eSports Day: Building eSports: Twitch, Rocket League, and H1Z1: King of the Kill

[Music] welcome to building eSports my name is Nick Allen I work at which I'm also joined by Chris from daybreak the executive producer on h1z1 so we're going to be talking over all for about an hour I'll be talking about twenty minutes or so then open up to the for you guys for questions but really the takeaway at least from my presentation is hopefully walk out of here was sort of a holy [ __ ] moment of hey there's a lot that goes into eSports as a whole and I think what you see for the most part in eSports are these top-level leagues on Twitch or on some other platform but underneath these top-level leagues are a bunch of moving parts and my hope is I can just highlight this again just so you guys have an idea of like what goes into building eSports and today I'm going to be doing that through the lens of rocket League so twitch probably about a year ago now entered

into a partnership with psionics to help build rocket League eSports rocket league was a title that came out of nowhere surprised a lot of people and has a lot of potential had a lot of potential so I'll be talking a little bit about that and about our partnership and again all these moving parts and again this is a picture I used to work at riot I pulled this off Twitter someone put double horns on me I thought it would be a good icebreaker so one caveat really quick Chris and I were talking about who wanted to go first and I wanted to go first because my slides are really terrible and I figured his slides are probably really good I've played a break games so let's talk about the agenda really quick so I have a friendly reminder for you guys and I'm going to talk about identifying eSports potential twitch has an eSports department and the eSports department itself focuses on building partnerships with game companies around eSports ultimately to help them make better decisions around their titles in the

eSports space and our department was born out of a lot of different entities a lot of different gaming companies coming to twitch and asking like how do I do this thing how do I do it right and seeing a bunch of other titles just not being successful in the space we call that the eSports graveyard but essentially that is people coming in and throwing a bunch of money at probably the wrong things in eSports and you see these titles just dip and disappear you never hear from them again and we'll call them out by name but you probably have some in mind of like something that blew up and then instantly disappeared twitch we want longevity and sustainability in the eSports space quite selfishly honestly because we think that if eSports are successful they're going to be on twitch and more people are going to watch it and that's good for us but it's just good for the space in general and we just want to grow the thing to be as big as we can so I'll be talking about eSports potential and how at twitch we identify that I'll talk about the goal we generally have one big goals we think about eSports at

twitch as when we think about these partnerships and then we're talking about growing the ecosystem and again want you guys to look at all the moving parts and think about sort of the complexity that comes in building a sustainable successful eSport but first a friendly reminder on the spelling of youth sports so you don't capitalize the M and email so why the hell would you capitalize s in eSports it looks weird when you put it the front of a sentence you have to cap the letters in a row sort of undermines the brand a little bit to please advocate for the correct line thank you very much if you walk away with one thing from this presentation the friendly reminder of how to spell it you sports correctly okay so talking about identifying potential so we talked to a lot of different game companies and they come to us and they like hey I want to do eSports and they don't have a clear understanding of what that is or why it's cool or what it's

about or anything and so we come in and we assess the game and we try to give recommendations on what they should do how they can improve which they should be thinking about and the amount that we sort of investing and sort of partner with them depends on do we think that the game has a lot of potential in the eSports space and so the way that we evaluate that is the game have a high skill ceiling and does it have some features that allow for a competitive culture around the game so private matchmaking to be surprised a lot of game companies come to us and like hey we want to do an eSports like well you have no way for one person or one team to play against another team sort of like on demand so that's the first thing you're going to need in order to be able to create a competitive culture around your game and and that M goes for things like the private matchmaking custom game rules can the community - sigh like what's competitive and what what's the highest

level of competition around the game and then the leaderboards are also a really important piece that we look at is there this aspirational path to being the best player in the world again it goes back to this idea is there a competitive culture rocket League does these things extremely well there is there is a huge competitive community that aspires to be the best in the world also identifying the potential so we look at is there an existing and growing grassroots community so these are examples of grassroots competitions and organizations that existed before psionics and Twitch partnered for rocket League things like rocket Royale rocket league central this is a geek core running this rocket League tournament as well what these indicate is that people want to compete and people want to organize tournament those are two brutally important pieces of a holistic eSport ecosystem we forget we think much about the production company the developer and the game company maybe the

broadcasting platform but you forget about the tournament organisers oftentimes and the aspirational path to being a tournament organizer content creators there are a bunch of small players that are important in the growth of this holistic ecosystem and this indicates that something is happening that there could be more and so this is one of the big things that we look for when we think about identifying potential in an eSports title and then lastly and almost most importantly is does the game company have an appetite to and there's two ways that they can do this one is cash money are they willing to put up prize money that is aspirational and interesting to players are they willing to support and create sustainability are they willing to take potentially some of their revenue that they're making on in-game items and pass that down to the players and the teams are they willing to do that oftentimes we talk to game companies they don't

realize how much money they need to invest to be able to get this thing off the ground and be sustainable long term and oftentimes you're like hey well you should do this event and you should do this other event should do all these other things like well we have a marketing budget for one small event in this in this one city and that's all we can do the whole year that is in a sustainable long-term plan and so this is a really big part and the second thing is and it's very closely related bandwidth resource engineering resources are you willing as an entity of the company to invest in creating cool compelling things in the game that support your eSports efforts and this can also feed into this sort of revenue aspect too but it's often times companies aren't willing to change their roadmap to accommodate this eastwards ecosystem that is super important to the competitive culture around their game and so one of the first things that we ask when we talk to a game company is you know how big are you willing to go

if this thing gets enormous are you willing to support it and what are your engineering resources your internal resources that you're willing to utilize to support the things that you're doing so again very very important things that we think about when we identify you know potential opportunities in eSports so bring this back to rock league and psionics ionics is an amazing partner to twitch around the rocket league championship series and around eSports and it was clear very early though they were a small studio they were willing to invest whatever they needed to do to help this thing be successful to help it be sustainable and that showed us that we could do something with them long term it would be interesting and we think it would be successful and we're going to talk a little about all the different things that we've done so that's identifying potential we've done and talking about the goal going back this idea of like the eSports graveyard people generally have a top-down approach game companies

generally the top-down approach and they think about eSports I know Chris will have some things to say about this and some really good things to thinking about just let's create a top level event for the best players in the world we'll throw a bunch of money at it and then that's it and then you have an entire playerbase that wants more that desires more around the game that you're forgetting about that you aren't supporting so it's important to have a really holistic view of supporting the east board and so talking about rocket League in the way that we've done that so we have the top level League which is the rocket League championship series we're on our season three right now and we've had a lot of success I could do an entire presentation on just the top level league but to give you an idea of what goes into this we have one person at twitch fully dedicated to the scheduling of the of the league and also the rules that's all this person does is a full-time job supporting our rule set supporting our schedule working with teams and players to resolve conflict

and that is just one small aspect of a giant massive league so when you think about even a bigger league like the League of Legends Championship Series that has a staff of like 120 people to support that initiative you start to understand how big these things can be and how many moving parts are talking about production stage design hospitality all these different moving pieces and all the teams that you need to have to support these things we're also investing heavily in caster development these are the storytellers of the eSport they are the faces of the game in many ways and of the eSport too so these are all the casters for this is season one the broadcast talent all of these people are hand-picked out of the community to come in and then we're mentored and cultivated to be the professionals that you see today and many times this is what people think about these guys are the people that they think about when they think about rocket League and they need to be able to represent the league themselves players the brand everything

extremely well if you have an amazing league but your casters are not talented or toxic or a bunch of different things you can undermine the entire thing so this is someone foundational piece that you have to develop and we have twitch and soundex we have people fully dedicated to growing the professionalism and talent of the rocketing championship series in AB rocket we passed the pro so this is a really really important aspect a lot of people don't think about we think about football professional football you and you think about what it takes to be a professional and how you get there there is a clear path for you you play a peewee football and then you play in middle school than high school and college and the New York Pro for many east boards do you say how do I get in this top level competition people have no idea there's no clear aspirational path for people to look at and say how do I get there I have no idea and and so they just they stop

trying Pat the pro is an extremely important point and with the rocket league championship series we utilize an open qualifier every every season to qualify in the next round of teams our first or second season had over six thousand teams sign up for the rocket League Championship qualifier if you think about there's three to four players on every team's you're talking roughly about 20,000 rocket League players that you have to manage over the course of one to two weeks and we have a full staff of Sonic's and twitch employees six seven eight people in a war room over the course of a weekend running this tournament and all the moving parts with 20,000 players and as the amount of people and as the prestige Rises for the our LCS and more people start playing rocket League the more people are going to be entering the thing the more challenging that comes but with that in mind it's an important piece again that aspirational path of

growing becoming a professional is really really important narrative development the storylines are an interesting piece our important piece of eSports and something often overlooked why do you care as a viewer why do you care about these players in these teams eSports doesn't have the regional alliances or the regional rivalries that we see in traditional sports so you need something else something to care about and be passionate about and these types of stories help build that narrative help build up the celebrity and fame of these players and make it interesting for the fan be like hey this is why I follow chrono V the best player in the world in rocket League and again just very very important stuff as you think about why should you watch eSports and why should you care so for these particular for these particular pieces we flew out to the houses of the the players a full production crew

interviewed then learned about their stories and what they're about talk to their families about hey what was it like when he you know wouldn't leave his room and play rocket League everyday for 10 hours and now he's making thousands of dollars playing the game we capture that we recreated but it takes an entire team dedicated traveling to build these types of these types of stories and to build this narrative around rocket League another really big piece is the live events again I could do an entire presentation on anything especially the live events but we did our last season two grand finals in Amsterdam we had 1200 people at 10 you sold tic we sold out tickets I think in two weeks maybe a little bit less than that but there are a million moving parts to a live event from stage designs hospitality to hotel booking to transportation to visas are a huge topic now in eSports how do you get players from other countries into the u.s. to play when it isn't recognized as an official sport by many by many organizations right these are all huge

hurdles that you have to overcome that are important when coordinating a live event of this size the investment for these can scale anywhere from you know $50,000 to millions and millions of dollars but the amount of work that goes into these things is astounding putting on a massive live event i coordinating all these players and I'll attach to the the personal struggles I've had of coordinating 50 you know 16 to 18 year old players internationally moving them over to am strand can be very very challenging and then regional expansion and really how I should phrase this is go to where the players are Oceania is where we've expanded the rocket League championship series in season three because that's where there is a passionate fan base of players a big group of players as well that demand they're just really really demanding a professional competition around rocket league in their region and

every time you expand you run into the challenges of can my rule set be legally enforced in this region how do i how do I do international play with these regions how do you build a weap that is culturally relevant to the player base that's unique to this region - so they're all of these things pop up and become extremely challenging as you think about regional expansion and you can expect you know in our partnership with psyonix run rocket league I will continue to expand and will continue to have teams fully dedicated of thinking about like how do we go into Brazil how do we go into all these other regions that have all these unique challenges and then lastly I think the the one one more major piece is for us anyways is event placement or /t o support how do we crowdsource competitive play how do we get more people involved in running tournaments and playing in tournaments and again creating a competitive culture

around the game is super super important now I can't tell you where we're going to know some stuff pretty soon but a big part of our work is hey tournament organizer what do you think about rocket league what is interesting to you what a sponsor's thing like all these different things and advocating to have this at all of these major eSports events get it there get more eyeballs on it is in a really important point again just driving engagement is really important so I talked about like five or six things I just scratching the surface as to the amount of work and the amount of things that are moving when you create a holistic eSports ecosystem I haven't even hit on all the content that's created around this I'm hit on the web development needs that need to happen hospitality and travel they're a bunch of moving pieces with fully dedicated staff to resolving you know to addressing all these different pieces of eSports so again it's all an effort to

support a holistic system it would be much easier for us to do you know two or three major events a year and really throw all of our resources into that and then forget about all these other pieces but in doing that we wouldn't have the results that we do and so this is just from we I pulled this from an infographic that we have around the season 2 world championship for the rocket championship series twenty four point two million minutes watched over a million unique viewers 1200 live attendance three point nine million Twitter impressions these are all this is a result of this holistic approach to eSports and a really important piece too without all these things we do not believe we would be where we are today and we see these numbers continuing excuse me continuing to grow over time and as we continue to expand to different regions as we continue to expand our efforts and the prestige of the RFS continues to grow we imagine

these numbers are continued to go up you can find this actually the infographic from season two on our our LCS Twitter account and again like we're seeing even larger numbers for season three as we venture into that too so that's again that's a super high level I've kind of every been talking for 20 minutes there are a bunch of moving parts and really again my takeaway for you is you guys are seeing probably a broadcast or production on Twitch but below the surface of that you know when we're talking about ESL events we're talking about all these different tournament organizers there are insanely huge staff supporting these massive events in many cases much larger than we have dedicated our LCS and if you take shortcuts in eSports you will find yourself as a game company and the sports graveyard you need to be thinking about a holistic approach that touches all of these pieces plus more and so

after this presentation after Chris speaks at 11:00 I'll be out in the hog I would love to talk to you guys and talk more if you have questions about this i'ma open the mic here in a second too but again just thinking about it's much much bigger much bigger than what you're seeing on Twitch and in order to be successful you need to have a lot of resources dedicated to supporting this effort all right so thank you very much I want over a professor hey hey okay so when you are trying to organize an event you're also organizing many of their own regional events leading up to the major at what point you decide to partner with existing events eSport events like Dreamhack or pax or whatnot of vs. go and create your own event that's dedicated to the one game yeah it's really good question so in our case what we generally do is we RFP will request proposals from people in the ecosystem

like hey we're thinking about doing this event how would you do and what's your take right and so then we weigh those proposals against like what what is it going to take and what is it going to cost to do it in-house right what are the what's the the comparison that we make is it worth it for us to do it do we expect a better fan experience higher viewership what's the marketing marketing pool from these organizations so we're weighing all of this value before we would move forward with something like that but generally it's a big question like do you want to continue to grow the ecosystem potentially or grow other term and organizers the cost of maybe them not investing as much as you would do it in-house so there's all these trades that you're making by either doing it in-house or externally and you have to figure out what's right for you based on again this value proposition that's in front of you okay and it's a corollary fistrick up what as an event organizer myself what is it that I could do to get more companies and more eSport tournament to happen at my event that's a good question so generally when we

think about who we're going to partner with it determine organizer we look at their track records we look at what have they done and have they been able to how have they done with the resources that they have and if they've shown that they've been able to do a lot with you know potentially in some cases limited resources is our contribution going to bring them to a new level is it going to help them be more successful or do we think that they can be they have the opportunity or they have the they have the capacity to actually sort of level themselves up to a point where you think it's worth supporting them so my recommendation for you would be to run events and prove yourself and I'm not sure how many you've done and try to do something small that is indicative of your capability and from there start requesting more support from the game company or other tournament organizers to help support your event based on your track record of success thank you hi

hello so I'm a member of the competitive fighting games community and one thing I've noticed is that there's actually been a push back towards the concept of eSports the point where it's almost seen with like a negative connotation because they see it as corporate kind of messing with grassroots events enforcing rule changes trying to clean up the community to make it look better towards advertisers and sponsors so what do you think is the best approach for a company that's kind of dealing with a community that doesn't necessarily want them to be involved yeah really good question I've actually experienced this I used to work for a company called the IGN pro league a few years back and we actually tried to East fortify the fgc for a while we we did a show with Mike Ross and some other things in it was not received very well so we learned a valuable lesson there more than anything I think sponsors and organizations want to be authentic to

the space and so what is authenticity to that GC if I'm a sponsor and I want to come in and support your event I don't want to do it in a way that makes me look foolish and so I actually want to be real and be able to relate with the community so that you see it's tough good as you bring in sponsors sponsored and Ailee are sort of like eSports I guess like the fact that there's money is sort of eSports as I relate to the FTC but really just showing like what is interesting and unique about that to see and why it's valuable for sponsors to get involved how are they authentic and how can they activate in a way that is interesting and compelling to fgc fans and if you can solve for that I think you can maintain the identity of jet of the FTC while also sort of injecting more you know sustainability and money into the ecosystem as a whole but yeah I think the FTC wouldn't be what it is if you sort of like be sports apply it so you have to continue to sort of you know keep that identity true I think the sponsors are going to want that and the

organization's are going to want that too okay thank you I'm wondering if you have any thoughts given you talked a little bit about international stuff how the current anti-immigration climate yeah really affects things and the corollary what outfits like twitch other eSports organizers game developers can do to address that yeah it's a really good question and something that we struggle with it is a systemic problem so there are all sorts of challenges when an organization just being Franklin with twitch that's owned by Amazon starts to lobby and sort of like government dealings it becomes pretty challenging there's a lot of a lot of different steps but I think we can be a testament to the credibility and opportunity in the eSports space because when we look

at some of these eSports athletes rumors of salaries over $500,000 a year in a game like League of Legends or csgo it's obvious that there's some skill there's some skill to this thing as a skill based competition and it's about sort of representing that in a way to the government or to the right entities to show like hey this is for real and you need to take it seriously and so I think it starts with people sort of like rallying together and figuring out a strategy to to communicate that in effective way and partnering with the right entities within probably academia and the government as well to properly represent this skill based thing that is eSports there's a million different ways that we can do that but I think it's going to take a bunch of different entities with credibility in the world to sort of represent that hey this is this is important and it's we need to resolve this issue because it's sort of

being a blocker to continual growth in the eSports space I think a quick type like one or two more yeah you tell me what percentage of eSports leagues slash events are managed by twitch or with twitch versus the rest of the space yeah sure so we partner with a Capcom for the Capcom Pro Tour and that's such a Street Fighter 5 and we also partner with psionics around rocket League and so we have some other ones coming up as well but generally were pretty or pretty mindful to not sort of we're very selective and who we partner with we will also want to be mindful of the other players in the space and not come in and and sort of like take over like these types of partnerships there's a lot of great smart organizations like ESL Dreamhack in the space that are also great to support your eSports efforts

too so we have two right now and we have a few more that you can expect to hear about in the next few months but really we're just trying to be mindful like giving a little bit of a nudge in the right direction while also allowing the other really important players in the space to also enter into these partnerships and help point people in the right direction all right last one how are you guys expanding your fan base to different cultures and subcultures where they might not actually accept an eSport as a valid sport yeah good question it's really hard I think people have a general like belief system as to what it's like there's a general stigma around video games I think we can all everyone in the room can relate to that a little bit and it's growing or it's shrinking everyday but generally our strategy is sort of is working and trying to identify with the core fanbase less of the people that are

sort of like on the periphery that don't fully engage or believe in eSports is sort of like a competitive aspect or something that's a skill based but with that in mind I think as eSports grows as more and more stories about these players making millions of dollars from either streaming or playing competitively start to surface I think that will lend credibility to the fact that you sports is interesting compelling and something that you should pay attention to so I think as this industry continues to grow naturally people will be drawn to it as viewing behaviors around content in general are going to be changing writers there's more cord cutters and people are moving into sort of like on demand type viewing experience that's more in line with like a twitch viewing experience and as that shift happens and again as eSports continues to build its credibility over time I think more people will be drawn to it and accepting of it in a way that many people in the sermon myself are actively now cool thanks very much guys

on the handed over to Chris [Applause] I'm getting set up here as Nick mentioned Chris when I'm the executive producer on h1z1 King the kill you're going to hear a lot of very similar themes and takeaways as he did a next presentation it's almost like we coordinated but I promise you would just met this morning so I think maybe we're onto something here ultimately to you kind of talk about how we've been successful in eSports it's a pretty complicated recipe there's a lot of pieces actually go into it if I try to take away the biggest ingredient you know if this work chicken parmesan I'm chicken would be the biggest ingredient and it's that we've taken the approach

that we're going to partner very very closely with our community we didn't come out and say here's the next big competitive game here's the next eSport that you want to pay attention to we put out a game that we thought was fun and then we listened to the community kind of guide us to say hey we'd love to compete here's one would like to see in the game and then we worked with that in our roadmap and started to deliver a feature set to let them decide what was going to work and what wasn't going to work if you're not familiar with h1z1 just real quickly it's kind of a really new unique game it's a bit of an evolution of a shooter a hundred and seventy-five people parachute into a big open world environment when you hit the ground you got to kind of scavenge around the world they look for weapons and equipment it's going to help you compete against all the other players in the world there's no respawns it's all single elimination so everything is on the line for you as you play the game what it does is built so much tension that when you win the game it feels like you're on top of the world I've been working on this game for over a year I have hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay I have yet to win a game it drives me absolutely nuts we'll

come close a few times and I tell you it's it every now every time I'm in the top ten now I'm like it is gonna be F is given via and then I [ __ ] come in second or third so far we we've taken a walk not a run approach to what we're doing in the competitive community so in 2015 we launched our first Invitational we did this at twitchcon and what we did was invite 60 of our of our biggest streamers from twitch to compete for over one hundred and seventy thousand dollars in prize money we raised that prize money with the community and so we took a portion of proceeds that we sold from some in-game items and use that to form a prize pool ended up being very very successful it was the most-watched program at twitchcon that year and really kind of catapulted and sent h1z1 off on a big trajectory that we're still following today we followed that up in 2016 at twitchcon again we opened the product the the field up a little bit we had Oh 70 people involved

prize pool has got much bigger over $250,000 this last year again big impression a lot of people watching it I think we had over a thousand hours of gameplay stream leading up to the event really exciting a couple of matches and really kind of led to a lot of a lot of success for us what we've seen this year is really kind of beginning with the with the 2016 Invitational we started to see pro teams start to form around the event and when I put this slide together about a week ago maybe a little over a week ago we had I think six or seven pro teams announced they had announced officially announced rosters to compete in h1z1 and I think even since then we've had another three or four as recently as yesterday I saw a couple of announcements from some teams that's leading up to our next event which is called fight for the crown what's cool about this it'll take place in March it's going to air on the CW network in April in primetime which is something we're really excited about it's also going to be our first tournament using one of our team modes so this will be 15 teams of five all competing to see you

can be the last team standing what's going to be really cool and what what h1z1 has that's really unique there is that we're the only game you can find we're 15 teams can compete at the same time every other game as 1v1 one team versus another team and we can get every single team in there Kapena wants a really unique cocktail and really unique mixture to see how that's going to play out so it's worked for us we did really really well in 2016 we were high up on the steam charts you can routinely find this in the top five stream games on Twitch right now we're almost always in the top five in the last two weeks we've been the number one selling title on Steam on their global top sellers list the success has blown us away quite frankly we're kind of sprinting to keep up to make sure all of our services stand keep standing up and provided best service as we can so what about the game is kind of leading to that success from our opinion it breaks down to these kind of simple concepts so to start off with

the core of the game is actually very simple drop into environment you have to live don't die right that's pretty much it but from there there's actually a lot of depth layered into it there's a ton of strategies that you need to employ when you hit the ground where do you land how many other people land near you what loot is around you it's all randomly generated on the ground so you can go in with a plan a but you better be ready to go all the way to plan Z based on how the match plays out there's also a gas a poisonous gas ring that slowly shrinks the map to shrink the place place it's a hundred square kilometer open-world environment and so did that's pretty important to keep the to keep the players together and competing when we talk about competitive gaming so I completely agree with Nick please don't sell eSports with a capital S and in fact we talk a lot about competitive gaming because for us it's more than just the eSports it's more than the spectacle of watching and it's more than putting on the tournament's are the heart of our game is competitive and we want that to be open to every single player that participates in our game not just the pros who are get identified and picked up by teams we

really talk a lot about is we're building the game that we need to make sure it's fun to watch no one's going to watch with us enough fun to watch and so we want to make sure that we keep the spectacle of watching the action as fun as possible it's more than just playing the game it's also how people are viewing it and then as I mentioned before partnering with our community is a big part of what we do it can be frustrating at times because you get a lot of negative feedback but you have to understand that comes with the job and it comes with the territory and you have to get to the root of what people are complaining about and get down to it and try to make a game that you know they're going to gravitate towards so as mentioned on the simple concept of talk about this you know again very very unique you're not going to find a game where 175 people compete all at once huge open world I mentioned a hundred square kilometers and this shrinks over time the course of one match takes about 35 minutes start to finish most players are in there for a couple of minutes and then there they're going to filter out and go into the next game but that depth is really creating strategy is paramount there are key distinct strategies

they're employed in the early game versus the mid game versus the late game and it evolves very quickly the early game is all about finding ludus fast as you can and clearing out any players that may have landed around you mid games about really setting yourself up for the late game and late game is making sure you have enough equipment or survive you probably want a vehicle to get around the map on and set yourself up for those final those final ten that I kind of talked about and you just have to be ready to adapt all the loot that spawns in the world is random is going to be different every single match and I've talked about the moving guess there's an element of crafting in our game so you're going to pick up items and you're going to craft medical supplies and other things to kind of help you during the match armor stuff like that and so understanding that depth of the game of what you need to find in order to craft it becomes a pretty big part of the skill mastery vehicles are a big part of the game if you are at the end of the game and you don't have a vehicle you're going to be at a distinct disadvantage right now and so again more skill to learn there more to master to learn where the vehicles are spawning up and then finding one and understanding how to take care of it it uses gas it has health you have to make

sure you manage that which layers into there's an RPG element of inventory management so you can only carry so much stuff and you have to decide am I going to carry this extra weapon or do I need more med packs the case I get into and get into a fight do I want smoke grenades or do I want frag grenades all this is to say you have to stay on your toes and there's a deceptive amount of depth to this game it seems very simple say it can be very easy to describe but to get really good at it it takes a long time we talked about this at the office a lot you know when we build our competitive game we want anyone to be able to have a chance to succeed and do well so we talk about the average Joe becoming a pro it's so when we look at how we start to open up our competitiveness events can we add a qualifying path that any person or community has access to and we're now just picking you know the 50 best players in the world or something like that and so we've built in leaderboards we've worked with website Twin Galaxies they have they partner with the team

echo fox where they have also settled leaderboards and we can use these things to determine where the skill is and you don't necessarily have to be you know a big personality on Twitch in order to get discovered you can come at it from your skill set and be found and be invited to an event to compete we have a whole meta on top of the game where every single maps you play and gets scored and one thing that was really important to us there is that scoring system is non punitive so your top ten scores from all your matches determine your place on a leaderboard and then you can work up different divisions and tiers to the leaderboard but you're never going to go backwards we always want players to feel like they're progressing and that they have something to attain and work towards and then like I said in the depth it's giving players to focus on their own skill set and not blame things on the game you know there's more to learn and there's more to watch on Twitch I can go watch you know a good player and kind of see how they approach this strategy and get some tips to my own game so I just needed to refine my own experience and then it's really about sharing that experience we've done a pretty big in-game

integration which which with their API so if you would like to try to get discovered we sort based on maybe the number of wins you have or the number kills you have where you're at in a match so someone might be interested to find the next really talented person as opposed to the next personality again it's trying to put in a vision for everybody the big personalities you need to recognize are going to get picked up by viewers anyway how can skilled players get found as well and this is something we're going to continue to work on in the future to have a you know a tighter and tighter integration with twitch keeping it fun to watch we talked a lot the phrase we use is the game needs to be as fun to watch as it is to play starts with that very simple to understand game it's a soul experience there's no response I can watch someone play I know exactly what's going on and I don't have to worry about they're going to die they're going to respawn at some other place in the map and I need to understand the map so that I can keep track of their progress and where they're kind of what strategy they're employing at that particular time as I'm watching someone play it's really easy to kind of go well you know what if I was in that position I would do this

or I would do that and that kind of opens up your mind into into thinking oh you know maybe I'd like to try to see I think I do better than that person I was just watching the game naturally is set up with a good pace that that lends itself pretty well to our to our streamers they have time in between matches weather weather loading and loading loading out loading in and getting ready for any match they even have time during games sometimes to interact with their viewers so it makes it easy for them to call out subs to call out tips to interact and chat and that's pretty important to them and it's pretty important to the viewers watching the experience and it's something our game blends very well too I talked about the in-game twitch integration and wanting to push that even further and we spent a lot of time building those relationships with our community we tried to fly them out to the studio every so often talk about a road map get their feedback show the latest progress on the game I talked to I get texted every day from multiple members of our community sometimes not fun Texas but

we'll deal with the model thing and to kind of finish up on that secret sort of part of the recipe our community in the competition is what drives the game we have a new future rolling out in a few weeks that we're calling hosted games what this is allows us some grassroots participation in the competitive space so we've done some stuff in the past a little bit more manual and this is a system to allow to start to allow it a little bit in a larger scale where we did some things around champions arena where they bring in they invite the best players from the community where they compete every single week and have a lot of fun to use the best we do things with with chicken dinner show which is a show run by a few people on Twitch where they also do some competitions and some fun stuff and we've had a lot of international support that we're trying to open up as well we've already run events in North America and Europe and Japan in terms of our community grassroots stuff and we want to open that up even further as we support more and more of the globe the Invitational

their big part of its kind of the hearts of our competition right now as we did in 2015-2016 we're going to do it again 2017 the first year was really just kind of what can we do here and then we were able to open it up last year by by expanding a little bit more internationally brought some players in from Brazil we bought players in from Europe we had a player qualify on-site from Korea and so that's something that we want to to continue in the future and even grow even more the fight for the crown the next big event that we have going on will be our expansion into team games team tournaments we think with this and a few other features we have run out in the next month we're going to see our popularity of our five particular five man but also our two man mode just grow exponentially we think that's really going to take off when we unlock some some potential there and then the way we interact with our community is really important to us I personally were on regular right at AMAs I try to do it every other week I try to respond as much as I can on Twitch or on Twitter I regularly watch our streamers

play the game because I'm looking to see how their what they're doing what's sort of the new trends coming up on the game things I need to be aware of so maybe we need to fix but also just interact with them to find out what's frustrating you what are you liking how's it going what do we need to put some focus on and I also again personally I write they I try to do it every month where I write it produce a letter to the community here's our current focus here's what we're hearing here's what we're trying to get fixed up for you guys it's that just regular Constant Contact and it kind of like I said sort of get ready to kind of get the good in the bad data so got us here is going to continue to guide us into the future as we look to expand the number of events we run so expand outside of twitchcon and start to partner with places like Dreamhack and some other things to run even more events and we want to expand even more globally we have a tremendous growth curve in Asia right now so how can we tap into that we're already very very popular in Europe how can we do more in Europe and just continue to grow the

game with a focus being on the competitive aspect of it so I should have some time crystal questions quite plausible you get some answers [Applause] Hey so I have a question regarding the primetime showing the CW seeing how like you have different game lengths for each match how do you guys control it feel like every big game that's stream fits within the time requirements of like you know primetime that's a great question so how do we handle a TV broadcast when the when the game length can be variant it's pre-recorded so we will record the game playing the tournament in mid-march

and then we get a month edited and we can fill in with content as we need to to fill in our broadcast yeah that's up I was I was wondering when you look at the community and you hear their feedback I'd find out what they like and what they enjoy about your game how did you collect the data did you get it to Reddit did you get it specifically through them writing to you did you the red the red a tenement and a maser yeah so we're how do we collect a feedback it essentially comes from everywhere so it's not just the AMAs it's also what people are posting and read it every single day I try to go on every night I'm just going to get a prize what's going on I see what people are posting to me to Twitter we talked to our customer service department to see what people are reporting one on one individual contact with some of the players in the community as well as we occasionally put out player surveys to collect more empirical data to try to guide some decisions that we're making but ultimately it's a collection of all that stuff and then as we look for trends and different themes of areas

where we want to go put some focus on the game we try to try to callate it all into one big chunk of feedback to go okay this is what we're going to do I think it's awesome yeah how's it going good Congrats on bringing the game to the CW that's really exciting can you share more about that courting process or what what it is that attracted them to you and you to them yeah so how did how did kind of the CW come about you know quite honestly it's a little bit of fortune a little bit of luck a little bit of hard work we have a pretty close partnership with Rick Fox who owns team echo Fox and his team was the first to get involved with h1z1 and so as he has had lots of contacts with his other teams around League of Legends at Cisco and the other teams that he runs the opportunity kind of grew a little bit from from echo fox and CW and then we got involved as as part of that and it just it all worked out as a great partnership for all three of us awesome

Congrats thank you hi there what so you talked a lot about listening to your community about what their their needs and are once were but how deliberate were you in the beginning in shaping that community if at all and making sure that it was accessible and comfortable for all kinds of players that's a good question so how do we go about shape in the community you know ultimately I'd say it started very almost grassroots ish lots of people in the dev team just reaching out to different different people in the community and starting to build relationships with them and starting to talk to them on a regular basis in a lot of cases there's a lot of pretty close friendships that have developed over the last two years I think it's also been I've been at then on h1z1 for a little over a year now I think this is also a little bit of Daybreak's DNA having formerly been Sony Online Entertainment with EverQuest and some of the other games they built being close to the community was always part of what they did and so sort of

naturally fit into h1z1 as we began to develop that game and thought about where it could go so it was really I think it was probably little bit left intentional then maybe the answer you were originally thinking but definitely just part of the natural thinking of the studio and natural culture of the studio thank you so you chose to run invitational style events based on kind of popularity of content creators versus a meritocracy people that won a lot I'm just curious in those events how were you able to leverage kind of the personalities of the players in an event that they weren't kind of streaming themselves yeah so how did we leverage the personalities of the streamers connect to our benefit in the invitational we did it a lot in kind of a lead-up to it so we did a lot of promotional content and a lot of marketing content that would focus on some of the streamers we did some pretty big things on these streamers that won the year before the winners from the year before and the way we generate the prize pool is with an in-game crate that has been a dinosaur players a lot of those most of

the items in that crate are based on the personalities plane in the tournament so like Ninja is one of our big streamers there was a ninja shirt the first year there was a ninja a gun skin the second year so we kind of partner with them to to put them into the crate and promote them a bit all right perfect thanks a lot you guys for attending they asked me to remind you to please fill out the evaluations as you leave and hope you enjoyed you to see thanks [Applause]