EVO GM explains how fighting game event found success in its biggest challenge

We got the chance to ask EVO’s General Manager, Rick Thiher, about his thoughts on the fighting game event becoming the largest esports tournament in the world and his biggest challenge moving the gathering to a new venue after years of making its home in the Mandalay Bay.

EVO is the proverbial Mecca of fighting game culture. Thousands of players from across the globe flock to Las Vegas, Nevada every summer for a weekend of community and competition, making memories that will last a lifetime.

In 2023, the event reached record-breaking attendance numbers with over 9,000 registered players. In 2024, they smashed that record, boasting over 10,000 registered players on top of additional spectators. 

It’s a good thing that EVO was moved to the Las Vegas Convention Center this year — but despite their best efforts, hundreds of players still couldn’t make it into the arena to watch the action on Sunday Finals, waiting in a long line outside the doors hoping for a chance to get in.

In fact, EVO has officially become the biggest open-bracket esports event in the world as of 2024… something that astounded its General Manager, Rick Thiher.

“It’s kind of dumbfounding, to be honest,” he told us. “It’s interesting getting into a position where really, the only open-bracket competitions in the world at this point that scale up beyond where we’re at are poker, and there are cities dedicated to the infrastructure around poker.

“We’re in Las Vegas, and being without that infrastructure and still hitting that scale is almost a validation of the fandom. It’s a celebration of how far that fandom has come, how much more of it is present, and that they haven’t lost the spirit of competition that this show was originally rooted in.”

With a new venue comes new challenges. Adjusting the event to fit inside a larger area without any columns separating individual booths, tournament spaces, and more was the biggest difficulty for Rick and the team when it came to envisioning EVO in the Convention Center.

“One of the biggest challenges, ironically, was the absence of columns,” he explained. “The Mandalay Bay had a lot of columns in the space that we used. This has significantly fewer. We’d learned to compartmentalize parts of the show around the column spread, because you can only put a booth here. You can only put an exhibit here. You can only put the tournament here.

“With the floor plan being more open, all of a sudden, it’s okay. We have removed that limitation, but we don’t know what that does to the vibe on the show floor. We don’t know whether when you’re walking in now, the compartmentalization of the artist alley versus the exhibitors area versus the publisher’s area versus the tournament area.

“Are those going to feel appropriately sized? Too small, too big? You can see farther without any interruption. Does your brain go, ‘I want to go do that later. It’s too far to walk right now.’  

Luckily, Rick believes that EVO will once again make its home in the Las Vegas Convention Center, allowing the team to improve upon this year’s experience with what they’ve learned.

“The nice part is, I’m pretty confident we’re gonna get to do this again here. So, we’ll be able to iterate that, refine that, make sure that those sensations walking around the show floor aren’t negatively impactful. That’s been one of the most challenging pieces, just figuring out how and where everything’s supposed to go.”

One major difference between the Mandalay Bay and the Convention Center is the absence of the Michelob ULTRA Arena. There was something special about witnessing fighting game history go down in that grandiose space that added a certain kind of magic to EVO, and players were worried that without this particular element, it just wouldn’t feel the same.

We asked Thiher how he managed to recreate the feeling of the ULTRA Arena in the Convention Center, which was packed to the gills come Sunday night for Street Fighter 6’s Top 6.

For Rick, finding a way to set up stadium seating to meet capacity and finding the right visual flourishes from the Michelob Arena were paramount to this year’s EVO Finals experience.

“I don’t want to say it was more challenging than expected, but trying to maintain the visuals was more labor-intensive than we anticipated,” he admitted. “When you go to an arena, there’s usually an LED ribbon around the arena that has a display that’s usually partnerships and advertisements, but the value on camera is its color.

It forces a sense of distance. You lose that in a convention center immediately. Figuring out whether or not we could come up with enough LED panels to replicate that look, whether we could rig it in the space and angle it in a way that still gets the same impact. 

“It was time-consuming. Fun, but time-consuming. And particularly great to be able to see it on camera, because the ribbon is doing what it’s supposed to do. It helps this feel a lot closer to what Michelob Ultra was.”

At the end of the night, Thiher hopped onto the main stage to announce what’s next for EVO. As promised at last year’s event, it’s expanding from its status as two of the world’s biggest fighting game tournaments into a global brand, featuring iterations in France, Los Angeles, and even Singapore, with more on the horizon.

With these new events, Rick hopes to expand upon what EVO started out as; a gathering of passionate fighting game players coming together in a single space to share what they love.

“EVO has come to be what it is today in part because 24 years ago, World Warriors started to exist,” he said. “You had players coming from everywhere to have rally points, ‘this is where we’re going to get together to celebrate exactly one thing’. 

“EVO became an event in that regard. I’d like EVO to be a World Warrior II. I’d like us to commit to being part of how this all developed, where this developed from. It’s why being in Japan in general and engaging with the literal birthplace of the genre makes a ton of sense. 

“That’s not the only place in the world that has cultivated very, very large communities. And it’s not the only place in the world where those communities have generated their own chunk of the larger culture that the genre is part of.”

There’s nothing quite like the fighting game community, and there’s no better example of this fiery passion, this pure, unadulterated love for a thing, than EVO. In Rick’s capable hands, fighting games are getting the shine they deserve — and he’s far from finished in his quest to bring the genre to the rest of the world.