Lessons learned from the first esports season in Guns of Boom & Game Insight's vision for the future

[Music] yep my name is Nick and I'm head of strategy at game insight and the eSports initiative is my baby so I'm running it from the beginning and those of you who was Helsinki at the purchase event back in September could attend probably my keynote session there where I this thread of thoughts which led us to the first is precision how we get everything started and bring starts so today I'm

going to talk about our next season if you missed the first part don't worry it's this kind of series where you know just events escalating so the next episode has just started as you can see from the video twelve of we've officially started our first of a second sorry second eSports season I'm talking about [Music] [Music] so it's always users season together

with ESL our major partner on this way in Los Angeles for example so also we

worked on the show components on how to show the game because in sports it's not only where you play competitively but also is something which is really washable which is you know you should enjoy what you need that the audience is also different from the traditional in sports disciplines so it took us much efforts to community to let them to

explain them how it works and to get them involved end of the day into the competition so all of that was dedicated to one big goal to build the ecosystem infrastructure and that's what the whole first season was about some brief highlights of the first season so we come up with $200,000 price point which speeded up between 50 online tournaments and studio it was one open Invitational Tournament in Katowice Poland which was one finals in Rey so to communicate with

the audience as a way to sell the product to a new audience a way to show the product in action and to show it in a best all possible so we paid much attention on creating the content so the quality of the content as well as the quantity of the content so we've ended with 45 hours of broadcasts millions of views I will give you some numbers later but what is more important we managed to get involved many casual players turned into professional gamers you've probably even you know changed some lives for better some fun fact for example the

of our European guys met each other in the real life just days before the event for the first time they came to the small Poland town to compete for real money they won and afterwards they some of them even grabbed their families and on holidays together to spend out the prize money as a bunch of old friends so all together the 600 unique participants and many many many teams is that first of all eSports is something which

professional players and professional I mean who plays our professional game play mode so 90% of them are higher than certain level so this is something which brings them you know reason to stay in the game so which of course enlarge the lifetime which also make them play more often play longer and you know it's better from all the sides by this time five professional clubs which means that the infrastructure started working any involvement because this professional

sports brands started to come themselves pay money for that we didn't get them you know invited to play game they just come directly they approached the teams the accident about if they are interested in [Music] [Music] so Facebook which is not here so which

is really really great in our opinion and of course ours after you know all

these results all these numbers all the data we have for the game is good for the players it's good for everybody everybody benefits from it so no dub we decided to be going on that's how our second season was born and here at this point although we've already known about sports about oil about behavior of users about how everything works you know have some challenges to do it first of all this time we talk deeper and decided that there are three trigger points we should be focused on is the transformation from casual player into into mobile eSports

viewer which means that we need to create this kind of environment where a player usually in some alternate player interested in watching how others play which is a challenge and the next one the next transformation point is transformation from a viewer into a player a professional player and that is about showing the game while broadcasting it I'll show it to the viewers as something which is not really different from what do I mean it's the same game the same kind of weapons the same maps everything is the same and everybody got he'll today and I mean

invulnerable so which means that the game professional players play is the same casual players play so the difference is only in in the mode professional players compete for the points to get qualified for some big events and casual players play just fun but not least trigger point is transformation of professional player into the celebrity because in sports in particular making now is the lack of celebrities like of heroes desire to play competitively and

so there are changes for players of course this year because become celebrity from the professional player imagine just picture it these you know grown up thirty year guys maybe with kids who game just occasionally for fun and one day he wakes up as a professional player doesn't some grants of dollars what does he do I mean it's a crucial moment it's really high pressure and great responsibility to decide what to do next is he going to keep his job his usual life or to change something

and as soon as he's being approached by some professional eSports brands the question the pressure becomes bigger and bigger and not everybody is ready for that of course some guys championship professional new faces pop up so the game is changing at the same time as a developer we also got our own challenges and first of all considered all the specifics we could see from the first season we decided to change the gameplay itself for professional players for example you decided to decrease the efficiency of

some of the weapons for example shotguns because we see that the weapons were too easy to play with in competitive mode vice versa we decided to push significance of some other weapons like sniper's rifle rifles for example because we bring more variability and more strategic elements into the gameplay and for the Watchers we decided to slow down the pace of gameplay little bit to let them follow the details and you know enjoy the process more so you know it's all about building sustainable organic infrastructure fertile soil

which will bring us more and more fruits later some highlights for the second season this year first of all we've decided to add two additional regions first season it was just North America and Europe this year we've added South East Asia and India by the way and lat am region which means more teams more players more and more than twice this year 500,000 and the most important thing is that we've changed the whole structure this is in the leather so comparing with the

last year when they had just to you know steps of to slaughter the first one was these online tournaments go for tournaments official platform and the second layer consists of two studio size offline events one in principle and one in LA but this year they're gonna be three layers first tournament but we've renamed it it's not go for anymore it's challenger series open for everybody the second one for those who put qualified and collected enough points from the Challenger Series Pro Series which is the series of the events all around the world we represent represented consists of this studio still studio size small

events cause events the first one gonna happen in North America and the spring the second one beginning of summer somewhere in South America and then all the other regions and the cherry on the cake the best of the best mobile in sports events go to boon which is the series of the events to be played on the main stages of the biggest traditional eSports tournaments on the stadium size like in Extreme Masters in Poland Katowice like ESL one in different places so those are the players who Pro Series and the very

first what's a kickoff event I'm really proud to what happened first of March in Katowice on the main stage of Intel Extreme Masters explore it's going to be Invitational event the best advance upon professional teams who played last season it's going to be fantastic so thank you very much and I'll be happy to answer your questions I didn't know this you know science just one knowing what you know today from the

next game let's say would you build it from the ground up with this bottom line knowing what you know today yep would you like if you create now a new game would you build it as with the foundation that you added for eSports now you would still wait and see if it comes from the commune again it's an organic process you understand you create a game first then you can see demand from the audience to play in competitive mode and what I'm saying is would you would you add the because you said you had a lot of things that you needed to add to the game so of course only I mean eSports is good in sports works you can see that you know the numbers we can see the impact on the audience we can see still you can see

the demand and we can see the interest from the brand from from all around the eSports ecosystem there is an interest so of course we will do it [Music]