Superstar Session: How Enthusiast Gaming is Building Winning Esports Communities

[Music] thank you and it's a pleasure to be here with you in London this afternoon this is our first Pocket Gamer conference as the owners of of Steel media so we're delighted to welcome you here and talk to you about eSports and about we'll just give you I'll give you my perspective on this fascinating this fascinating industry and what we're doing in eSports and why we are doing it first a little bit about enthusiast gaming we are our mission is to build

the world's largest communities of gamers and eSports fans so we're all about building communities whether it be fan sites for Pokemon or fan sites for Blizzard for live events such as the one we're here today all together at we're about building communities and creating experiences for avid gamers we're already the largest gaming network in North America and the United Kingdom and we look at eSports as a very very important community within the overall avid gaming community and we'll take you through that a little bit it's more of an investment slide so again if you look at the portfolio investments that that we have we have a gaming network of over

a hundred sites and 900 youtube channels that collectively we have over a hundred and fifty million people every month come and spend some time with us on the eSports side we own one of the bigger eSports organizations in the world called luminosity gaming luminosity gaming has over 50 content creators and key influencers arguably the biggest gamer in the world is a fellow called ninja until January of this past year ninja really became who he was by being a member of luminosity we found him when he was a halo player who was getting about a thousand views a night and he became the biggest gamer on the planet under our watch we have some of the biggest for tonight's streamers twitch streamers and YouTube streamers in the world we own

five eSports teams that play under the luminosity banner whether it be apex legends or fortnight mad in smite we have the number one ranked in the preseason rankings apex legends teams in the world we've won many Call of Duty championships and have had a lot of success as an eSports organization and then together with a Canadian family called the aqua Leaney family we own two slots we own we co-owned with them The Vancouver Titans of the overwatch team of the overwatch League rather who as an expansion team made the grand finals of the overwatch league last year and we own the Seattle surge which is set to

begin competition in the new Activision Call of Duty League this weekend and so we're big on the franchise side of eSports and the non franchise side and we think it's important to be a tier 1 eSports organization to have participation in both franchise leagues and non franchise leagues and then the other part of our business is the events business so obviously owning steel media we now own this fabulous confront conference Pocket Gamer and all the other pocket gamers around the world the other steel media events and then we also own the largest gaming exposition in Canada eg LX we just hosted it in late October in Toronto we had over 35,000 people over the course of three days and it's really become the preeminent gaming event in in Canada and so again to get to the topic

at hand why do we own all these different things it's all about building communities and eSports there's so many statistics out there there's so many fabulous statistics that would tell you that more people saw the League of Legends World Finals then saw the Superbowl in America there are statistics that would tell you that in America we have a funny statistic which I guess is a tad morbid but we say that every day to Major League Baseball fans died or won major league baseball fan dies and to eSports fans are born but for us what we look at we look at eSports as content and it's very different from pure-play eSports organizations that would tell

you that their whole business model is centered around the success of their teams they're gonna build the Manchester United of counter-strike they are going to see the franchise value of their assets soar we're about creating experiences and content and we think that our eSports assets are a tremendous content Factory I'll give you a couple examples at our GLX conference in Toronto we brought most of our luminosity players and influencers up to Toronto we had them do appearances we had them sign autographs and it's kind of funny because a lot of these eSports stars don't really interact with their fans they're doing it over Twitch they're doing it over Facebook or YouTube or caffeine and they're not interacting with their fans

and so giving them a chance to spend time with the people that watch them each and every day was a tremendous experience not only for the fans but for them so we look at our players and our influencers as key content that will make our events really successful we also look at our eSports assets as an opportunity to create unique experience or content for our websites one of the thing one of the media sites that we own is called the Simms resource you may be familiar with it it's the largest Simms fan site in the world and within that community there are 75,000 people that pay for a VIP content offering every month and what we know about avid gamers is that they'll pay for content that they want and so we look at opportunities for

our key for tonight streamers are players to create content that can populate other places in our network so whether it's our eSports sites whether it's VIP packages we look at again our players and our teams as content and so we've talked to you about our our platform and for us I'll just give you a commentary on why we're in franchise league's non franchise leagues why we have streamers and content creators as opposed to just being all about the teams it's it's really simple you know some organizations like faze clan or 100 thieves would tell you that they do not want to participate in closed franchise

leagues and I think that the future of franchise leagues is going to be a positive one not everyone feels that way by the way you know it costs 30 million dollars to buy a franchise slot and overwatch or Call of Duty that's a that's a pretty penny but again I believe that publishers like Activision in creating these closed-ended leagues are going out onto the deep end of the diving board with the rest of us in terms of staking their reputation and their investment on the future of eSports they needed to succeed as well as enthusiasts and luminosity needed to succeed and having a big company like that get so involved protecting the the quality and the content is very important to us but we also think that grassroots eSports is

very important too and so in the non franchise leagues like for tonight we believe it's important to have a strong presence in that as well again there are organizations that just focus on teams and just focus on investing in their players and getting nutritionists and therapists and houses and all kinds of stuff and trying to win as many tournaments as they possibly can for us that's important and luminosity has had a lot of success but again back to key principles for enthusiast gaming we're about building communities and experiences and using unique content to power those experiences and so for us influencers and content creators are as important as competitive players we have a tremendous example of that we have four young men who stream Fortnight on

YouTube we pay for a house in Florida we put these guys in the house and they create videos each and every day that they upload to our luminosity YouTube channel almost every time they upload a video we get between 500,000 and 800,000 views on those particular videos and these folks have a combined social media audience of well over 10 million and so for us you know as business people that's also a great asset to have when you're talking to sponsors you know the future of eSports so much excitement around it investment banks write academic papers on it they quote all these massive massive audience numbers but the reality of eSports is people are

always trying to say well geez when is it gonna overtake traditional sports and the thing about traditional sports and I'm more familiar with the model in North America than in Europe but the thing about traditional sports is that that business model has had a lot of advantages that eSports doesn't have because teams have monopolies over their geographic territory in North America in North America you know the New York Knicks basketball team have a 75 mile radius in and around New York and they are the exclusive agents to monetize that 75 mile radius which means as a result what is the biggest revenue generator in traditional sports its broadcast and and so that's not yet the same in

eSports it's very difficult to monetize over-the-top consumption in the same way that it is to monetize linear broadcasts and so the result of that is the main economic driver of eSports ownership right now is sponsorship corporate sponsorship and so for us it is very very important when sponsorship is your main economic driver to do two things one build as big a fan base as you possibly can and number two really understand as much of that fan base as you can so the luminosity world all our players and our YouTube channels and our Twitter feeds and our Instagram we have an addressable fan base of over 65 million people and so for us though having those

content creators those guys in the fort night house that can get eight hundred thousand views on every single video is very important to a potential client to a coca-cola to a an energy drink company something like that so for us franchise league's non franchise league's content creators we want as many opportunities to build as big a fan base as we possibly can because without that we're never going to be able to attract the corporate sponsorship that will make this a successful investment for us because again eSports as great as it is does not have that recurring fabulous traditional broadcast revenue stream yet that makes the difference for the Manchester United's and the Los Angeles Lakers and all that kind of stuff so that's just an overview of our views of eSports we're very unique in the sense that we own a media platform we own an

Events Division we own an eSports company but we really see eSports as a very very important commune in hardcore gaming and we want to use that content to fuel interest on our network subscription packages and unique experience offerings in our live events and we believe that's a winning strategy so with that I will take any questions that you might have yes we do have time for a few questions yes just wanted to ask you touched on sponsorships thought that kind of tier two scene of gaming how do you think sponsors would be likely to get into that because at the moment it's quite a kind of the top teams like Evil Geniuses and stuff they have loads of sponsors

but the tier 2 tier 3 scene is struggling clan lot again you know for us for my view of it is what is a sponsors return on investment and that return on investment is about appealing to a very very important demographic right the good news for all of us is that people who play games happen to be Jen's YZ and Millennials who comprise the world's most lucrative hard-to-get-to demographic that's the good news the challenging news for a tier 2 organization even for a tier 1 organization by the way is that long gone are the days where you would spend money as an advertiser just to get your logo out there just just brand awareness that's not the way it works

anymore the reason why Facebook and Google gets 65 or 70 percent or whatever the number is of digital spending dollars is because their ads people perform well because they know more about their members that than anyone else and that predictive behavior is what can give an advertiser return on investment so anyway the challenge is if you're a Tier two organization with you know thirty thousand Twitter followers and fifteen thousand Instagram followers you know what can you tangibly offer a non-endemic sponsor that that's really the struggle right now makes sense yeah I mean following on from that how how would those kind of tier two teams grow without the sponsorship I guess it's like this this loop where the ones at the top okay but then it's hard if the ones below it to promote themselves

to that level yeah I mean I think it's about attracting investment and people who believe in the future of the space right there are people who believe there there's enough people out there who believe that an eSports organization will be worth as much as Newcastle United one day not to use a Manchester United example that you know the challenge is and we have the same challenge right how do you find those people how do you get that investment in how do you get patient people to believe in you I don't really see any other way than doing that but from firsthand experience I know that those people are out there we're out of time out of time thank you very much please give up weekend [Applause]

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