gaming brand founded in 2011 by gamers posting Call of Duty videos on YouTube. Seeing an opportunity to turn the brand’s connection with gaming audiences into a broader business, they also created SoaR Studios, a creative agency that supports SoaR Gaming while developing campaigns for external clients, including Coca-Cola, DoorDash and Canada Basketball. Today, the company has more than two million followers across its social channels, while SoaR Studios’ campaigns routinely reach six- and seven-figure deal sizes.

Although both grew up in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood, Hyman and Silverstein only met in their 20s, when they bonded over a shared love of gaming and a belief that esports represented the future of media and entertainment. As Hyman’s NHL career took him from the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Edmonton Oilers, gaming became his main way of staying connected with his younger siblings. Watching his brother, 10 years his junior, spend hours watching gamers on Twitch and YouTube changed how Hyman saw the industry. “Gaming was much bigger than just sitting on your couch and playing,” Hyman says. “It was becoming a form of media in its own right.”

Hyman and Silverstein saw that the value in esports lay not just in  teams or leagues, but in the content and communities surrounding gaming–from gameplay clips and highlights to livestreams that attracted  younger audiences. “If you want to reach that demographic of Gen Z or Gen Alpha, they’re not watching traditional media at all,” Silverstein says. “They’re on Twitch or TikTok, watching gaming videos.”

That thinking shaped SoaR Studios, which helps companies outside of the gaming world reach internet-native audiences they might otherwise struggle to connect with. Hyman and Silverstein also recognized that esports had yet to fully capture the advertising potential of its enormous audience. SoaR Gaming provides the community and credibility, while SoaR Studios turns that into  campaigns across gaming, sports and digital culture. “We refer to ourselves as the agency of record to reach the internet generation,” Silverstein says.

SoaR Studios builds campaigns for the platforms where these audiences already spend their time. With Thai Express, the agency launched the brand’s Canadian Twitch account and surprised viewers by dropping into streamers’ livestreams to gift batches of subscriptions to their channels. The agency also worked with Audible, replacing Twitch streamers’ usual “Starting Soon” screens with audiobook excerpts and creating sponsored gaming challenges for streamers, with each challenge unlocking gifted subscriptions. In both cases, rather than interrupting viewers with a conventional ad, the brand became part of the experience.

That approach has also helped SoaR Studios expand beyond gaming. Hyman’s connections in the sports industry have opened the door to campaigns with traditional sports brands. Its work with Colgate featured WNBA player Aaliyah Edwards and PWHL players Emerance Maschmeyer and Renata Fast.

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