Innovate
Tampa tech founder sees esports as path to wealth creation in the Black community
A virtual esports summit has joined the lineup of activities surrounding Super Bowl LV in Tampa in February.
MetArena, a St. Petersburg-based digital platform that pairs education with esports, will co-produce the HBCU Esports Conference and Career Expo. The Feb. 5 event, two days before the 2021 NFL Super Bowl, will give students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities a chance to learn more about the esports industry.
Two HBCUs — Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina and Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland — will partner with St. Petersburg College to execute various aspects of the event’s production such as drafting press releases, introducing conference speakers and assisting with managing the virtual conference platform.
One of the goals of the program is to help students, faculty and staff at the schools get insight into the esports and gaming industries while interacting with industry executives. Another is to increase support for STEAM [science, technology, engineering, arts and math] education in low-income communities and to improve financial inclusion for underrepresented innovators.
Although the esports and gaming industries are growing rapidly, only 2 percent of professionals in the gaming industry identify as African Americans, while 83 percent of African American teens play video games, a news release from MetArena said.
“The Black community over-indexes as consumers of gaming and esports, but is grossly underrepresented as value creators in the $174 billion gaming industry. This conference is critical in preparing the Black community to build generational wealth in a digital economy,” said Marcus “Esports” Howard, CEO of MetArena, formerly ProjectMQ.
The event also is designed to include the Latinx community, which has many of the same socioeconomic challenges as the Black community and represents a significant percentage of students enrolled at HBCUs, the news release said.
During the event, MetArena will provide the first public look at its new community esports platform.
Attendees will be eligible to win prizes. The HBCU with the highest percentage of participants will win two PS5 and two XBox Series X consoles, each including one television and four controllers, for its esports lab. This grand prize is sponsored by Codeboxx, a coding bootcamp and digital workshop business looking to establish a local headquarters.
The digital event will be hosted in Decentraland, a virtual world, with the support of GAME Credits, a gaming cryptocurrency. It will be in a blockchain ecosystem, so participants need to create a crypto wallet.
The event is open to the public. More details are here.
