The mobile esports games discussion

[Music] [Music] okay hello to all again so we're continuing the discussion on eSport and we're having a very nice panel and discussion here about our eSport is going on mobile we will try to speak mostly on the mobile market so maybe gentlemen you will introduce yourself each of you I know some of you I've I've listened to you max presentation so Simone you start I just tell us what you're doing and your position regarding eSports activities of mobile okay so I'm Head of Design at nitro games so obviously eSport is something I need

to basically be on on the on track with and it's an interesting topic so I've also researched a little bit and then it's it's something that as a company were obviously interested in seeing where it goes so okay so game design Yuri so yes my name is Yuri Luzhkov it's I am director of community and eSports a critical force and we do an mobile FPS game we also have a very vibrant competitive scene which is growing very very rapidly and definitely it's it's our our tool of engaging and marketing our game as well so definitely very very close to my heart so you will have the community management point oh yes and of course tournament organizing point as well we work with a lot of partners and also have a lot of success facilitating community tournaments which I think are

super important for grass root level growth max you just took for white just before that yeah for those of you who were not here my name is Max and I'm a researcher at the University of Tampa that I research both eSports and streaming kind of psychological points of why people consume those previously have also played games professionally so I have that is a Bracken as well as British playing games which game I'll play the magic magic gathering holy so not a digital game but a physical paper it's coming back out on digital now isn't it though yeah something like that so I'm Chris Cataldi I'm the chief operating officer of a company called Gen vid technologies we specialize in broadcast technology for eSports so if you've probably seen ventureBeat has written a couple articles about us I used to run a company called Shinra technologies which was the cloud gaming arm of Square Enix

and we're very much focused on cloud deployed tools that can make game streams interactive up until now you're watching people talk about games and the developers have been engaging influencers from now you'll be seeing a lot more interactivity on sites like twitch and YouTube itself and so we work with the platforms we work with the developers we work with the teams and work with the broadcaster so that's kind of my focus here today thank you very much so the idea was to have a to start with an overview of the eSport market for mobile I don't know if you have the conference on this before that but it will be interesting to have some figures maybe on and know how good the the state-of-the-art of eSport on know by now is it growing is it big max you are the researcher I always what is doing on the mobile market yeah I mean it's I don't have any strict figures on eSports versus I mean mobile versus non mobile I just know like from the watching

aspect for example twitch is being watched like more and more from from different types of devices than just pure PC so that's mobile that also includes consoles and so on but I think just the fact of being able to watch twitch wherever you go is a big concerning point you can if you're watching a tournament at home and you need to go cuckoo dinner you can grab your phone and then watch it I know I've done it myself so yeah I think the most recent figures are 35% of people who watch twitch are watching on their mobile devices time so it's definitely oh they're watching on mobile but yeah are they watching mobile games not yet I mean it really does their when you compare it to PC or even console Mobile is still quite nascent I'd say you do have I think what the place that gets the most kind of talking I guess is super evil Megacorp with vainglory obviously you've got a critical force you've got a whole bunch of other game you've got class you've

got maybe we can which are the five biggest eSport games on mobile now for you you've got class you've got obviously vainglory in terms of these sports whether or not it's a player base is a different story but in terms of what gets the most ink again what's the most air time I think vainglory is definitely there it has professional teams in there as well which I think as you're saying and your talk is one of the bigger kind of focal points of media where else would you say is is a say like hearthstone you can play I mean it's kind of a hybrid and and if if you look at the actual tournaments sure people are mostly playing on your computer some kind of this tablet setup but like you do you can access the actual same functionalities on the mobiles you can on a desktop so I think it's definitely worth mentioning I think that in general it's it's kind of the same problem not just for mobile games but for a lot of PC games and console

games as well the market is being dominated by very few games which have developed their competitive scene over many years so what nowadays the publishers and while game developers try to do when they enter the space is they try to throw in money and expect results very very fast which doesn't exactly translate into viewers or engaged fans of the game you really do need to put an effort the League of Legends didn't become the huge mega hit the first year it got released I remember watching their first World Finals I talked to the guys that try it and I was like it looked like you did the whole thing in the garage they were like yeah we did that so nowadays I think people really try to get results too fast expect just throwing money will bring them views which really doesn't so no stamina that's what I say on that note what do you think about the fact

that like as an eSport if you don't throw the money and where do the players come from is that something that just happens like people pick it up as a hobby and then stop playing it professionally or for example a clash royale throwing it like 1 million on a tournament I imagine that you know attracts a lot of people and actual competitors competitors yes but I don't think that fewer is really care if it's a hundred thousand or if it's 1 million you're not going to get the money of course it makes really really big news titles so you do get media attention that's what for example vainglory is doing they are putting a lot of a lot of effort into attracting the teams paying the teams running really big production events I think that definitely you need to spend money but how you spend money and - what you spend money because for example how we're doing we're spending it on micro tournaments and engaging as many people as possible inside our community so that as many people as

possible would have the feeling of success they have won it doesn't matter that they didn't do that they they never faced fnatic for example but they beat that guy that guy that he that they go to school with for example they've been playing some other games in a clan war or something and then from there you get the the professional teams and then there you get the kind of expansion or at least that's our vision what I understand from what you're saying that the the eSports scene is now quite all its a nerdy 15 years old it's been going on PC but for the mobile market to get into eSports you need to put lots of money and that's what 10 cents is doing with a arena of Varro that's right super I'll make a corpse with vainglory but is it possible for smaller company to to get as big as those giants

I don't think that Valve put any money into bringing a counter-strike into eSports it's just made itself because so many people are playing so but of course I started 20 years ago and then it change years so the mobile market is much more younger and it's it's now it's facing a huge eSport scene while the opportunities are much more difficult than the place market are more difficult to get in but they have to do that so what is the good with CP to get into this eSport market and how you as a game developer well you you have explained already in the new previous talk what you are doing for the community second setting up tournaments and so on what all the things that have to be done to get into this difficult market I'll give give give the microphone is just a second but one of the things I think that a cooperation between various mobile titles because there that many of us who make games which are meant for gamers are not to strip as much money

out of the player as possible so just banding together and doing events because then we can bring bring fans from different games we can learn from each other and also a lot of the titles we don't even compete for the audience so there's that and then also engaging brands and making us more interesting to to the bigger brands which then again bring visibility just as you said in your own presentation and also the money so there if I can put my opinion here I think it's not a example of mobile but pop G when it came out shows that with a very short amount of time if you build a right kind of game for the for the viewership and for the player base player known battlegrounds which is last month the number one streamed game on Twitch it's again not an example of a mobile game but it does show where tech and game design and kind of knowing your player base and also your viewer base can come together and overnight take down games that are pretty much

entrenched and the most popular right so to your question can mobile get there I think I think to URIs point as well it's a matter of creating a broadcast in creating a a viewership experience that is better than anything that's come before that's also not necessarily just expecting influencers to rebroadcast what they're doing the mobile streaming experience for broadcaster is the hardest there is right because the tools you have are limited in your presentation you were showing even what PC broadcasters have the tools there are still very they they range from super basic to it's a little bit more professional but a learning curve the experience curve required to have something professional on even PC is very very steep and so imagine what that means for mobile all right so I think what we're gonna see is that in terms of the first truly like inclusive or expansive mobile eSport is gonna be a game that allows for an amazing

viewership experience that doesn't necessitate a expert streamer on the mobile side that would think that can do all those things together so when we work with with mobile developers in this space they're very cognizant of that fact and I think you're gonna see that soon I'm just again look at where we are today versus 10 years ago for mobile games in terms of smartphone the we are catching up fairly quickly to that the rest of the gaming market I think eSports is gonna be no no exception there it's a very successful game is it a nice pop game not yet there's no competition for the moment we they're starting to do that just started to do competition but it's more complicated the app to build is for team builder tournaments build the rules but of course we switch an audience ten millions or 12 minions game sold so far in a few months that they are the starting from a big big base max yeah it's gonna comment here and that is I mean it's like some point that I need

the technical aspects are also limiting both kind of the broadcasting and the content equation for YouTube as well I think about you know all these most successful broadcasters they're they're like a really really professional set up they have lighting they have professional microphones they have sometimes like multiple cameras they're not using you know you know your 50 or a USB webcam they're using like a DSLR tripod to capture and they're using like a minimum two screens some have like six screens I'm not really sure what they put in all those but like when you see those studio setups they're like really professional and now imagine that just like using your phone sure you can use the front facing camera and whatever but it's not going to be the same especially like even though phones are really good these days like having the the technical aspects correct to broadcast it's not a simple thing so I think yeah that's definitely one one thing word limit for

eSports on mobile thing yeah I think think like if you think about just like the current way eSports is being broadcast our eSports game announcer the tournament's like if you look at League of Legends on Twitch some pros are practicing it's fairly easy for them to broadcast but it gets much harder when you have to broadcast from your phone and then like actually conveying that you're well if we take the example of Counter Strike when you look at counter strike competition that they're talking to each other they're doing that so gesture that you have all the five players against the other five and are trashing the other guys and it's part of the interest of the competition but is it possible for example on critical critical force if the guy are just playing on their phone how they will interact how will the early stage the the competition oh definitely people use I mean some people use for example discord on the same phone the more professional guys would have a second device so that they

can run discordant one device and then play on the other one in regards to the ease of creation of content well we had very good success in that I mean vainglory has now 650,000 videos made of them on YouTube we have 1.2 million and just under 2 years so people do know how to use mobile devices to create content they also of course if they want to add camera they probably will be using PC and they will be doing the setups anyway the guys that want to get good they will get good and they will get their get the necessary stuff but of course for the small guys which are just starting out quite often but the tools provided inside the phone or mobile device are quite sufficient to create the beginning content you need to start somewhere you don't need to be beauty pie when you

start streaming or making videos and do you develop a sport game at night night road you have one I'm not sure if anyone's gonna say that you can actually develop an eSport game we do a competitive multiplayer so I'm not saying that we don't do that at some point but obviously as of now you can't just say to pay this is an eSport and it doesn't happen like that at least in my opinion this is at the moment going a lot on like how you view eSports and how you stream eSports which still requires like a device basically like a PC or something to actually get your content out of your phone but at the moment at least like in 2016 I think 30% of the prize money on eSports went on mobile so it's already like an established thing so eSports is coming to mobile that's for sure but how and what kind of capacity I guess is the big question as far as I know the the street fighter is not coming as well on on mobile which is an interesting is that's the first version where you actually have an

established PC console game that is now coming into like a native mobile app and that's something at least I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out so but the evolution of eSport on mobile do you think we have to wait for the really big publishers to to set up some very large events and is it a place for middle publishers or small developers to - to create some new new product new tournament events well I think that's a I'm not very comfortable with it because it's very always big that what is what is eSports and when you are an eSports title do you need to book your first stadium and fill it with 60,000 people - to be an eSports title I like to think at least when I'm doing my work and we're supporting our players that just like with football if there are a few guys kicking the ball

around they're doing sports already so if there are people playing your game and then they make in competitions and they are trying to beat each other even even if it's a single player game it can you can call it a sport you can call it an eSport and you can you can throw rocks at me right now for saying that but is it going to be a large title is it going to attract masses you you will figure it out later as well it depends on the game depends on the community depends on how you handle the community will you actually allow the time for the community to grow and expand so I think that you know you guys are starting to do eSport even though you just don't want to don't want to admit it and say it a competitive game that's what we call ourselves as well yeah I mean I mean the only difference in competitive game in any sport is whether or not they're professionals there and there's actually a valued enough for the broadcast for sponsors to come on board

and and for there to be a competition there right that mean that I in terms of nomenclature to your question can we can mobile get there I think absolutely it's just a matter of time when people say that counter-strike is very easy to watch I as a former competitive Counter Strike player but not professional competitive what I'll say is you know it's like American football we grew up with it to a certain extent so the people who are watching have again a lot of experience watching if people picked it up for the first time and watched it without any context I think counter-strike is probably not the easiest to watch but we just just like American football in America we grew up with it so so it's they're mobile games for the most part too lifetime of the game itself doesn't lend itself to a 20-year live game right so I mean and smartphones have been around that long right so it's just a question of our games gonna Robo games gonna be long enough to to be organic where the community comes around and makes a nice port around it

or is it gonna have to be a little bit more top-heavy where the where you call it either you know it's a marketing ploy from from the developer side or it's kind of a mix in terms of the technologies definitely there the audience is definitely there it's just a matter of time and the right mix and it's I think it'll happen sooner than people expect it to we know that eSport is a kind of marketing world for for selling more more more games but in fact it's true we've been playing competitive game for yes before in sports even appeared but now for very large publishers in sport is a way to say that everybody can get into the game and to bring more people and to make it you have large stadium playing but can we have eSport competition on casual game is possible to imagine that we have tournaments and broadcast tournament on the more casual audience that the mass of people playing on mobile games or is it reserved to complex game very competitive game I was just gonna mention something about casual games and

when you asked earlier like is there room for smaller companies to come I would say yes and no no because eSports is getting into that point like if we talk about the big big eSports counter-strike and so on there's a lot of money there like in the overwatch league you have to pay twenty million dollars to get a team spot and then like just now yesterday there was this news about the NV NV US team getting like thirty five million investment and relocating that's a lot of money compared to like some years ago when in a player salary of like $1,000 a month was like really good but I think on the other hand you see a lot about the surprising place coming from different studios you mentioned player unknown battlegrounds just coming up of course like people who perhaps knew was coming we're not surprised but for general public they were really surprised like what's this game why is it so popular and some like rocket League which is inherently quite a casual game you could of course played competitively so I mean

yes for sure like casual games have potential for being eSport you don't have to be this super complex MOBA with like all these talent trees items and so on that you have to like data-mine optimizing theory craft you can have a little bit of simpler game which is fun to watch and fun to play and that can be very successful I mean I don't have a recipe for how you should make one but I'll but I'll put my opinion here as I'm up to do to your question on eSports can it be casual I think you'll you'll get some pushback from from the core players who even today are the the core demographic of viewers if you wanted to talk about broadcasting games and having large viewership I think there's absolutely potential for that look at any game show look at anything where contestants can come on and have some sort of star experience and that people can watch that right whether it's we were in a space now or you're gonna have

these interactive even a cloud-based experiences where people gonna come on and and millions of people watch them and you can have all kinds of price pools again look at any game show and that's definitely possible is just a matter of of drunk viewership but I don't think most people will consider that an eSport but you could definitely have a game that is viewed by large audiences that is sponsor friendly that is mobile friendly and again that you're gonna see that more often see that before you see a casual develop a game and saying it's going to be an eSport game you develop a competitive game and and you start to create an eSports team around it if people are interested to join competition I so disagree with your vision of what these sports game is but Howard if yeah yeah I mean I still I still think that you don't need to have a professional team with salaries to be called an eSport I mean like maybe maybe you know like it's it's there's there's

a guidebook and then I just didn't read it but the other thing I think that there is a lot of pushback always from the hardcore players to whatever you do just think about dota 2 and League of Legends and just go and ask dota 2 if League of Legends is an eSports game and how do they feel about the complexity of League of Legends I think that's as long as there is a large enough learning curve for you to get better it's enough and be actually the easier and the smaller the barrier of entry the better because trying to learn how to play dota2 I don't want to do that also also I think that a lot of a lot of problems attracting larger audiences exactly come from complexity one thing which I don't like about vainglory

I love the game played a lot on my free time but one thing why do you have last-hitting in the mobile game for example it makes very very counter intuitive what makes you do a lot of counterintuitive things from the player perspective that doesn't have the mobile experience like you see the opponent champion at level 1 but you're not supposed to hit him because you will die but for the person who hasn't been in the dota 2 in the league League world they don't know that I mean that's why maybe I like playing vainglory so much always one but then at the same point like when you watch football you would think ok if you just pick that ball in your hands and run you twin right so there's always that level of knowledge you have to have about the game and in DotA I guess it's easy that the games are so long and that's these laws in the game where there's analysts and everything explaining how the game works even to people who aren't playing it so they have that opportunity where they can actually basically explain how the

game works and get players playing the game like people who don't know how the game plays might actually have an idea how it works after they watched a couple of students but I feel like you're not gonna agree with this either next one just was just one quiet one one comment I mean I wouldn't compare dota 2 to football for soccer I would compare it to cricket now there there's there's more more fair comparison I think yeah I think when we're talking about complexity and broadcasting I think what the guy who who's done the eSports production that you let the Finnish national broadcaster when they broke as counter-strike on actual TV not just like online but but on actual actual television he said that if you're a counterspell period you're not producing the content for you they're producing it for your dad so I mean I of course consciously is a complex game the people who are good at it are really really good I could never

do what they do but it's a very simple concept of this like good guy bad guy cops and robbers and any like people who have watched any action movie ever no kind of people are shooting each other if you're not the one that's bleeding it's probably a good thing so I mean that kind of tells us something about like when you're selling eSports to a general audience accounts the complexity work there's always like a spectrum of the hardcore but also being able to watch it as a true like newcomer something like counter-strike works just because it's the concept is simple even though you don't understand it the strategy and tactics of it so to conclude for mobile developers do they want you to go into the east pole even if you say that you do not decide your game is this proper you want to have as much audience possible and you want to have as much people play your game so you want to have your game competitively played with tournaments do they have to do the same thing that the PC developers have done for the last 10 years or do they have to have a

different approach what would be the the good approach for mobile developers to get into eSports would they have to set up some very big tournaments and try to be on TV or do they have to get a more casual audience with ranking into the game or is that a eSport culture that mobile developer could could develop it's a difficult question I know but we have to configure you know all says I think each platform is has its unique attributes and you have to really leverage those to be successful not necessarily just parent what broadcast on television doesn't broadcast on on online with PC does but I do think that one thing that e mobile games in competitive and reports call it what you will need to do going forward is think about the spectator experience and probably build a spectator mode not to your point not all PC games have this necessarily and definitely not all mobile games have this so if you want people to watch the game the the

specular experience is really important and the game has to support that to a very high level I think as well I think there's room to be brave don't just like copy copy like mobis and FPS but think about like what other genres could there be like currents when we were looking at these ports and we say eSports other people just think about those two like maybe heart stones maybe card games fps and and then like MOBA so that would be the same as like all sports is just like ice hockey and football that is not the case if you look at Olympics there's like a million different things going on there so maybe like you know try to make comparative connect rig or something I don't know how that would work but like that's just an idea or something like that you know something that if you are like looking to develop that like MOBA that's it's can yours and not just copying a MOBA then maybe try something different Amazon tried with fruit ninja last year they I would say just two things a work

on enabling your community because again you can't just simply pour in money you need to also support the people and give them the tools to organize themselves and then of course you need to work with partners you can't do it alone there are ESL there valiance there I don't know tournament there are so many media yes media of course you need to talk to the media you need to talk to the influencers you need to talk to a whole lot of things and do it as a combined effort I think for like production value those tournaments with you rice balls are amazing so those basically bring up the bar on production value of streams and any kind of broadcasting in the media involvement as well you know having a 1 million dollar prize pool to advertise is gonna draw people in who haven't even tried the game and then on like a smaller level of actually making an eSports game I think the developer involvement is a huge thing so you need to enable people to be able to play a tournament you need to make it as easy and as low-interest

possible to actually have a match with your friends and see who's the best at okay okay thank you for all if you have any question on eSports it's the right time now we have you have five specialists on this oh there oh let me again so things guys for discussion I was listening to it and one thing that I was missing like to hear what's all a sports about so that main question was like casual gaming and eSports I mean eSports is eSports there is nothing casual about eSports on our platform we have people training five hours a day so they can play let's say critical ops on our tournaments five hours a day that's most than any soccer player in it's young ages basically putting into the sport itself so eSports is definitely sport for itself we are witnessing that let's

say clash royale is putting two hundred and fifty thousand dollars price pool in to the tournaments they attract two thousand live views we do the same with two hundred euros tournaments so basically one thing that is a common to eSports is why people are actually watching it at all it's because of the entertainment you know I think that's the most most thing critical ops I love the game it's very entertaining to play as it's vainglory and that is why it's attracting the audience developers can put a lot of money into production price pool and big teams as we see on a example of super evil Megacorp does not necessarily mean success because it's a lot of money and the numbers are just not there to support it we hope that they do well with it but like there are definitely different approaches how you can do it from the community we know when you are watching let's say

vainglory costs they're entertaining but the talent is missing so you cannot expect to take any game and make it into eSports within a month on a critical ops example because we are working closely with critical force we had the same numbers for like 20 times less of the money that went into the production and we did it in two weeks and the entertainment is the factor that basically keeps this community going and turning back to the game and making game growing and growing and growing so basically yes you can throw in the money to attract media to attract brands is that the key is that the solution I don't know make things easy is it makes thing easy but the essence of eSports it's about entertainment if you have a game that can entertain the audience that's the key if you don't money big production teams will not help it thank you thank you for critical of promotion also it's a good partner any other

question on this port or media I think unless but maybe maybe perhaps one more but we're running a little bit behind now I think so drop it up this interesting I'm gonna have to say thank you very much there - Chris max Beauty sumo and of course Te'o Phil for their very entertaining eSports panel thank you very [Music] [Music]