In this episode of UrbanEBB, host Rico Figliolini sits down with Mike Logan, Chief Commercial Officer of AVID Products, to explore the world of esports, gaming headsets, and innovation in audio technology. Mike shares how AVID’s employee-owned ethos drives its mission to create affordable, durable, and communication-focused products like the AVIGA gaming headset. They discuss AVID’s presence at DreamHack, the transformative power of audio, and the growing gaming accessibility for diverse communities. With insights into market trends and the role of AI in audio, Mike offers a compelling look at how AVID fosters connection and creativity through sound.
Resources:
Avid’s Website: https://shop.avidproducts.com/
Aviga Headset
Timestamp:
00:00:00 – From Athlete to Esports Advocate
00:01:49 – Esports Offers Valuable Life Skills for All Students
00:05:22 – The Transformative Power of Audio
00:07:42 – Affordable, Communication-Focused Gaming Headset
00:12:36 – Expanding Aviga Headsets Beyond Gaming
00:15:15 – A Gamer-Centric Festival at Dreamhack
00:17:48 – Leveraging Niche Markets and Affordable Solutions
00:20:31 – The Importance of Quality Products and Authentic Marketing
00:23:10 – Accessibility in Gaming and Lowering Barriers to Entry
00:28:06 – The Rise of AI-Generated Content and Audio Importance
00:30:54 – The Vibrant Gaming Community
We’re seeing people groups, very diverse people groups start to come together under the umbrella of esports. So it’s opening up an entire cultural mix that we never had the opportunity to see before. And I’ll be honest with you, that was the moment when I realized the power of esports and was just sold on it.”
Mike Logan
Transcript:
00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini
Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEBB here based in Atlanta, Georgia. Hope you’re all doing well. I have a great guest today. I missed meeting him recently at DreamHack Atlanta, but Mike Logan, Chief Commercial Officer of Avid. Hey, Mike. Thank you for joining me.
00:00:17 – Mike Logan
Thank you, Rico. It’s great to be here.
00:00:19 – Rico Figliolini
You know what? We had a conversation before we started this and it’s good to get to know you a little bit more before we dive into this because it’s an interesting industry, and you have an interesting background. In fact, let’s start off with that. There’s a passion for esports that you have, I believe. something that you got, sort of turned on to with a high school coach. Was that what you said?
00:00:45 – Mike Logan
It was. I was at an event one time, a conference, our company that was there was sponsoring one of the speakers. And the speaker was an esports coach out of Alabama. And of course, we’re the sponsor. So he comes up to me and says, oh, you’re a big fan of esports. And maybe honesty, maybe I was too honest with him because I said, not really. And he said, why not? I said, well, I was a real athlete in school and, you know, in high school and in college and just don’t understand how video games can be considered a sport. He says, well, he goes, what if I told you that I gave my first varsity letter to a child in a wheelchair because esports? And I was like, well, that’s compelling. And he told me, he said, Mike, he goes, let me ask you. He goes, when you played sports, soccer and football were my two sports of choice. He goes, what did you learn? I said, teamwork and, you know, how to depend on people and how to be reliable and how to take accountability and be responsible for showing up to practice and doing your job. And he goes, but do you still have the physical cardiovascular benefits that you gained in high school today? And I said, well, no, they’re long since gone. And he goes, do you still have the teamwork skills and the benefits that you learned from being part of a team and working together? I said, absolutely. That carried with me through my career. And he says, those are the skills that we’re going to use and we’re going to develop when we do esports in high school. He says, I understand the argument that it’s not a cardiovascular pull like it is when you’re out on the field and you’re sweating in the hot sun. He said, but the life skills that sports teach kids are the same life skills that esports teaches kids. How to rely on somebody, how to be dependable, the accountability, how to lose and win humbly. All the different benefits that you learned on the field that you carried with you are the same benefits that we can offer kids that may not have a body type that allows them to take the field and represent their school. But now we do. And so now we have this outlet, the available option to offer kids the ability to say, hey, I might not have a body type. I might not be physically fit. I might not be athletic per se, but I can still represent my school and have school spirit and bring home a trophy. And so we’re seeing that. We’re seeing people groups, very diverse people groups start to come together under the umbrella of esports. So it’s opening up an entire cultural mix that we never had the opportunity to see before. And I’ll be honest with you, that was the moment when I realized the power of esports and was just sold on it.
00:03:13 – Rico Figliolini
It’s amazing. And you’re right. I mean, just knowing the kids that I know in the school here in Atlanta and Gwinnett County and stuff, these kids are learning a lot from that. And you’re right, team building. I mean, you don’t lose that. You have to be able to learn how to take defeat and how to work with other people that you normally may not be able to work with and appreciate people around you. So yeah, I can see that happening. So did you end up, you weren’t a game player before that, I’m assuming.
00:03:45 – Mike Logan
I’ve always been a video gamer. You know, I was right at that cusp of the generation that came up playing the old original Nintendo, maybe even a little Atari built into the early days, but never really viewed it as a sport until that time. Until I talked to that coach.
00:04:00 – Rico Figliolini
Interesting. Yeah, I had, you know, not for anything, I had the same feeling when I started seeing esports, which is big in the state of Georgia, actually. Very big here, and it’s getting bigger. But I felt the same way you did, Mike. Like, this is a sport? Yes, you have teams competing. But it’s interesting to see. And especially when I’ve played games like Fortnite with my kids and just the teamwork in getting through a game where you’re ranked going from 100 to 1 you really have to work as a team. And my kids would be like dad, just like you know we’re gonna leave you behind and stuff. I had to get better at what I was doing. I at least used the skills that I could use. So then I wasn’t weighing them down. So I can appreciate that. But yeah, and you’ve been in the audio education technology industry for like 25 years. E-Gaming hasn’t really been part of that. But Avid is a company on a mission, right? So tell us a little bit of what that core mission is and how that relates to what you all started doing this past summer, late May, when you introduced your gaming.
00:05:17 – Mike Logan
Sure. Avid really believes in the power of audio. And when you start looking at the science behind what audio can do for somebody, it has a visceral transformative impact on people. And what’s interesting is, you don’t even need a research study to know that because everybody knows that maybe you drove a little faster on the interstate when your favorite song came on, or, you know, there’s maybe a reason why they play Black Sabbath at the beginning of every stadium, right? Because it gets people’s adrenaline fired up and ready to go. So people know that music has an impact on them, but it doesn’t just have to be to get someone pumped up for a sport. They can actually be used for calming effects. And so Avid got into the audio industry by being the first company to ever put a headset on a commercial airliner. And we did that because we wanted to reduce that anxiety that people had of flying by playing music and relaxing them a little bit and just offering a better experience. So we’ve been doing this for 60 plus years with airlines. We got into the medical industry about 20 years later. And so we’re, a lot of people, I say some people say, I have never heard of Avid. I said, well, you probably have used this, though, because if you flew on an airplane and you had a headset on, there was a chance that was us. If you went to a hotel and they gave you a headset to work out with, that was probably us. If you went to a hospital for dialysis and they gave you a headset, that was likely us as well. So we’re very purposeful in what we do. And it’s all about using audio to transform some type of an experience. So that drove us to education where, you know, we see this influx of devices and the individualized learning. And so for the bulk of the, after the turn of the century, our focus has really been on schools and classrooms. And so that, obviously you can imagine that transition from just a learning headset and then using everything we’ve learned from that to go into the esports market where we see this other emerging technology or need for technology.
00:07:09 – Rico Figliolini
So what actually drove that idea of getting into that space? Because it’s a competitive space. A lot of products out there, a lot of companies doing this. It’s like pickleball almost in a way. They’re going to have a shakeout at some point because there’s hundreds of companies selling pickleball products. And just to differentiate yourself within that market space is a difficult chore. So, you know, with the new product you have, Aviga, the gaming headset that was introduced this past May at DreamHack Dallas, what got you guys started? How long did it take you? What, you know, did you look at technology to make this intentionally affordable headset for gamers?
00:07:56 – Mike Logan
So we were able to leverage some of our strength areas, similar to what you said when you play Fortnite with your kids. You know, you find your strength areas and you leverage those. And we did the same thing when we created this headset. What we knew is that we knew how to make an affordable headset because of the education market. It demands affordability. We knew we could make a durable headset. And we knew we had the ability to create a headset that had a really good microphone on it so that you could hear really well because we’ve made creator headsets before, budget-friendly creator headsets. But what ended up happening is some gamers picked up that creator headset and said, I really like using this for gaming. We said, well, why? They said, we can hear each other really good on this headset. So we started looking at it and we realized that most of the gaming headsets out there do a really good job of boosting the sound effects because that’s what we all like to hear, right? We, you know, we’re of the age where we can appreciate the old car stereos with the three knobs and we got in and what did we do? We turned the bass up, we turned the treble up, we turned the mid-range down. We basically made a smiley face with the EQ because that’s what we wanted to hear. Headset manufacturers aren’t that far off of doing the same thing. They boost that bass up. So the explosions and the gunshots sound really good. The big thuds come through. But you might be inadvertently drowning out a little bit of that vocal frequency range. And so what we’ve done is we said, let’s not overly boost those sound effects, focus on the vocal range and give people a really good communication-focused centric headset that they can afford. And so between the affordability of knowing the education space, the durability of making sure it lasts, and then this communication-centric mentality when we created it, we’ve created something that the industry is responding really well to.
00:09:32 – Rico Figliolini
Did you find, Mike, anything surprising as you guys went through this development of doing this, of creating it?
00:09:39 – Mike Logan
I think the surprise was how quick people fell in love with it. The headset was intended to be a K-12-focused esports-centric headset. It was going to be something that a high school esports team, a middle school esports team could pick up, purchase very affordably, outfit their whole team and have a really good communication experience. But what we have found is that all of a sudden within a year of releasing the product, we’re all of a sudden the headset for the U.S. national team. The Oklahoma City Chargers pro esports team uses our headset. Atlanta Detonate right in your backyard uses our headset. So we just signed the Carolina Reapers, not what, I think it was last week or two weeks ago, which is that’s the team that has the cat on it, which is just signed to the U.S. Olympic team so we have, we’re getting an awkward amount of attention because people just really like this approach that we’ve taken and they say we can just hear each other better and that’s what esports is all about is the communication.
00:10:36 – Rico Figliolini
Right. I was, prior to us getting on today, I was doing some research and stuff, going through some reviews, and the clarity was the biggest part of some of these reviews. The simplicity of the headset. I mean, there’s only one knob on the headset. But the simplicity of it, the ability to mute the mic, as most headsets do nowadays, but the clarity of the sound between players was the biggest thing that I saw in reviews that they were really happy about. So I could see that and that feedback probably. So as you do this, as you’ve rolled this out to gamers and stuff, do you look at that feedback? Is there ways to address anything? Is there wheels turning of what else you can do in the coming year of developing other headsets for this space? Are you going to work with that?
00:11:33 – Mike Logan
So one of the things I think makes our company different is we’re a small company. We’re not one of these behemoth companies out there that just can’t turn their ship very quickly. So VOC, or voice of customer is one of the primary driving factors that we use when we design a product. So upon release of the Aviga, we started asking customers, what could we do different? What do you love about this? What would you change about this? And so out of the gate, we’ve already started with our product definitions, getting ready for the next version of the product and we’ll continue to make it better just like we do with all of our products.
00:12:08 – Rico Figliolini
You’re an employee owned company, I think.
00:12:12 – Mike Logan
That’s right. So the entire company is owned by the employees. So everyone that you call, if you picked up the phone and called anyone at my company, they’re an employee owner. And based on how long they’ve been there, it determines their level of ownership.
00:12:26 – Rico Figliolini
You know, that’s impressive actually to me to have a company like that because that means you’re all vested in the success of the company, the products. And I’m sure that the feedback you all get at every level probably is really looked at and fed back to the team, I would imagine. So your primary audience at this point for Aviga headsets, we’re just talking gamers? Or you said before this, I think this is finding its way certainly in the high school level. What other areas is this beyond where you’ve mentioned? I mean, there’s a lot of places obviously that are using this, a lot of industries and market areas. How do you work with that? How do you find, it can’t be everywhere you could be but you know how do you market that?
00:13:14 – Mike Logan
We have different divisions within our organization and you’re right, it was originally created as this gaming centric headset with the volume control to flip to mute and then this communication centric first type of a build. And so what we have found because of that, we’re seeing even K-12 schools, they’ll use it for STEM or STEAM labs instead of just e-sports because it gives that isolated experience and kind of allows a child to immerse themselves into the audio. But we’re also seeing it in telemedicine. So just about everybody has been exposed to an online or virtual doctor’s appointment at this point. That requires clear communication and isolated experience, private audio. So we’re seeing that pick up in healthcare as well. But then in the gaming space, the real target audience for the gaming space is not necessarily the pro gamer. It’s not going to be the next Counter-Strike champion out there. What we’re targeting is the everyday gamer, someone who wants to sit down, play games casually, and just enjoy the gaming experience and communicate with their friends.
00:14:17 – Rico Figliolini
So you all were at DreamHack Dallas, then you were at DreamHack Atlanta during Georgia’s Game Week, which was an expanded week of gaming and stuff. And I mean, they’re going crazy with the expansion of how they’re doing these things now. So not just, you know, gaming, what was it? The LAN games? Or bring your own computers also? I mean, there’s so many things going on at DreamHack. Dungeons and Dragons, board games. How do you market to that? You guys had a booth and stuff, giveaways. I think you were using even some influencers or gamers. How did that work? How did you get into that? Was that successful for what you wanted to do?
00:15:03 – Mike Logan
I’ll give a big shout out to DreamHack. Just to anybody that hasn’t been, you should absolutely put that on your to-do list. DreamHack is an incredible conference, and it’s not your typical trade show of sorts. They limit the number of vendors. It’s really a festival. And so it’s more gamer-centric and not necessarily vendor-centric. Even though we’re a vendor, we have a booth there. You have to keep in mind how you want to market to people. And so what we do is we do very, very hands on demonstrations. So we have people come up. We want them to experience it so they can put the headset on. They can talk to their friend over top of the sound effects of a game and they can hear it and really appreciate that. So that’s how we chose to approach DreamHack, is really try to make it more of a user-centric experience. And it was really successful.
00:15:51 – Rico Figliolini
You’ve had e-players, e-sports players, anyone that people could recognize or content creators?
00:16:00 – Mike Logan
So I think the funniest one was we talked about the Atlanta Detonate. They signed Fatality. And Detonate had a booth at the DreamHack event as well. And we decided to have some fun. We said anybody that was able to beat Fatality in a match of Street Fighter would get a free Aviga headset. And after three days, we ended up giving out none. So that was probably one of the most fun elements of DreamHack is that nobody could beat Fatality so obviously that’s one of the names people might recognize.
00:16:37 – Rico Figliolini
That’s amazing to do a giveaway and not be able to give it away.
00:16:40 – Mike Logan
No one could beat him, so.
00:16:42 – Rico Figliolini
That’s funny. And there were a lot of people. I remember the year, even though I missed this year, the year before that, I met several people, several, I mean, such an age group, such an age range of people that have come to DreamHack from, you know, 13-year-olds to 75-year-olds that I met. I met a 75-year-old who was there with his son. So you can imagine how young was that. And he was just hanging out while his son was playing one of the games. And, you know, so you have families coming there. I met another family from Minnesota. I met the mom who was there with her 13-year-old son who was competing in Fortnite, brought his own computer, but his father had to drive the computer from Minneapolis to Atlanta that day because they didn’t want to put it on the plane because, God forbid, something happened and it broke. It was one of those bring your own computer setups. So you have a variety of people, families. I think once you start selling, quite frankly, people are funny the way they are. They’re creatures of habits to some degree, right? If they start out with certain brands when they’re younger and stuff, they tend to want to live and keep with those brands a little bit. Loyalty to that. And I know you’re in a space, education also and stuff, where it’s a competitive space too, right? So you always have to look at new technology, advancing what you have maybe you’re working with the things that are coming up like vr and stuff right? Augmented reality. I mean all this stuff is coming to play. Does any of that fit into how you guys look at the future of what you’re doing?
00:18:26 – Mike Logan
It does. You know, it’s interesting you talk about those big companies that are out there and they’re basically everybody’s trying to go for that space. Audio specifically, individual audio, is a rapidly growing market in spaces where we don’t play. Typically we don’t play in the fitness industry for example, as heavily as we do in other markets. But fitness, the individual wireless earbuds in the fitness industry, it’s a booming market. But it’s interesting that we’re not a small player in that the number of headsets we sell every year is grossly inadequate to these other companies. We’re putting out just over 14 million headsets a year or headphones a year. And when people realize that, they’re like, wait a minute, how come I haven’t heard of you? And it’s just because we don’t invest as heavily in the marketing. We’ve really just invest in keeping our costs down and then going directly after a market that we know we can make a difference in, such as, you know, I mentioned earlier dialysis. It’s a great example of somewhere that just people weren’t focusing on that, but it really was a need to say people want a headset while they’re sitting there for, you know, possibly up to an hour and, you know, there’s just nothing to do. So it’s a great example where we could offer that experience to somebody. In education, it’s similar. That we were able to offer a low cost, very durable headset. The needs of an education headset aren’t what the big guys are looking at right now. They’re looking at something that looks cool and has the flashy stuff on it. Education, if you sell to educators, they want something that’s going to last them a couple of years, give them a great experience and be affordable. I think that finding a niche and finding an area where other companies don’t play and they just don’t have the expertise, I think that’s been the key for us and it will continue to be. We’ll find opportunities. We have meetings every month, every quarter to say, what else should we be doing?
00:20:13 – Rico Figliolini
It’s amazing. I mean, you’re right about the education system. I’m so involved a bit in Gwinnett County with different things. And I can see everything gets banged around. I mean, my high school, one of my kids went to a STEM high school. And things have to be made to last a while in these school systems because they will be banged on. They will be used quite a bit. Different people will be using that headset and stuff. It’s not one person, one kid that’s using it. So I can, you know, and I’ll share something. My background is publishing and marketing, right? And I checked out and I’m looking and I’m searching and I’m checking your website and I’m checking, you guys don’t do Google AdWords really that I’ve seen. You guys are not out there. You know, there are brands out there that might have 100,000 followers, but when you zone down to who they are and the amount of engagement, you could tell that sometimes these are bought or these are not real engaged audiences and stuff. So for you to be selling 14 million products, it’s just amazing to me, considering what I see. And I’m like, they’re not really marketing they don’t, you know, I don’t see that on the web if you will. So I can tell then that it’s really a relationship thing that you guys are building. And I mean it’s just, I’m impressed that you all are doing as well as you’re doing selling a product that’s a good product then without having to do what the big boys, they’re all playing Google AdWords, they’re all doing that stuff. You apparently don’t need that.
00:21:53 – Mike Logan
It’s about authenticity and creating an experience for someone that says, let’s first solve a problem. Let’s not just create a product to see if we can sell it. And that’s oftentimes what happens, right? And it’s sad, but people create a product, they put enough money into marketing. And I used to work for an amazing CEO that told me, he used to use this saying all the time. He said, every successful company has a genius. They’re either in engineering or marketing. And it’s interesting. So many people have their genius in marketing. They have a product and they just market it really well. We try to make sure our products themselves are exceptionally well-designed. They solve a problem better than anybody else. And because of that, we don’t have to spend as much money trying to market it. We just solve a problem, present it, and people appreciate it. And that’s really what’s happened with this Aviga, right? I mean, we’re still not the biggest booth at DreamHack. You know, we’re small players off to the side, but people seem to really resonate. You get people bringing their friends back over to the booth, affiliates, pro esports teams saying, I’ve got to see this. I have to see this one more time. And we’re continuing to get this churn and this buzz around the experience.
00:23:03 – Rico Figliolini
And that’s great because people sometimes they don’t respect the price, right? They look at something and say, well, is that really good? Look at the price on it. And it’s like, well, damn, if you read the reviews, they’re very good, you know? And it’s just like, you don’t have to be a $120 headset to be good. You know, that a lot of that goes is paying for marketing. A lot of that higher, higher in money. So I can see, yeah. Do you see trends in gaming, or audio gaming changing? What emerging trends are you seeing out there? Where do you all see things going over the next five years?
00:23:44 – Mike Logan
I think that one of the issues that the gaming industry in general has faced is this economic barrier to entry that continues to exist where if you want to be a pro gamer, you need a $3,000 or $4,000 PC, a couple hundred dollars worth of monitors, an expensive headset. You need expensive gear. One of the things that I’ve seen emerging, and again, hats off to DreamHack. I think they’ve done a great job of this, is all of a sudden you’re seeing Switch tournaments and you’re seeing just mobile tournaments, which of course are out there. But you’re even seeing PlayStation 2 tournaments come back up where the economic barrier to entry is very, very low. People can afford it. And the gamers that are emerging out of the areas that are you know maybe less economically advantaged than they have been, the gamers that are emerging from these other areas are exceptional and so we’re seeing a whole nother generation of gamers a whole nother people group of gamers come up because they can now afford to compete in these other types of tournaments. And so I think that’s one of the coolest things right now that we’re seeing in the gaming industry. Of course, I’d be remiss if I said I wasn’t excited about that because we have a very budget-friendly, high-quality headset. So it fits into that same market. But I think the thing that I like is that you don’t have to have a fortune and capital to get into gaming anymore.
00:25:09 – Rico Figliolini
That almost felt like the second I was thinking of street basketball pickup games. I mean, you just need the basketball and the net. You don’t even need the net. You just need the hoop.
00:25:15 – Mike Logan
That’s right.
00:25:20 – Rico Figliolini
So, yeah, I can see that. And even the nostalgia of playing games. I think my oldest has a PS5 and he’s just like he misses some of the old games because they were immersive. I think when you get to a certain age also, you sort of find that some of the stuff that’s going on now is just too much. You almost want to get back to the basics of gaming versus being immersed sometimes in these things. They’re getting so real. Like, in fact, Unreal Engine or the software that’s out there, you could literally walk into a war game, shooting game, for a shooter that you almost, if you didn’t know, you were like right in there, in real, like, texture and everything. Yeah. Be immersed and go to heaven. So do you, as far as the company, I mean, you’ve been there a year and a half. And the team, is the team like all in-person, hybrid, remote? Are you finding the industry like that too?
00:26:35 – Mike Logan
We have a combination. We are. I think most companies have figured out that when you use remote opportunities, when you’re willing to hire a remote employee, of course, there’s always challenges that that presents. But you open yourself up to a much larger pool of talent than when you are restricted to a certain number of zip codes so people can drive in. Our company is based in Providence, Rhode Island. We’ve been very blessed to have a very good talent pool in Providence. And that’s where most of our company is still based. But our sales staff, the regional account managers, they’re remote throughout the country.
00:27:08 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. Which is good because you don’t necessarily want them in the office, right? They should be out meeting people and doing things and marketing and selling. I guess the last question I have is, you know, with the personal experiences that you all have, you know, the shaping of leadership innovation, you know, what’s happening in gaming now, the way things are changing, AI, how AI would figure into audio. Does that even come to play in audio?
00:27:42 – Mike Logan
It does. So AI has already reached audio. There’s video generation engines that allow you to take you know two or three minutes of you giving a speech and then I can generate an ai video of you saying anything that I want you to say. So there’s that technology’s already out there and of course you know I always, we’re seeing this even in, you know, I hate to go back to schools, but we’re seeing it really heavy in schools because schools are using AI in some software to do grading and students speak into their headset and how they speak, how they pronounce words is being graded by an AI engine. This is the same thing that’s going on with these AI video.But it really boils down to the quality of input from the headset or from the microphone is going to drive the efficacy of the AI engine. So audio is becoming very important. As AI continues to emerge, the engines aren’t quite sophisticated enough to recognize nuances, accents, deviations, and voice patterns. And so it becomes inherently important for the accuracy of the pickup of the microphone to input into the system.
00:28:50 – Rico Figliolini
Interesting. I didn’t even think about that aspect of it. And you’re right. I mean, every time I think about Siri getting something wrong, it’s not listening to exactly what I’m saying. And I have a bad accent, maybe. Mine’s from original Brooklyn, New York. So every once in a while it comes out and it’s like I have to recorrect stuff. So I get what you’re saying as far as that being clear, I guess. Do you have any closing thoughts of what you want to share that maybe we haven’t covered during this podcast?
00:29:24 – Mike Logan
I think the only thing that we haven’t talked about, you kind of hinted at it a little bit with DreamHack, and maybe a commercial for DreamHack is if people haven’t gone, it’s an environment. And what’s interesting about DreamHack, and I think even the industry in general, is we grew up in an era where a video gamer was almost taboo. It was a black mark. You didn’t tell people that you were a gamer because they would think less of you. That guy’s just a nerd. I mean, I was a nerd in high school because I was a gamer and it was just known, but it’s so acceptable now. And when you go to a DreamHack and you’re surrounded by 55,000 people or 40,000 people that are all okay with you being exactly who you are. And it’s such a judgment-free zone. I think the industry and DreamHack is just a representation, a manifestation of that, that fact that you can exist in a world where you are who you are and there’s no judgment. And I think that’s what’s interesting about this next generation of gamers coming up is that they don’t have to hide from it.
00:30:25 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, I like that. You’re right. I mean, and they’re welcoming. I don’t even think it matters the age level you are. We see a variety of people doing. And it just becomes a whole community. I mean, my 27-year-old, she’s playing on Fortnite and some other games as well. And she’s on Discord and she’s communicating with her friends from across the country. Such a time zone difference that sometimes I’ll find her gaming at like two in the morning. I’m like, what are you doing? You got work tomorrow. She’s like, they’re in California. It’s only 11 o’clock there. You know, it’s just like, but it is such a community of people. And they talk to each other and they share everything. I mean, you’ve got Reddit. I mean, my youngest goes to Reddit for everything. He’s like, if he needs to find out about a headset or something, he’s on Reddit and he’s checking it. He’s putting out the question. He’s looking up what everyone is saying. So, yeah. So it’s a great community. I can see that. This has been a good conversation, Mike. I enjoyed learning a bit more about Avid and your products and stuff and how you guys look at things.
00:31:36 – Mike Logan
I appreciate you having us. It was pleasant. And, you know, you’re a heck of a conversationalist. So I appreciate the format and just the casual nature of the conversation. So thank you.
00:31:46 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, thank you. And everyone else that’s listening, UrbanEBB is one of these podcasts that I do, one of several, that really talks about culture, business, politics sometimes and stuff. So I’m glad that’s over with. But it’s enjoyable talking about gaming and talking about this stuff. And it’s just, Mike, I appreciate you making time for me. Thank you again. Yeah, hang on for a second. Thank you everyone. If you like this podcast, definitely like it, subscribe to us, the subscribe button down there somewhere. Or if you’re listening to it on Spotify or iHeart or anywhere on YouTube or Facebook, wherever you’re listening to the video or the audio podcast, leave a review, leave a comment. Appreciate you all. Thank you.
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