“I’m so involved in the world of e-sports, and I know that it’s an emerging industry, but a lot of people still don’t know understand the money that is in it”

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Michael Vassos sold his first e-sports company during the summer of 2019, just a month before his 19th birthday.

Talk about your experience with your gaming company Onyx.

I started it in December of 2015 and it was a more casual thing because I found out that I was really good at video games and I didn’t know I was really good at video games. I knew I was good, but I didn’t know I was that good. Then this game came out, Black Ops 3 for Call of Duty, and I just kind of like exploded, like my KD and my stats and everything were all super good. So I started a little team with about five guys who I just met through similar ranks and online play. After we started playing a lot of online tournaments and everything was going smooth, and then everyone kind of had their own priorities so everyone kind of dipped. But I really liked it and I didn’t want to let it go so I kept the name and the team and kept all the ideas the same and then transferred a bunch of money into the branding of it, and that’s when Onyx Gaming was formed. I ran it all by myself from mid-2016 all the way to summer 2019, which is when I sold it. It was an up and down ride but it was fun nonetheless. The process of selling it was frankly a three year process, not from the guy who bought it but I got offers for it left, right, and center for the brand, for me, for the company. They would give me laughable offers and I would say buddy c’mon don’t give me that. So I eventually settled on one guy who was genuinely serious and gave me a good offer for fair money, so I said I’ll take that. No company but my bank account is solid haha.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

“In an Ideal world, I will be somewhere in the world of e-sports because it is something I am passionate about. For example, I have worked for this company called Way-form in the past and in the summer, and they do event planning for major e sports tournaments around the world so that is always super fun. So hopefully it is something to do with that industry whether that be actually managing a team or marketing in that field or planning, I love all of it. I could also see myself doing marketing and advertising in a general world. “

How do you balance being the first ever captain of the Western Competitive Smash team and school work?

“the process of making the team was not particularly hard but a bit frustrating. Western, I love it, but they don’t have a good track record of taking esports seriously. Frankly, I don’t blame them because I say this about every institution who is yet to figure it out. Like this is my world, I am so involved in the world of e-sports and I know that it is an emerging industry, but there is a lot of people who don’t understand it, who still don’t understand the money that is in it, it's just as popular as sports now. Well it's getting there, its building tremendously. Western doesn’t acknowledge the smash bros team as a western smash bros team, it's more so of a smash bros team who all goes to western. So under the Collegiate Star League, we are the Western e sports team but if you were to go to Western activity records it would say that we don’t exist. It was a bit of an annoying thing to get around so there is no funding. That is really the only challenge we face, like we have to carpool ourselves if we want to brand ourselves. It isn’t a big deal it just gets annoying. Balancing it with school work, it was the starting process of the team that was a big annoying because it took some time, but the actual events is not as demanding as I anticipated, like it is only one tournament every two months.”

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