Why Game Over Network?
Buckle in, I’m laying it on the line here, so come on a journey with me.
During the Montreal Canadiens’ Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Final during the pandemic playoffs of 2021, with so few fans allowed in the stands, when games ended and television broadcasts flipped immediately to other programming, I realized there were fans being left behind.
Canadian English broadcasters have failed miserably for years to make a compelling postgame show format for hockey games. Radio postgame shows exist, but they haven’t improved that format in decades.
The idea sprang to mind; a live, interactive broadcast built around the fans themselves, delivering an experience tailored to younger fans that aren’t served by traditional media. Before long, the concept of Game Over Montreal had been solidified.
Soon, the concept became a plan that was more grandiose, expanding to every hockey market in Canada, with a focus not only on creating a premium quality program for fans, but also to employ people trying to break into the hockey media industry from all sorts of backgrounds that aren’t well represented in our media ecosphere.
Despite a 26 per cent year over year growth rate after a debut season with over 900,000 views on YouTube, the company we started with ran into financial issues, and we were cut. After meeting with our team, we decided what we were doing was important enough to try on our own.
Media & audiences are changing
Hockey media has always been relatively monolithic, it’s only in recent years that women have been on hockey broadcasts regularly. Yet, the fastest growing cohort of hockey obsessives is young women. In spite of that fact, reactionary elements in media have been pushing hard to create a viewing experience that alienates the audience outside of a very specific group.
Between drowning us in sports betting, invasive advertisements during play, the continued barstoolification of the discussions on broadcasts, mass layoffs, and frankly an unwillingness to challenge orthodoxy; legacy media appears determined to ignore trends and chase away people who just want to enjoy the sport.
Audiences are getting younger, more diverse, and more progressive, while legacy media gets more conservative, more exploitative, and more openly complicit in the worst parts of hockey that have been exposed in recent years.
Through the style of content produced in legacy media, the words that are said, and the audiences those corporations chase, the not-so-subtle messaging is that there’s only one type of hockey fan. We reject that.
Hockey is a beautiful sport, and anyone can fall in love with it. Most of us don’t fit nicely into a little box designed in a corporate board room, which means most of us are looking for something that isn’t provided.
Young fans want more accessible media, they want more interactive media, they want to feel represented and valued, and they want to feel good about what kind of entertainment they’re consuming. Legacy media ticks none of those boxes.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman himself has mentioned multiple times that the multimedia environment that we live in is much different than the dominance of the television age. What the future of hockey broadcasting looks like could be radically different in a very short time.
The question is, do you trust the corporations who have already profit leached an entire industry into the ground, to have the creativity to seize the changing mediums and audiences? Or are you ready for something new?
Why us, why me?
Our core group has already built a lesser version of what we’re aiming for, going from nothing to over 900,000 views in a season with a with minimal social promotion, and zero advertising dollars. We are a group of educated, passionate, dynamic teammates, dedicated to making things better.
Personally, I have been a builder my entire career in this business. From building Habs Eyes on the Prize from a website that accrued ~86,000 pageviews per month when I took over as manager, to over 1,300,000 per month when I left two and a half years later, building a roster of contributors that ended up as professional scouts, journalists, NHL team employees, coaches, and even a Stanley Cup winner. The community we built over a decade ago remains strong today.
From there, I was the seventh employee at Canadian sports analytics provider Sportlogiq when it was a start-up in an incubator, where I was first a consultant, then the public face of their media division. In just a few months, we went from an unknown, to holding broadcasting and digital contracts with RDS and Sportsnet. Now, Sportlogiq is among the dominant sports analytics companies on the global stage.
From there, I started Game Over, which grew into Game Over Network.
Our Vision
It’s easy to say you’ll be different, but how will Game Over Network be the space for this venture? Our core infrastructure will drive us forward.
Game Over Network is designed to first and foremost empower young journalists and broadcasters to create. As we grow, the plan is to transition fully to a worker-owned co-operative organization that values the individual autonomy and creativity of each person in the company, while focusing on a community-based, fan-first production strategy.
By giving our people the ability to create what they want, how they want, we will make good on the promises of representation so many corporations commit to on the surface. We’re not just saying we’ll do better, we’re bringing people of all different backgrounds into the fold to make decisions, not just pose for photo ops for the company website. We are determined to be a space where people can grow professionally, acquiring and mastering new skills as we grow together.
This means our contributors can wear their hearts on their sleeves and connect with audiences instead of condescending to them. When a game ends, people want to feel together because as silly as it may be, we care about this sport. That collective feeling of emotion and entertainment is why so many are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to watch a game in person, while watching on TV would give better sightlines. The fact is though, the vast majority of us watch from home. You deserve community too!
Part of the community-based approach is to partner with small, local companies in each market, providing them with an affordable advertising space to directly interact with young fans, creating a reciprocal relationship where our audience is exposed to local businesses they will want to support.
This means no sports betting, no AI generated content, no othering, and a willingness to be honest about big issues. It means investing in every market with local contributors, not just Toronto. In today’s media environment, that makes early cash harder to come by, but we are not after the same partners.
Our building blocks of live broadcasting, interactive post-game analysis from passionate, local journalists, broadcasters, and analysts who are part owners in Game Over Network are only step one. We have enough national media outlets headquartered out of Toronto, it’s time for something different.
Vibe with us
Media is changing rapidly, and part of what makes Game Over Network special is that we straddle the accessibility of new media with the structure, forethought, and nostalgic, distinctly Canadian aesthetics of the old.
Design work has been done both in house and through Canadians fan and Ottawa-based artist Dave Murray.
Our intro, designed by Charlie Arsenault from Game Over Ottawa, cycles through the individual logos for each market as a heart beats, skates cut into ice, and voice actor Steena Carey references the classic Canadian television series Reboot, warning of an ‘Incoming Game Over”.
When the show begins, our overlay designed by Dave Murray and Maude Schoblocher brings the rink home with jumbotron-style design, including a score clock that keeps track of what segment of the show we’re in, and boards along the bottom that are natural spaces for our partners.
Each contributor’s camera is separated by a custom-designed stick shaft local to the market, which can also fit perfectly with a partner who sells equipment.
Our Game Over logo, initially designed by Jesse Blake, then re-designed by Dave Murray and me, features a skull whose features resemble a classic console controller, a nod to both the history of live streaming largely being built upon video games, and the popularity of NHL video games.
Each show consists of four segments.
The first period is all about the emotions of the game. Audience members who tune in live are encouraged to vent or celebrate in the chat in a highly interactive conversation.
The second period we dig in with analysis, forecasting and breaking down how and why things played out as they did.
The third period is a topic of the host’s choice, followed by overtime, where the audience is free to ask questions that weren’t related to the previous three segments.
As the show ends, you hear the sound of a VHS tape ejecting from a VCR as static envelops the screen and the heartbeat from the intro slows down and fades out, and the program ends.
Each segment of the show is bridged by a custom made advertisement for our partners that combines our aesthetic with theirs, giving a personal touch and non-invasive approach to advertising.
Year One
When we were laid off in 2024, I took some time for myself, and realized that I had burned myself out a long time ago, and had been forcing myself to keep going, running on fumes. The break to focus on myself allowed me to make incredible progress physically and in terms of mental health, and frankly I felt invincible.
I was exercising multiple hours per day, dealing with multiple entrepreneurial investment organizations for months, volunteering in political campaigns, community organizing, parenting two young kids, being a good partner, building the business itself, and learning French. All this while trying to learn how to run a business on the fly.
Les progrès que j'ai réalisés dans l'apprentissage du français ont été particulièrement gratifiants, car j'ai pu commencer à comprendre beaucoup mieux les médias francophones. Je comprends encore très lentement le français, j'écris probablement comme un enfant et je parle comme l'inspecteur Clouseau de Steve Martin, mais je m'améliore.
However, as things got less stable economically with our neighbour to the south, we faced multiple 11th hour rug pulls of funding, and I realized how much I would have to do during the season behind the scenes while attempting to manage seven local markets and a national channel.
That invincible feeling left very quickly.
I took on way too much, and realized that I had isolated myself while trying to build community. You can’t be a good leader if you can’t even breathe.
The incredible people within Game Over Network, most of whom had never done anything like this before, carried the season with far less support than there should have been.
Hindsight might say I should have started slower and only launched Montreal, but we had already done this before, starting over again already felt like starting slow. Prioritizing my own market while selling the idea of representation would have been disingenuous, in my opinion.
This year we have to be smaller in order to maintain our focus, ready to expand when we meet our funding goals.
Support
If you want to support us in our venture to modernize hockey coverage, building a sustainable, non-exploitative space for sports reporters, broadcasters, journalists, and analysts who deserve opportunities that don’t exist in the industry currently, there’s lots of ways to help us.
First and foremost; your time and interaction are key. Every share, every like, every comment, helps us grow in the algorithmically gatekept media world we live in now. Subscribing to our channels on youtube, or our social media channels will help us grow.
Joining our discord community will help us engage with you to build the media you want to see, and get to know our contributors.
As I alluded to earlier talking about learning from mistakes, help is always appreciated to. If you have skills, time, and you want to help us build something special, you can always send an email to info@thegameovernetwork.com.
If you want to support us monetarily, our Patreon that is run by Michael Czar, where there are lots of perks and bonuses. You can also check out our merch designed by Game Over Winnipeg’s Brady Chalus to support us everywhere you go.
If you run a small business in Canada and want to become a partner we can work with to help each other, please reach out to info@gameovernetwork.com!
If you really believe in us and have the capacity to become an investor in this project, please reach out to info@gameovernetwork.com!
Game Over Network is much more than a business, it’s an idea, it’s a commitment. Let’s build something special.
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