Mobile eSports competition – Keys to producing a successful event

[Music] all right well now that you know we have two wonderful presentations on mobile esports I think young people here are probably very excited about prospects of mobile eSports so you actually gave a presentation at PG Connect Vancouver last year also kind of giving an overview 101 of your movies sports and it's grown quite a bit in the past year and so I've been fortunate to organize a couple of live mobile eSports events in the past year as well so you know this presentation is really more about sharing my experiences with them you know the events that I hosted so by no means is this a guideline of how you should do an event but more about kind of the learnings that I've had along the way so you know if any developers out here or third parties that are interested in hosting a mobile sports events hopefully this will be helpful to you so I mean Before we jump in you know be useful for everyone to know what

maury sport is so you know I've been in mobile gaming for a good couple years where I worked in Beijing I worked in Vancouver and I really saw the prospect of the growth of mobile sports so last year I started a mobile eSports contents like kamo eSports so if you google in mobile you sports real chances are you come across my site or when my articles and from just writing content about mobile sports games went on to produce a couple of online and live eSports events particularly for clash Royale so you know that image there is actually a live event that I produced with an organization called Northern Arena in Toronto so you're one of the first big live Crossrail events in North America and it was very successful so jumping right into it so if you are interested in producing a mobile eSports event or even this is mobile gaming event now let's talk about purpose now why do you want to put together this event I mean you know aside from having a lot of money that you might want to blow so first the showcase if you have a new

game and you want to show people how this game is played and why this is fun and what better way to do it than to be showcasing it through a live event on online event education so a couple of presentations talk about brawl stars the new supercell game so they didn't mention this as a mobile esports game but how come everyone's talking about it as a mobile esports be by introducing a game they had a live three-on-three tournament in which you know they had a live commentator they had no players that were playing live against each other and instantly just captured the imagination of everyone that this can be a mobile eSports engagement so you know mobile gaming developers obviously you guys are very familiar with live operations and in essentially running events is a part of live offs you know keeping people engaged keeping people interested in your game watching live competitions as well as you know having players to be able to compete in these competitions as well and you know down the line it might

also be a way for gaming companies to monetize through live and online events and of course sponsorship and this pertains particularly to third-party event organizers such as myself so as an example northern arena one of their biggest sponsors is Bell Mobility so they're kind of like the Verizon Wireless of Canada and they love mobile so you know we produced one class rally event in Toronto and they actually came back to us and state and said that ok can you guys do another one for Montreal and you know sponsors especially sponsors that are in the mobile space they they want this opportunity to you know showcase and show the brands so you know run an event and your give them a reason to your sponsor your events so moving on to okay now you decide that you want to have an event and you know the purpose how do you want to position your event so there's no right way of doing it you know just because your game is a casual game like candy crush doesn't mean that you can't make a super competitive and

you want this event to be open to all your players or you know do you want to have a league in which you're constantly inviting the pros so and just to show you that even within a game you can have events across different spectrums you know clash Royale obviously no they made it open to everyone but the event that they had last December North American open it was wacky you know they had people playing while they were being rolled around in a ball you know it was you know it didn't seem like an eSports event but there was a big big viewership for it and now the ones that they're running the crown championship it's a much more kind of professionally rather than then they're really trying to pit the top players in a game play in the game against each other for a big prize pool you know same thing but from no hearthstone usually it's a very competitive circuit but the Red Bull has these casual events in which they're running hearthstone competition in a completely different format a draft format which is not official but it's a lot of fun to watch so you'll think about how you want to position your event and then production so you know

production is really big words that I use obviously you know running event or all visit production right but I know these are some considerations I want to throw before you even start putting together your event you know how long do you want to run your event is this going to be a one-off are you going to have qualifiers is this going to be a league and once you know how long you want to run this I mean what are the resources that you have so I would think that a lot of companies you're probably bootstrapping these events you know obviously if you have the resources you hire at ESL and higher energy hire these day organizations to help you run this right they know what they're doing but if you're trying to do something in-house you're going to want to see if you have your artists that are able to create assets you want to see if your community managers are able to stream so you know what kind of resources do you have to work with and do you want to do an online event or do you have two resources to pull off a live event and if you have a live event was it going to be is it going to be in Helsinki LA you know wherever your company is based and what's the advantages of disadvantages

of that so once you have an idea of what you want to produce put together a budget and chances are mobile gaming companies you probably don't have a budget for you know live event production so start thinking about that and thinking about you know why do we want to put a budget you know to put together this live event and yeah and go that goes back to the purpose which I said earlier and once you have that together put together your proposal you know and I'm a product marketing guy so you know I like to put together a nice little positioning statement of why we're doing this right so now taking the positioning taking the purpose you know put together a small sentence like this them so my event name will be a you know whatever this position your event would be held live or online on whatever date you said your event to be and what's the aim of the event by the event will aim to whatever purpose so you know as an exercise if I was to do this for my Crossrail Montreal event so it was a casual event that was open to all players they're held across two days so one day was a qualifier and in the day was the live tournament and there's a brought to you by northern arena and

motorsport so the event you know it was a Montreal we didn't expect to bring the best of the best from all across the world to compete there so we want to make a casual it was a local cash Crossrail event in which local players had a chance to compete against hand-picked ambassadors and some of the influencers in the class rail community for eight thousand dollar prize pool alright so now you know what you want to put together how you're going to reach the audience and how you're going to get them to want to watch your event so now let's segment the people that you want to target for us from the core to everyone so special invites you have your influencers your top players you know these are people that you know have the most highly engaged users of your game you definitely want them to tune it and then of course the participants you know you're going to have a sign up previous to the event in which people would be able to register and you know ahead of time when they're going to play or if you have a live event are you going to be having drop-in participants

so no third party in Malaysia how would a Quattro event at a mall and it was actually really successful and they had no idea how many people are going to show up but yeah I think a couple hundred people just showed up in the mall and start playing cross rails so you know they do want to allocate you know an audience number for that live spectators of you have a live event of course so know try to at least have a guess of how many people would be interested in attending this live event you know it could be in the hundreds or you could be dead the husband's right and how are you going to budget for that and of course the online viewers which i think is most important because you know you want the this is the number that's going to be most significant this is the number that you want to you have to be as big as possible so with this in mind and how are you going to get these people to be interested in your event and so those four circles that I have in the middle are kind of your resources and a new ways to reach the audience that would be interested in this event so of course as a game publisher you you know this is an event based on your game

or if you're a third party this is event based on their game so you definitely want them to be involved and the best thing you can get out of them the developer is for them to have the in-game notification of hey you know this event is going on now launch Atun in on Twitch and you know eSports teams of course you know the eSports realm especially with a league and dota and csgo it's all about the teams and teams have their own following so if you can get teams involved with the competition you know that's another source of marketing and promotion for job for for you to get your word out of your event and of course there's kind of more basic stuff social media out of marketing and so yeah I've had in that chart in the core of this dozen influencers so every eSports event that you see you know there are it is a very vague definition of influencers which will all jump into you know influences are very key to drive audience into event because you know they're kind of like your headliners so if you go to a WWE event

this is your know the rock or you know Randy Orton or if you go to a bath quadrant this is your LeBron James you know this is why people want to watch your event and so for mobile eSports or just eSports in general I defined influences under three categories you know one of course the big celebrities right so you know at the bottom that's Ronaldo the Brazilian one not the Portuguese one he was at the League of Legends finals in Brazil so he was a third to shake hands before under the winners but it was cool to be able to bill that Ronaldo was there and on the top with an Quattro event in December so that's a rob corddry from The Daily Show so he was actually hosting that event but in a sense it actually didn't turn out very well because he didn't know the game it was very awkward to have a host to be hosting this gaming event in which he didn't he knew nothing about so no I was at an eSports event and April and the theme was authenticity you know you want these people to be participating in event to be authentic you know people

actually care about your game so that it comes across as an authentic experience and then you have your top players so you know this is especially important for the more kind of core mobile eSports experience you know people want to see the best of the best go at it so if you're having an event make sure that you have some of the top players if not all of them to be in this event and then the third is actually what I think is most important you know a vague category which is defined as community leaders so they could be your you know your your reddit influencers your youtubers your streamers but people that are really active with your game and people that play your game know who they are so for example if you play clash Royale or clash of clans you know chief pad if you play a hearthstone you know a mod half full this guy's toast you know these people and so if you have an event on these games another way to draw interest in these games is to have the influencers participate or be a shell caster so these are the people that you

want to get involved and you know as an example so I hosted on my first class real live event in Toronto so I didn't have the luxury of having a big budget to get the biggest names not even in mobile eSports to be part of my event so you know what I did was I had one of my writers he is also on the subreddit mod for clash Royale and he just started streaming so his name is will so super passionate about a game and he knew the game from inside out and I thought that he make a great shell caster and along with him I also brought along a streamer you know beautiful looking girl who it was also a hardcore gamer called Deena so they're both from Washington DC and I flew him out to Toronto to be my shell casters would have been and you know they were super passionate about his super professional they did such a great job and this is actually one of my favorite pictures and after the event I was worn out you know I up I went up to them and said that you got such an amazing job and then from that point on you know it just snowballed you know they became more well-known in

the community and we talked about the crown royal crown World Championships so yeah now you know because of that first cake they got more involved in community and they planted jobs you know as a shell casters and host for the Crown Royal championship so I was really happy to see that you know from that first you know shell casting experience they were able to do more and more and so you know the best way is to build your own community leaders within your game rather than to just pluck you know names from elsewhere and so you know we talked about influencers done that are able to draw people to want to view your event so another thing that's been really popular recently is just you know incentivizing viewers to beauty event based on you know giving away freebies so as two examples on the left is rocket League so rocket League had their World Championships I think it was a couple weeks ago of not last month and super successful they had close to to indicate concurrent viewers for rocket League I

mean it was crazy and obviously it was promoted really well not just through twitch not just through you know the social media but also in games so they actually incentivize their players to tune in in-game and so what they did was you know just watch the match and you know be on twitch chat and they would have random drops of goodies you know at random times throughout the mattress so you want to tune in for the whole match just to see if you get them you know get that random prize and of course you know the production was great so while people were waiting for the price they got to see oh wow this is actually pretty fun to watch so it's a great great way a great way to display and showcase what a good event that was and on the right is actually something from hearthstone so no not as intense but something really simple you know they just had a choose a champion before the World Championships in which you know you pick who which champion you think will win and they're further along they go in the championship bracket the bigger the prize that you get so even if you don't know who these people are you feel

invested right you feel that okay I want to chew on this guy called amnezia because he seems like he's the best player and if he does well I'm gonna get goodies and ruin prizes so no then bills presentation if you were here he emphasized about fairness and you know when you have a competition and there's money at stake and there's pride at stake people would do whatever they can to win and you know obviously I follow the classroom community very closely and some of the competition's especially online competitions there are a lot of the little ways to cheat you know for example you know this kid is a very good player so how do I know that he's not playing on account of someone else right so even if it's a large championship maybe he'll use this phone to help me qualify and I get a can participate in the live championship so make sure that as you run this event you know you have the rules set in stone and if there's cheating if there's you know something that Gil so that's a disconnect it's cleared what's going to happen so that

you know the experience for the players them you know they you know as they're coming in as seems fair and it seems like you know you know what you're doing because you can spend you know tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars producing an event but if that experience is that dump due to poor regulations they're going to walk away unhappy and then logistic so I put all this in one slide but actually this is probably one of the most important parts so as you're putting together this event you got to think about okay what platform do I want to put this on obviously everyone thinks twitch but there's a lot of events or just kind of mobile gaming competitions that are being hosted on YouTube and Facebook right now so think about what are the advantages and disadvantages of each platform so twitch has a lot of neat tools but if you have a big Facebook audience you know you have over 10 million likes maybe it just makes more sense to host their event on your Facebook channel so that instantly your people are getting notifications of your live event and scheduling so you know it

seems like you know this audience your mom doesn't watch twitch very often but if you tune in twitch on a weekend there are literally hundreds of streams and events that are going on because that's you know the prime time for having eSports events so if you know that's the audience that you're targeting you might want to fix your schedule up a little bit so that it doesn't conflict with a legal digest championship if that's the audience you're going after so your be aware of scheduling and you know making sure that you know the influences that you want to come also have the time to participate you know in your event and then especially for online events connectivity and communication so you know have online event sounds like a good idea but there's so many uncertainties in play so let's say I'm running a tournament in which I have to have one match after another how do I make sure that the next participant is ready to jump into that match what would happen if there was a disconnect and how do i chat with these people what if I

want them on webcam so you know ahead of time got to think about these logistics and especially Wi-Fi you know one of the you know advantages of mobile is the fact that you know we can have a tournament here everyone everyone port your phone if you start playing the game and I could call it a tournament but I've to make sure that the connectivity can handle so many devices playing this game at once without lag so a lot of things that you have to consider for logistics then you have a little video to show you this is from back in last November so Amazon's actually making a big play in your mobile gaming competition so they had the first live event called champions of fire in Vegas and you know it was the first time so obviously things didn't go as smooth so this is an example of what can happen if you know you just have in tune you'll forget something in logistics so if you might play in the video so I can tell you that you ate some bad fruit you got fruit poisoning and a rough

start promoting it for 209 he's already killed his first life is going to be the end of that because that is going to run through time so I don't know we got caught what happened there so this game had a you know in game ad whenever you die and unfortunately instead of playing a clicking play again click on an ad so and this is competition for money afraid so yeah me as a game developer make sure that you know if you have a competition with your game people are aware of this stuff so but now Amazon recovered and they actually had an event and in New York just this past weekend call the mobile masters and so the event had summoners war vainglory and hearthstone so guess which one of these free games had a bigger audience Sumner's work so

this was a surprise to a lot of people because hearthstone and vainglory are the more established Gainesville I mean look at them average viewers numbers summoners were blue the other two games away the biggest reason is because there's not a lot of summoners works games upset events that are out there so you know fit he can also play into consideration the open glory is on you know almost every day but it's just amazing and a good example to show that you know just because your game is not known as a mobile eSport doesn't mean that you know it can't succeed you know as an event so no so that kind of wraps up my presentation and you know I'm going to skip through this part but I did a presentation last year PG connects Vancouver talking about you know what to expect for mobile eSports and so most of my 2016 predictions came true so we have more mobile use force games bigger cash prizes we have somewhat more statistics for mobile games but I think you know in that area that can be a big improvement and of course higher production value

for events and tournaments and so you know updating my predictions not as both but I think just the term of mobile eSports you know the presentation earlier was vibe you know I heard terms competitive mobile gaming mobile eSports professional mobile eSports and I think then what what you sports right now is the term is very vague and I think you know as we as this industry matures a little bit more you know we're going to come up with a more definitive answer of what exactly is a mobile esports or if a game is a mobile game can it have a mobile esports on top of being a mobile game differentiation but from mainstream esports so again the previous presentation talked a little bit about that and the disparity so I didn't talk anything about China but mobile esports is huge in China especially led by honor of kings that game was 58 million Mau it's crazy over there and I think the disparity is at least for the next year is going to be even greater in which Asia

particularly EU is growing a lot faster as well but yeah hopefully here in North America we can catch up and finally bigger platform network production partnerships I think that's a nice segue into the panel so you know big things that are happening with skills with ESL with partnerships with game developers so yeah well looking forward to hearing what they have to say on that with the next panel thank you very much [Applause] you [Music]