Alumnus turns a youthful passion into a thriving esports business

With his mother as his partner, gamer-turned-entrepreneur Joseph Moseley, B.S.B.A ’19, has built a flourishing business in the booming and ultracompetitive esports industry.
Alumnus turns a youthful passion into a thriving esports business
Joseph Moseley and Catherine Sarrett at Scrims Esports Gaming Center, in Lisle, Ill.

When Joe Moseley arrived at the University of Miami in 2015, he attended Canefest, the student involvement fair held by the Committee on Student Organizations near the beginning of each academic year. His first stop was the table for the Video Game Club.

An avid gamer from a young age, Moseley had gotten interested in esports – organized multiplayer video game competitions – in high school. “I had started playing more serious esports titles, following tournaments and pro players, watching the [live] streams,” he recalled. “So, at Canefest I went to the video game club and mentioned that I play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), which is one of the biggest esports titles in the world.”

That initial encounter led Moseley, a marketing major in Miami Herbert Business School, to join four other students for regular CS:GO sessions. “We started practicing and practicing and then eventually we played in team competitions and tournaments, as a club sport,” he said.

Competitive gaming is big business, and it has grown explosively in the past decade. Projections by Newzoo, the esports industry’s leading market forecaster and analyst, have global esports revenue approaching $2 billion this year. Twitch, one of the leading live streaming platforms for gamers, averages 2.5 million viewers at any given time. All that is still a small fraction of the total video gaming market, leaving esports with huge untapped growth potential.  

Major brands have gotten into the action, sponsoring professional teams and tournaments. In 2019, the year Moseley graduated, the League of Legends World Championship attracted a global audience whose size rivalled that of the Super Bowl.

At the University of Miami, the Department of Wellness and Recreation has a flourishing esports program that has attracted hundreds of student members and currently sponsors three student teams.

In one of his classes at Miami Herbert, Moseley was assigned a project that involved creating a business concept, including a marketing plan. The assignment yielded an idea that Moseley and his mother, Catherine Sarrett, have turned into a real-life business, a 6,000-square-foot esports gaming center in Lisle, Ill., outside Chicago, called Scrims Esports Gaming Center.

As Moseley, who is director of operations, put it, “opening a business is a lot harder than making a Google Slides presentation.” After graduating from the U, he initially worked in digital marketing but soon was thinking again about his esports idea.

Throughout the fall of 2019, Moseley and Sarrett, who owns a consulting firm that advises clients in the sports and entertainment industries, brainstormed ways to bring Moseley’s concept to fruition.

“We started looking at properties and developing a business plan,” Moseley said. “And three weeks before everything got locked down in March of 2020, I quit my job. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, I would have had to work from home anyway.”

Instead, Moseley spent his time during lockdown working with his mom on refining their plan. “COVID delayed us six months,” Sarrett said, “but it really gave us the opportunity to really plan and think about how we wanted to do this.”

Moseley and Sarrett dodged a significant lockdown-related challenge: obtaining the right computers and peripherals in enough quantity to open Scrims Center’s doors to paying customers. “We actually got very lucky with getting all of our equipment because we had ordered it before all the supply chain issues and chip [shortages] hit,” Sarrett recalled.

Opened finally in January 2021, Scrims Center – the name is gamer-speak for scrimmage, or practice game – represents a quantum leap from the video arcades of old. With its mix of high-end gaming computers and consoles, fiber internet, and virtual reality hardware, the center offers access to dozens of popular game titles. The goal, according to Moseley, is to offer customers a gaming experience they wouldn’t necessarily get at home.

All ages and skill levels are catered for, with kid-friendly titles and activities, including game lessons and summer camps, available alongside live and online tournaments and leagues for competitive gamers. Customers pay by the hour or through monthly memberships.

Having been through the experience of planning and launching the business, Moseley is clear-eyed about what it takes to carve out a profitable niche in the esports ecosystem. “There are a lot of big statistics that get thrown around about how many people play games and watch games,” he said. “And people get starry-eyed about how much potential there is in esports. It’s new, there are so many great ideas, a lot of people trying different things, and a lot of failure, and nobody knows what’s going to be the next big thing. You just have to sit back and be patient.”

Patience and a relentless focus on providing an optimal gaming experience have paid off for Moseley and Sarrett. Beyond its core—and very loyal—customer base, Scrims Center also hosts birthday parties, evening wine tastings, and school and park district camps. They recently arranged to be a rainy-day alternative for a Chicago-area nonprofit that provides outdoor adventure experiences to teen refugees.

“I can always tell when someone walks into our place for the first time,” Sarrett said. “Especially a kid because their eyes are so big. More than once we’ve heard, as a kid walks in the door, ‘I’m in heaven.’ It’s nice when they get so excited.”