Should this be an investment for the City/County to use the Hotel/Meal tax to increase hotel/meal revenue in the city? Could an E-Stadium be incorporated into Phase II of the Convention Center?
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Looks pretty official:
Another article from visit raleigh says:
60% of the spectators are visiting from outside the region
NC State University, Wake Tech, William Peace University and Wake County Public Schools will also be on hand showcasing their game development and simulation programs and curriculum.
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I’d like to see Raleigh partner with Epic Games to invest in more local e-sports events and maybe a venue like this new $50 million gaming arena in Philly. It can also be used for concerts, corporate events, comedy shows, and TED talks.
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could an e-stadium be part of a real stadium project?
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oh man. An e-sports arena at the end of Fayetteville Street (one-half of those surface parking lots) with a tower on top (full of tech companies) could be pretty… Epic! 
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I hope the Rainbow Six tournament is a big success this weekend in Raleigh. I am not much of a gamer and I haven’t ever watched esports, but I know it is already much larger than most people realize and is growing like crazy. I am 100% in favor of Raleigh/The Triangle growing its brand to include this because I feel like we already have something of an organic base with companies like Epic Games in the area. This may have been mentioned earlier in the thread, but earlier this year Raleigh was rated the 10th best city for gamers in the US (Wallet Hub list, so take it for what it is worth). https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-for-gamers/36270/
I believe that some of the recent and planned improvements in the Convention Center have been designed with gaming/esports in mind, so we are somewhat heading in that direction now.
In addition to the Philly esports stadium, I have read about one in Arlington, Texas. Inside Esports Stadium Arlington, North America’s Largest — and Most Flexible — Esports Venue
Definitely a growing trend, and something the city could get in on the ground floor of.
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Not just outside of Wake County but foreign. E-sports is much, much, much bigger in Europe and Asia than in North America. People are literally flying from Finland to Raleigh to attend. Ironically I’m on a ferry to Helsinki as I type this.
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Say hi to my friends in Helsinki! I’ve been there several times, and yes, once by ferry from Stockholm.
I was on flight from DC to RDU Thursday night and there where a number of people speaking German and what sounded like Scandinavian languages on flight. Kind of hope where not headed to e-sport event because would have been a really bad into to area, United flight that was due to land at 7:30pm after 5 delays and a maintenance issue made it to RDU around 2:30am.
Speaking of video games…I also think Raleigh would be a great fit for a video game museum ideally similar to Seattle’s MoPOP in terms of scope and interactivity.
Maybe Epic’s Tim Sweeney can get the ball rolling…
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I was just looking at the 2019 best places to live ranking by U.S,News & World Report, and Raleigh/Durham was ranked 10th. Respectable? Yes.
However, when digging into the 5 scores used to come up with the overall score of 7.2, something jumped out at me. Our Desirability score was only 6.0. So, I went to their methodology and, low and behold, it’s the only score that’s purely subjective. Basically, it’s a score based on asking people if they want to live in a place.
Next, I compared our Desirability Score to the number 1 and 2 cities: Austin and Denver. Austin’s score was 9.0 and Denver’s was 8.8.
Then I said to myself, “what if Raleigh/Durham’s desirability score was commensurate with its other scores?”. So, I replaced that score with the average of the objective measures, and it is enough to move us up from 10th place to 4th. If I dare give us a score of 7.9 on desirability to match our actual net migration, it moves us all the way up to 2nd place.
Bottom line, Raleigh’s opportunity is in its brand identity, and it needs to be worked on. We are right there on objective measures, but fall down on the subjective one. The net migration score for Raleigh is 7.9 (people who actually move to the area), but its perceived desirability is nearly 2 points lower.
IMO, this is the work that needs to be done.
https://realestate.usnews.com/places/north-carolina/raleigh-durham
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Hear me out here. As always, coming from a baseball perspective.
Epic teams with a baseball investor and Kane, pays for a downtown stadium without public funding and creates the first stadium build specifically for E-Gaming and Baseball. (would probably have to be retractable dome situation).
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Multi-use stadium with retractable playing fields like in Phoenix Arizona.
This is interesting, and meshes with something I felt I’ve noticed but doubted due to it being based mostly on anecdotal evidence. I have been interested in making a career change from data analysis/data viz to full-fledged software engineering (me and everyone else, right?) and thus have been continually reading about the process and where new entrants into the field are finding jobs for the past year or so.
There are regular threads on Reddit and elsewhere wherein users share where they have been hired to work in Computer Science-related jobs along with compensation and benefits to kind of give everyone on the forum a good idea of what a reasonable offer looks like, and almost no one ever posts that they are are moving to Raleigh / Durham or that they were looking at companies here. It’s even more common to hear people post that they are moving to Charlotte to do software development than it is for them to move here. Ignoring the obvious places like the SF Bay area and Seattle, people post all the time that they’ve been hired to work in Austin, Portland, Boulder/Denver, Phoenix–places with similar or sometimes lesser levels of total # of software engineers employed, and concentration (percentage of people in that job out of all jobs). I even see many more post about places like Dallas, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City… but almost never Raleigh, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone post about Durham. And there are threads on Hackernews where dozens or hundreds of companies who are hiring post their open positions, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a company from Raleigh post in one of these, but companies from Austin are all over those threads.
I’ve been wondering if that is because we have a number of schools here, so companies in the area are only hiring new grads from nearby? Our entry-level CS salaries tend to be lower here than the more well-know “non-Bay, non-Seattle tech hubs” despite our similar employment numbers, in part due to our lower cost-of-living, but I wonder if it isn’t also because companies here aren’t necessarily competing with other tech hub cities, at least for new grads. Maybe that’s how it is for most or all industries, and maybe that’s kind of harming our branding in a way, because we don’t have as many people moving here for a job and then extolling our virtues to all their friends and family back home? That’s not a comment on whether or not that’s a good or a bad thing; it’s just an observation. Maybe we want to be the hidden jewel rather than the next Austin or wherever (and it would probably keep the cost of living down as well).
Have I hit 20 characters yet?
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Raleigh Durham ranks #18 in this 25 Best Places People Are Moving To in 2019 article. It mentions a net migration of 6.76% from 2013 through 2017. That is pretty good. Somehow a lot of people know about Raleigh enough that they are moving here.
https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/slideshows/the-best-places-people-are-moving-to?slide=9
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@TedF & @Mitch
There are probably a lot of things at play here, many of which we have discussed in this community across many threads/topics. I doubt that it’s just one thing alone. I think that we all understand that Raleigh does really well across a variety of objective metrics, so why doesn’t that translate into desirability, and why doesn’t Raleigh fall off the tongue of the general populous like Austin, Seattle, Portland, Denver, etc?
If I scrape my memory, I come up with some categories of why it doesn’t. All of them are cultivated by the city itself, shaped by public perception, or attributed to our region and state. Some that come to mind are as follows:
- Raleigh is for families. While this is not a bad thing at all, it’s an exclusionary narrative that reads like “Raleigh isn’t good for singles or non familial couples”.
- Raleigh is conservative. This one baffles me to no end since the city isn’t objectively politically conservative. While I know that this may be a triggering statement, it’s important to understand that a good chunk of America’s population doesn’t have a positive opinion of the combination of Southern + conservative. that’s just a fact, not a value judgment. Specifically, Durham targets Raleigh with this narrative all the time to bolster its position in the region.
- Raleigh is boring. I suspect that this one comes from the amalgamation of a variety of other perceptions. For example, it’s not hard to come to a “boring conclusion” if you think that Raleigh is a conservative city for families.
- Raleigh is “North Carolina”. I’m not trying to say that NC isn’t represented in Raleigh. I’m just saying that everything that’s coming out of NC (often politically) is a reflection of Raleigh. To add to that, it doesn’t help that the legislation happens in Raleigh, despite the body politic being reflective of the entire state. Austin seems to have transcended Texas politics, but Raleigh doesn’t seem to be there yet. It may be because Austin has branded itself for decades as “weird” and that brand is strong enough balance the state’s politics. Who knows? Nashville is another capital city that has transcended its state’s image, and they too have a strong brand identity.
- Raleigh has let Durham control the Triangle’s narrative. I’ve watched this one for years and years. “Durham is the foodie city”. “RTP is in Durham”. “Durham is cool”. “Durham is more urban”. “Durham is more hip”. These are all curated messages that are repeated over and over and over with no pushback from Raleigh.
Raleigh also stood by while Durham basically stole the traveling Broadway show business. - Raleigh is insular. The city has been successful for so many years that it looks inward and rests on its laurels. While Dix Park has the potential to be something really, really transformational in the coming decades, there’s not one thing that I can really think of that Raleigh has done lately that I would call leading edge, risky, inspirational, or aspirational. The things we have done are not unique. Everyone has food halls now. Everyone has co-working incubators. Everyone is building more housing in their cores. Everyone has festivals. We’re doing a lot of things that other cities are doing but they aren’t differentiating Raleigh or raising the profile of the city.
In the 1950s, Raleigh built Dorton Arena. It was an architectural wonder/marvel. Also in the 1950s, the bold step toward establishing RTP was taken by local and state leaders. In the 1970s, Raleigh and Wake County took the bold step to consolidate the schools into a single system. Also in the 1970s, Raleigh was the first majority white Southern city to elect an African American mayor. Later in that decade, Raleigh elected its first female to lead the city. These were all impactful game changers that really moved the needle forward for the city, but where are today’s examples?
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Mimosas before noon on Sunday ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Bull City.
Bit ironic we’re importing culture from Durham–they’ll never let this down. Isn’t one of the South Raleigh project incorporating a new cider maker as well?
I don’t know who Bill is, but I fixed my post. LOL
I believe you’re right that a Cidery is a part of SoHi?
Yeah… as much as I enjoy Bull City Cider’s … cider, I am not too happy about them moving into Raleigh. Look- I think Durham is a cool place, but I’m growing tired of all the Durham love that talks about Durham as if it’s literally Brooklyn.
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