The Ongoing Evolution of Ovilee May
push to talk #20 // how a plucky esports host evolved into a leading event producer
Esports broadcasting has had a pretty rough run lately, huh?
The golden age of esports—in terms of its sudden surge into mainstream cultural and financial relevance—was probably the period between 2014 and 2021. The money was pumping in, and every event was bigger than the last. Rick Fox bought an esports team! Sneaky and Balls were in Playboy!
Anything seemed possible. But then the money dried up.
A lot of jobs have been impacted by the ongoing esports winter, perhaps none more visibly than the esports host/caster. It’s not easy out there for broadcast talent. So this week we checked in with somebody who’s been through all the ups and downs of the last decade of esports. She’s grown up on camera, evolving from a plucky interviewer to executive producer on one of the most-watched gaming showcases in the industry.
The Push to Talk interview with Ovilee May is below. But first, the news.
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
Dread Delusion Proves Art Direction > “Graphics” - Here’s a trend to watch: A growing percentage of players and devs don’t seem to care much about “realistic” graphics anymore. Now it’s all about art direction. For one recent example, take the neon-soaked psychedelic Morrowind vibes of Dread Delusion. Some say this is about “nostalgia,” but I disagree. Something bigger is going on here. A game like MULLET MADJACK doesn’t actually look like anything that’s come before. These games are expanding our conceptions of what a beautiful video game can look like. (Dread Delusion on Steam)
Mass Layoffs at Phoenix Labs - The future of the Dauntless and Fae Farm studio looks doubtful, with reports claiming over 100 people were let go and all active projects cancelled. One project was reportedly “weeks away” from launching in Early Access on Steam. (GameDeveloper.com)
Console Sales Slow Down - According to Sony's FY 23/24 earnings report, the PlayStation 5 is still selling strong, but it’s slightly behind where the PS4 was during this same period. Things are less rosy for the Xbox Series X/S, which sold at 1/5th the rate of the PS5 last quarter. (Daniel Ahmad on X)
Recompilation: An Incredible New Way to Keep N64 Games Alive - This is wild: native PC ports of N64 games made using a new tool developed by a small team of enthusiast hackers. The technical details are beyond me, but it’s obvious that they’ve unlocked performance improvements that would have been impossible using traditional emulation. As one YouTuber put it: “This seems like a pie-in-the-sky concept I would have come up with as an 11 year old with less than zero understanding of how programming works. But it's real.” (Nerrel on YouTube)
The Ongoing Evolution of Ovilee May
Ovilee May is happy, but tired.
In April alone, the 27-year-old host and producer has interviewed nearly 100 game devs auditioning to have their games featured in this year’s OTK Games Expo, a blowout games industry showcase that’s looking to compete with events like Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest.
Ovilee, a former G4 host and producer and League of Legends esports broadcast host, is now executive producer for OTK Media.
And there is a lot to do before the show is ready for showtime—it goes live soon, on June 4th.
She lists off the joys of production:
“I need to coordinate with the co-streamers. I'm speaking with graphics. I have to go back and forth with production. What happened with props? We need the opening ceremony to be figured out. Okay, this dev hasn't delivered their assets. chase them down.”
And even though there’s a lot of work to be done it’s clear she’s enjoying the chaos.
Young Dreams, Dank Memes, and LoL
“I’ve been a gamer since I was three years old,” Ovilee says. “I learned to read from a Zelda game manual. Gaming is where I got my vocabulary.”
When she was still a teenager, Ovilee attended the League of Legends season 2 playoffs at LA Live and fell in love with esports. “I decided then that I’d love to work in esports. I didn’t know what I would do in esports, but I knew I’d love to work at Riot.”
Ovilee jokes that she would have taken just about any role in esports if the opportunity had presented itself. “I saw the guy shooting t-shirts into the crowd out of a Kog‘Maw launcher, and I thought if I could just be the Kog’Maw launcher girl, that’d be my dream.”
Even before anyone was willing to pay her for it, she was hopping in front of cameras and talking to people about LoL. One of the first videos on her YouTube channel, published almost exactly 10 years ago, features a 17-year-old Ovilee cosplaying as the popular League skin Forecast Janna at an anime convention, interviewing other cosplayers and effectively LARPing as a broadcast reporter.
Even here, you can see so many of the elements that came to define Ovilee’s on-screen persona in later years as a host at the biggest official Riot Games events. She’s got this disarming, unpretentious vibe. She’s unencumbered by self-doubt and unafraid to be a little silly or “cringe.”
Ovilee’s early forays into content creation paid off. In 2016, she landed a gig doing social media for the esports org Team Liquid. A year later, Yahoo! Esports picked her up as “a little intern assistant,” as she puts it, where she began getting her first real, on-camera hosting work.
From there, things moved quickly. By August of that same year, Riot Games had hired her as an interviewer and sideline reporter for the North American League of Legends Championship Series.
The Summit of Worlds, G4, and a New Era
This is the recurring theme in Ovilee’s career: things happening really fast. A year after starting at Riot, Ovilee was everywhere in LoL esports, even landing screentime at the 2018 Worlds championship—an event for which the finals match alone attracted nearly 100 million viewers.
This is how crazy esports got. Those are like Super Bowl numbers. And the people running the operation were 20-somethings like Ovilee. Now, looking back, Ovilee says she wonders whether things were moving too fast. With career milestones getting crushed so quickly, “It’s like I was too naive to know what realistic pace-setting looks like.”
And so, like the industry itself, Ovilee kept moving fast. In 2020 she left Riot Games to join the much-hyped relaunch of G4 TV as a host, producer, and manager of other producers.
The transition, Ovilee admits, was a dramatic one: “I had to go from talking about League of Legends and my adored LCS players to—suddenly, I'm in these meetings looking at multi-million dollar budgets and figuring out how to launch a TV network.”
Much has been written about the dramatic rise and fall of G4’s reboot, so I won’t bore you with the details here. But suffice it to say—like everything else in Ovilee’s career—it all happened very quickly. In 2022, the network’s parent company Comcast pulled the plug.
So Ovilee kept moving. She kept taking hosting work as a freelancer: hosting the Brawl Stars world championship, working with various esports teams, and even hosting an Omega Strikers tournament or two.
Even now, as a full-time EP for OTK Media, Ovilee isn’t taking her foot off the gas. She’s still doing hosting work on the side, even this week flying back and forth between New York and Los Angeles to do some events for AT&T.
This is how Ovilee has always been: she takes on as much as she can. “I set a goal for myself: Try everything, and if I hated it, I’d just not do it again.”
For Ovilee, this “try anything at least once” strategy led her through not only her hosting gigs, but social media management (“I enjoyed some of it but then I hated the minutia of it”), individual content creation (“I like making content, but I didn't find myself enjoying being a full-time streamer”), and producing broadcasts and events (“I learned at G4 that I do like producing and I feel fulfilled when I'm able to create an event from start to finish and see it executed—to see the happiness from the people participating as well as the viewers”).
In my opinion, the fact that Ovilee’s as flexible as she is goes a long way toward explaining the speed of her rise in the industry.
But you almost have to wonder: if this is what it takes to make it as broadcast talent these days, how does anybody have the energy for it?
The Esports Churn, and Advice for the Next Generation
With all the churn happening in the games industry at the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what sort of advice to give kids who want to work on games—there are a lot of them, after all. Developing a strategy for navigating a career in games is tough, even for those of us who’ve been in it for a while.
On this point, Ovilee is very direct: “My advice for working in esports as a caster now,” she says, “is don't. The life of an on-camera host is very, very unstable.”
Esports is volatile, Ovilee says. “It’s an industry driven by passion. When I started working in esports, I was working three or four different jobs so that I could afford to live.”
That was in the boom times. The difference now, she says, is that finding paid work for beginners has gotten harder than ever.
“It’s the nature of the industry we're currently in, especially with a lot of marketing dollars drying up and a lot of people feeling mistrust for the esports industry thanks to bad actors,” she says, referring to mismanagement from owners and executives. “A lot of the shows have dried up. You're not going to find that hosting work. Plus, a lot of studios have shifted their strategy. For them, the question is why go with a traditional broadcast host when you can just pull in a streamer instead? Especially a streamer with a dedicated fan base whose tweets can pull in triple the engagement that your standard broadcasters are doing.”
From the studio perspective, the decision to favor established content creators makes sense. The challenge that everyone is struggling to solve right now is how to get eyeballs. And a more traditional broadcast talent who spends time building an esports broadcast’s brand instead of their own is less likely to have a dedicated audience than a content creator who has their own channel.
So, Ovilee says, for the next generation of on-air talent there’s really only one way to break through: “For people who are aspiring to be casters, aspire to be a streamer or content creator first. At this point you need to be making a obscene amount of content and you need to be essentially building yourself up as a brand.”
Even then, she warns, it’s going to be tough:
“Over the next few years we’re going to see a drought in really quality broadcast talent,” she says, “because the ones that are great have already been snatched up by specific games and those games are probably keeping a hold on them. And then there's just not enough feasible opportunities for amateur people to come into the scene and grow.”
The Kids—and the Industry—Grow Up
Ovilee has been on camera for the better part of the last decade. In effect, she’s had to grow up in public.
“I'm different now that I’m 27 from when I was 20 years old,” she says. “I’ve had a couple stages in my career where people have been like ‘Ovilee is not the same as she was when she was on LCS,’ and I'm like, brother, I was 22. Life changes. You grow up.”
This resonates with me. I was 23 when I got my first “real” games industry job at Riot Games—about ten years ago, now. And I thank God I haven’t had to spend the last decade in front of a camera, because I had a lot of growing up to do in my 20s. And it all feels like it happened very, very fast.
The video game industry is like that. Despite the ups and downs of the investor cycle, or whatever stupid ideas are being pushed by the suits, it is—or at least it has been—a place where a determined 17-year-old at an anime con can go from standing outside a stadium in a homemade costume, to being the person on that stadium’s main stage, hosting events.
But then, once you make it up on that stage, you realize that’s not actually the end of the story. You gotta keep it moving.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go dress up like a yordle and plant a bunch of poisonous mushrooms outside a convention center for content.
See you next Friday.