Summoners War and the recent esports and community events focus

[Music] [Music] hello everybody my name is David I run the European office for a game that will come to us and in that position I was very fortunate to work on the samanas Warworld arena championship 2017 tournament in Paris which was one of nine tournaments that we did last year it was the first time that we did offline events for this game where we had a global competition going people competing about a total of $100,000 prize money a world final in Los Angeles and before that nine qualifying tournaments in different parts of the world you can see the cities up here I worked on the Paris tournament which was held on October 7 and before I explain to you why we did this and how we did

this and all that kind of complexities that came with it I'm just going to roll a really long video to give you the feeling of the Paris event [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and even most we know whoever's metal device capabilities in here from universe ambience of Ron's office couple medialis

here we go as it goes for the defense speed not the zero speed resistant with a dirty happy but this kills the Heather [Music] it's the first time I take place through working something organized by the com2us it was amazing really gorgeous I hope they will do more events like this one [Music]

[Applause] [Music] he's gonna detonate now with me that is that that's gonna be it and that will take down dull boy watch it close 1 3 beste 5:00 p.m. and it's [Applause] [Applause] so as you can see this was a pretty big deal for us we had over a thousand people come out to Paris to attend this event in person we had about 23,000 peek viewers on the livestream which went for about six or seven hours and total we had we did a stream in ten languages or major European languages sorry with ten people or major European languages English

German French we did a Russian stream and an Italian stream on YouTube and twitch we were also the number one top grossing game in France Switzerland and Netherland around the time of this tournament who had a number two top grossing game in Germany so it was just very very exciting for us a very very big deal and when we started talking about this we didn't know it was going to turn out like that and I think the biggest question that maybe also you might have is why why did we even do this why did we even make put this burden on ourselves because it was a lot of work for all our global organization and there are several reasons for why we wanted to do this the first one I think was to just give back to our community someone as war is now by now about three and a half years old it's an RPG game that has continuously evolved and grown bigger and bigger and growing more successful we've we've done large-scale marketing campaigns for this game big TV spend big influencer marketing spend and so this time we wanted to do something where the players also get something back we also of

course wanted to highlight a new mode that was introduced into the game in March 2017 which was the real-time arena so before someone as war was you could say a PvE RPG of course there was also a player versus player combat but it was a synchronous I would put my defense you would attack it you would just play the defense would be played by the computer so there was competition and there was PvP and there's also guilt battles but it was all a sin criminals and in March we introduced a real-time arena which is now in the fourth season by the way and so that was a big feature that we wanted to highlight and so we started experimenting with different events and and they and we saw the potential in this real-time arena to also think about streaming streaming the matches streaming the competitions involving the community and the streamers that we already have and so what we started was we did a several test events to see how the reception would be to a PvP and we did some small-scale events in Korea and

then we did a relatively big invitational tournament in June in New York together with Amazon which generated a lot of views generated generated a lot of revenue surprisingly it generated a lot of new users and we got a lot of good feedback from our community so that was one thing where we thought okay this is this is this has a lot of interest and we should pursue more so I talked about the real-time PvP we also did more community events this is a picture from a community event in France that was held in July and was actually not organized by us this was organized by the Samanas war TV community it's a it's a French community they do a lot of streaming it's like 20 different people that do very in-depth someone else war streams and we just piggy back and kind of sponsored this event that happened over the course of a Japan Expo and there was like 400 people coming out to see someone as war and to meet their friends from all over the world so we thought okay this is also a big deal and then the next event that we did was Amazon was the game's common in

Cologne we did we had a small stage at the Amazon booth and again we had a surprisingly large amount of people come out and watch streamers of our game just explained the game not even like we didn't really put a lot of effort into this if you will like we had about two hours per day of content streamers just playing the game we had one of our lead developers kim taehyung who is just taking a selfie there on the stage we did a bit of a stream with him bit of an interview and that also generated a lot of turnout so all of this gave us the confidence that we could run offline events on a much bigger scale so organizing events like this is quite complicated and I'm going to talk like very high-level because we don't have a lot of time about a few of the points that we had to think about to get this going so if you want to create an offline tournament like this I think there's basically four pillars that you need to look at so first you need players to attend the tournament you need to have good people that have a good competition that's relatively easy because you already have players in your

game then you need an audience to attend the event that's a lot harder because to be honest we didn't know how big the turnout would be we had no idea we could only guess and think and like estimate what would happen you also need a venue and getting a venue it's very difficult and then you also need a stream which has maybe in some way the most important thing because obviously even if it's a thousand people coming you want to reach a lot more people and not everybody can go and watch this in person but everybody can watch it on the live stream or watch it later on so streaming is also very important so those four things you kind of have to setup and I will just talk a little bit about how we did that so to get our players as I said was relatively easy we did a just a website for people to sign up we selected based on their current World Arena ranking that wasn't that hard we got about 50,000 signups for the European tournament for example which was pretty big we did we did it like that in all the other cities as well and

then we also did an online qualifier for people that could not like physically come to a location we did this for Australia Brazil and basically wherever we didn't have a tournament that also worked out well and then when you the hard part is then once the people sign up and you select them to then actually get them to be there in person at your event because of course like the 50,000 I ordered that maybe the 20 people that you select of the 16 that should then play they're not all going to come because some of them sign up on the wrong thing they're not even European people they're underage they just somebody else signed them up so the communication and logistics of making sure that these people will actually come and that they have travel visa and and that everything is like sorted out and you have their correct username and the correct gaming name and all of these things are surprisingly complicated and companies like ESL make their money pretty much by just organizing this stuff because it's very difficult and then what we also did is we brought

replacement players as well so we ended up selecting 18 people to come to the tournament and then of those 18 for dropped out even before they were flying in so we had to rotate another four people in and then we had 18 on-site of which 16 were playing the other two were just in case one of the other 16 would have like a bad day then for the audience that was really my biggest headache for a very long time so and I think almost everybody's headache especially people in Korea and certainly also Eric and his team in us at the same worries about like getting people to the menu so the first thing after I've done it which is easy to say if you build it they will come if you have a strong community if people play a game they're going to come out and it's surprising how they will turn out like at every every venue we have people queuing up early in the morning or even like midnight 1 a.m. 2 a.m. to be the first to get in on some locations we would give away selected amounts of like rares

in games that use that use of characters that are in the game that you cannot get anywhere else so people would want to see that but also just in Paris we didn't do that and we still have people there like 8 a.m. because they came from Germany and they didn't have anything else to do they were just wait outside and was mind blowing so we went to France because as I said before we did this a community man event in Paris and we thought the community is very strong it's already quite organized there's a lot of streaming going on in France so we we picked that city because it just seemed the safest bet in terms of getting people there and that worked out well for us the one advice I would share if you are looking into doing this and the one thing we will certainly make do different at least for Europe is don't make the event free so we were very on the fence of can we ask people for like a mission or should we just make it free will they even come if they have to pay money so we ended up making it free and

then what happened was we had a lot of people sign up because of course we also gave stuff away at the event and we gave like 750 crystals for the game which is a big prize because you can use that to someone like 11 mystical Scrolls and they could get you a lot of good rewards so when we promoted this in game people are just selective they only read free crystals so of course they signup they didn't even like a lot of people I'm sure didn't understand that they would have to physically come to power so we ended up with like a lot of tickets sold but kind of unsure if like really are 200 people from Russia going to fly to Paris for this event we don't know so so next time we will definitely charge a fee it may be like 10 bucks 20 bucks and then give in-game rewards and free drinks and whatnot to make it to make sure that it's really worth people's while but we would charge a nominal fee because that would give us a lot more security so even on the day on the Saturday I was really really scared and then when I went outside at around

11 a.m. and there was this long queue that you just saw everything dropped from my heart and I was just really happy because we've got a good turnout and we were very lucky and then the last point for the audience if you do this event and you are looking at like 16 matches to play and maybe even you want to do like double elimination which we didn't it's going to take a long time there's a lot of games that will be played on the stage so you will think that okay we need to we need to entertain people like they say they're gonna get bored of the matches and to some extent that may be true you need to do stuff to entertain people we did small games in between where we would make like who has the most mystical scrawls guess the monster small things that would also have something to do with someone who swore and that went very well because it was all entertaining for the people in the audience and it happened on the stage but it was still a break from the tournament games what we tried in other venues was we also created this like experience where you would go around and like do challenges and have other programs and that was fun

and cool but at the same time it was also maybe distracting from the games because then people feel like they miss out so that's also something you have to balance if you do too much other entertainment people start not looking at the games in the seats so that is like that feels a bit empty then so that is one of the challenges and then for the venue we ended up with this beautiful art deco theater in France which was really a really nice contrast between like you know this technical iPhone iPad Android phone cool graphics was really nice it worked really really well other other countries I think had the benefit of having a more established eSports culture like in Korea for example it's relatively easy to just find an eSports menu even in the US there are venues that just do be sports and these are like modern and clean and and all your streaming is taken care of and your Wi-Fi is fine but for us I was

very happy that we had this menu because it had a little bit more character and than the others but it's not like we we had a lot of choice either because we did we decided to like when we really lock this down we had about three months to set everything up which is just not enough it's a very very short so getting a venue or booking a venue in France while people in France are on summer holiday is not easy at all so we were very very happy to finally get this and without going into detail a lot of things will go wrong in like the event the venue booking so I just suggest do it early and make sure the Wi-Fi is good because that's of course also a big deal for mobile games I think we were very concerned when we saw this Pokemon go fests disaster spreading across the news where people would come together to play pokemon go and then they didn't have like reception so that kind of defeats the whole purpose right for us I mean we did while we didn't expect like the

audience wasn't supposed to play it was enough if the guys on the stage who play of course our audience would still play because it's a mobile game and everybody had had the game open while watching and everybody was doing some hands and and and and doing stuff so Wi-Fi is of course usually important if you do a mobile gaming event and then the next part I think is the livestream we worked very very closely with our community so we got streamers for each language which are already doing their own twitch or YouTube show you can see here on the picture this is cap Cabo and Robert they are the two like main German streamers in the back you can see islet grow island cone and shredded puzzle who are very strong international streamers for someone as War diamonds from pack from Pakistan the other guys from Hawaii they came out to Paris to host this event and we had two Italians we had two Russians there were also community players and that was very tricky integrating them into the whole thing because typically if you look back

at the esports menu you would the streamers would have like their own caster cabin and there would be kind of removed from the action but they have everything set up here since it was a theatre people were actually sitting in the back row so like where the tech guys are here this was where our streamers were so they actually had like their camera had a view of the whole venue and in some ways this was actually very good for the stream cause it was very lively and very loud and people were clapping and like coming through the streamers and hanging out with them and talking with them so that was very good for our stream we created our own summoners war eSports channel on YouTube to host all this kugel was very kind to feature us as well in the Play Store but we also streamed on like look at the individual twitch channels of the casters we did a stream on VK which was the most watched stream on VK on that day so that was also really cool for us and to wrap up I'm just going to go through the results of this whole thing so we had over a

thousand people attend we were top one grossing in France Netherlands Switzerland top one in Germany where the most watched livestream on VK we had 22,000 peak concurrent viewers but about like 20,000 for almost the whole day and it's important to say that on this on the same day we also had the Tokyo tournament and the New York tournament right after so it was like a whole day of someone's war we also got a lot of press attention with was very nice for us so in the lead-up for this event we were on Game one TV in France we were in Carrera della Sera in Italy in the actual print newspaper after the event reviewing the thing we had machinima come out from the UK making a nice video so of course getting getting attention and press attention for our title was also very a very important part of this whole adventure and when we announced the tournament we had a really nice news day on pocket because kind of like five articles at the same time on the site on that day

and then as we had the individual events press would come and check it out and in the lead-up to it especially in France of course we got a lot a lot of coverage and also like mainstream gaming media which is typically very critical of gaming events we even got on Kotaku comm with our world final even if that was maybe a bit controversial news and then the last takeaway of this event I think will be the connection that we build with our streamers and with our players which is really really valuable for us going forward because of course we will be looking at doing more things like this we're evaluating different conferences our own event and another tournament show like this nothing is like decided yet so I can't announce but of course it's been not a big deal for us and we want to continue in some way and working with the players is really important because someone as words a complicated game is not easy to understand you need people that can explain what's going on really well and for that you need the top streamers and the top players and we now have really strong relations with these guys we're

like chatting online with all of all of them like every day we're asking them on specific issues in the game balancing issues security issues and the game they give us are their feedback and then they carry this into their community as well so what you also shouldn't underestimate is how connected your players actually are so when we chose the top 16 people to come to Paris everybody knew like all the top players in Europe knew because they're all in the same guild and they're fighting against each other anyway and they're online chatting with each other so this this effect was also very beneficial for us and I think with that I'm done and I leave it up to questions if there's any [Applause] [Music]

you [Music]