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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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YOUNG GUNS

Austin Moorhead

Obsession, Overwatch, and the Future of Gaming

The fascinating "inside story" (Publishers Weekly) of the quest to build the world's first professional gaming league and the global race of the most gifted players to take home its first championship.
One of the most popular games globally, Overwatch earned over $1 billion in revenue in the first year of its release and has accumulated more than 40 million active gamers. Overwatch's developer, Blizzard, has invested tens of millions of dollars to create a gaming league with potential to rival the most popular sports leagues, the Overwatch League (OWL). It is a global phenomenon with no signs of stopping and Young Guns by Austin Moorhead shows how this came to be and what it means for the future of competitive gaming.

Young Guns combines a Moneyball-esque business narrative about the sports tycoons who launched the world's first massive eSports league with an entertaining look into the wild subculture of top gamers that is reminiscent of Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, Stefan Fatsis' Word Freak, and Michael Craig's The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time. Furthermore, 20th Century Fox has already optioned film rights for Young Guns.

Launched in January 2018, the Overwatch League (OWL) is the first large-scale concerted effort to build a competitive, global framework for an Esport that can rival the largest pro sports leagues. $3.5 million in prize money, a broadcasting deal with ESPN, and the purchase of OWL teams by celebrity owners including Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, and Stan Kroenke, owner of the Los Angeles Rams, set the stakes for the launch. The first season ended in a tense round of playoffs that climaxed in a suspenseful championship series in a sold-out Barclay's Center.

Austin Moorhead, a gamer who found himself fascinated by the emerging world of pro players, embedded himself during OWL's debut season with multiple teams, including the London Spitfire, which would go on to become Overwatch's first world champion. In Young Guns, he takes readers behind the scenes of the wild first season of a competition that just might become as ingrained in our culture as Sunday football, revealing a high-stakes, pressure-cooker world of profane teenagers who earn six-figure salaries, TV executives and traditional sports owners struggling to understand and conquer youth culture, and a game whose innovation progresses so fast that fans watch their favorite gamers practice for hours just to keep up with it. Told with perspective on the subculture and unrivaled access into how both the OWL and the teams that compose it have built themselves to succeed, Young Guns is a fascinating look at the ascendance of competitive gaming and the future of sports.

An avid gamer, Austin Moorhead has worked as a consultant and investor. Young Guns is his first book. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Published 2020-03-31 by Hachette Book Group - New York (USA)

Comments

Moorhead gives readers unprecedented access to the team dynamics and drama of esports while tracking the ambitious rise of the first global league. His year-long journey yields insight on the hard work and luck required to be an esports champion.

Austin Moorhead gets inside the heads of the gamers... These eccentric characters may be playing a form of basketball, but they will never be confused for the real LeBron James. That's okay, because in a very different way they are just as captivating.

George Plimpton + Hunter Thompson = Austin Moorhead. In Young Guns, Moorhead has written a compelling, hilarious and heartbreaking account of gamers and their games. Either that, or a survival manual for the coming apocalypse. Who knew that these young armchair athletes were engaged in the most brutal sport of all. The first great cultural chronicle of this new decade.

A fascinating, entertaining look at a growing phenomenon, Young Guns takes us behind the scenes of the gamers and opportunists redefining the meaning of sports. Austin Moorhead masterfully weaves a high-stakes business narrative with a hilarious romp.