The Vainglory Story - 5 Lessons From Building a Touch Screen eSport

[Music] all right we're gonna talk about competitive gaming on touchscreens real quick just a quick show of hands who here is a an actual competitive gamer most of you guys that's good a lot of people anyway who out of those competitive gamers who today has a deep conviction that competitive gaming can actually be done on touch screens in the first place that's really good you know I did this about I want to say nine months ago at a different conference where literally I think there was one guy who stood up said I think it can be done we've obviously believed in this in a long time and we've been working on it and it's just great to see that more and more people are seeing that it actually can be done so my name is Christian I am the chief operating officer and executive director original an investor into people megacorps today spending twenty five hours a day building out

what I'm hoping and what we are hoping is going to be one of the companies that will help really build the era when the touchscreen generation finally gets hold of the kind of gaming experiences that all of us grew up with on PCs I grew up with games like Unreal Tournament Warcraft 3 and sort of fondly remember those nights spent together with my friends having lugged each other's PCs over to one place playing as a LAN party competitively cooperatively literally all night and then pretending to our moms that we would have slept at some point in time and just those experiences were incredible visceral deep engaging and we all feel very sad that the touchscreen generation is constrained to kind of three-minute gaming sessions you can't have an all-nighter with three-minute gaming sessions it just doesn't work so anyway what am i talk is about today it's really lessons if you like from building a competitive game I feel super cheesy saying building a in eSport because I just don't know that you even can build an eSport we've set

our sights on building a legit genuine competitive game that we would want to play ourselves and then we've just been delighted that the community has taken it up in such a big way as a competitive activity for them but ease for anything with eSport is clickbait these days so you know putting it to the eSport summit so I put eSports in my title anyway a little bit about me so I've actually been building game companies for a long time in fact I used to play so much games as a kid that I never managed to get myself a proper job that was my mom's prediction she's a very early age so I've actually spent all of my time since leaving university building game companies I was originally a co-founder about today's glue mobile with a dream to put what I then used to play on my Nintendo into people's pockets through enabling them to download games onto mobiles after that building Playfish with a dream to connect people playing games through social networks I was originally an investor are led the seed investment round into a company called supercell that's today the largest touchscreen gaming company in the world by revenue

and I was on their board of directors for a long time until they became part of Softbank and as of the past three years or so I've been part of building super evil Megacorp I've I've sort of had the good fortune of building what I felt back then would be sort of the next big growth wave in games and being there very early and made lots and lots and lots of mistakes along the way and have had some successes and and had worked with some amazing people and one of the things that I feel is most amazing about the touchscreen gaming market today is you listen to any of the analysts or the bankers and they'll tell you it's like I heard the term yesterday purple ocean it is so red and it's so so competitive and so visceral and no one can survive that it's like the reddest ocean ever so it's no purple ocean I actually do believe any of that I think if you create an amazing product you can still punch through in many ways but what's amazing about the notion of core gaming on touchscreens is that I think for the first time as an industry we're in a place where those of us who grew up as

core gamers finally both have the volume and the tech sort of the technical capability on these devices that could potentially support some very very large multiplayer competitive games over time and I'm just excited to be part of this industry at a very early stage of its growth but it's something that we as a company are very focused on so as a company just that quick boilerplate on what we're doing we're about four years old we are a company that focuses very much on creating the best home for really better and core gaming talent that's made games at places like riot or rockstar games and other places we try to create a fairly small company but a small company with hopefully a very big impact we are only about 50 people or so across the board we don't necessarily aim to grow that much we have about five or 10 open positions but that it's what we believe is going to more or less be it for the foreseeable future we have our own technology so we have our own game engine which is we developed over a long time by one of the most talented

developers of console great game engines out there we have about 41 million dollars in venture funding has some great people we really have no excuse not to succeed somehow but this industry is really hard so we've been learning a lot over the past couple years our dream as a company is ultimately to create a franchise for decades we would love to be you know that kind of companies that we loved as we grew up with companies like Blizzard and more recently Riot who've been able to create a following in a community by staying really true to the player and staying really true to the core values of the community out there because we believe that these types of you can't acquire your way like user acquire your way to to millions and millions of happy players you've just got to build it and you've got to support the community and let the community grow and that's what we want to do we also want to create experiences which are not just really fun to play but really fun to watch and in particular seeing how the PC eSports era has sort of had these growing audiences year-on-year is something that we're really inspired by we're hoping that by being able to bring these style of experiences to touchscreens we can

actually help grow the broader eSports world of the broader spectated gameplay world if you like because in many ways it's kind of more relatable everyone has that device in their pockets anyway so play your super quick video of some of our competitive gaming events over the past six months to give you a sense of what vainglory is all about right now in terms of its competitive scene the glory is a 3v3 MOBA single lane with the jungle matches lasts about 20 minutes played on almost any touchscreen and in the in the world today and you have very very wide variety of devices that play tournaments all across the world here's a quick compilation let's see if we can get some audio as well [Music] sorry Larry Santana for the 2015 big glory autumn season life [Music]

[Music] [Applause] they are going to seal the deal here at 2:04 willing they take down the second one it from wind remember that there are no payments available they buy them to train in the game themselves alexis is Game three from liberation ik liberation ik all my wallet fantastic game I just can't believe it amazing

[Music] [Applause] so the game was originally released about just over a year ago and high-end iOS devices we've since then increased our device support a lot we released it on Android about seven or eight months ago and we've since lowered the device requirements a whole ton and and we're still incredibly early but we've one of the things that have taken us by incredible surprise has been how quickly the competitive community in the game has grown in fact so much so that you know every company has to be the number one at something and today we are by some margin the number one touchscreen eSport in fact if you whether you look at it by by price polls buy views with over 20 million stream views last year and in fact this last weekend alone we had the North America Championships the North America regional championships at the Red Bull Arena in Los Angeles this last weekend and that on its own had

over a million screen views so the overall kind of viewership is growing the amount of yeah the price pool was over three hundred fifty thousand dollars over the past six months only a small proportion that came from us much of it came from sponsors there's been folks like say Amazon Nvidia Red Bull others that have gotten involved and we've also worked with ESL OGN a whole bunch of other kind of enabler so if you like in the in the eSport space all to learn because frankly this is something that is entirely new to us we're excited about the growth of competitive play but it's something that is still new and we're after every weekend that we run an event or a tournament we still continue to have this massive amount of internal feedback on how can we make this better we ask our players we ask our audiences across the board and overall the game has grown very rapidly we don't actually spend anything on user acquisition or any other sort of traditional mobile games forms of growth all we do is to try to create keep our community happy we try to invest in the things that our community want to do and we can take our time we're convinced that in the next three to five to seven years

somebody's gonna build a game on these platforms which will be the seminal game on touch screens for core gamers and we don't think that can be rushed we want to try to get it right and then gradually invite more players to be part of the experience so after about a year if you like of operating the game and now six or seven months of esports or competitive play we've learned a couple of things across the board we've certainly made a lot of mistakes we've you know gotten something to write something's wrong but I wanted to kind of share some of those and before I do that I want to play a quick video one of the more significant recent events in Maine glory was that even though already last year we have a bunch of European eSports teams like team secret SK gaming g2 eSports all acquired vainglory teams in Europe last week TSM team solomid probably one of the most famous North American professional eSports organizations got into being glory by acquiring the current world champions team Alliance and that was kind of a big deal for us because in lots of ways even though we're focused

on making a game that's great it's always wonderful just to have that kind of vote of confidence so let me play a quick video of a profile of then Team Alliance no Team solomid from this last weekend you can have a bit of audio again so we recently got some pretty big news Alliance has now been acquired by Team solomid we are now paid professionals playing vainglory full-time it is our jobs now we were absolutely incredibly stunned that we were getting this opportunity and incredibly grateful TSM is a really big deal and it's a big deal for us to be acquired by them when I find out that Alliance would be switching over to TSM it was so super exciting like I know TSM because I was a league of Legends player for a while so TSM is a really big name for me so just the idea of being acquired by such a great team in such a great organization it it just really let me know that I was

on the right path some people would definitely take it on is a lot of pressure I think it's something that is actually motivating us as a team now we have someone that we can represent who's well known on a global status and we really look forward to playing our best on behalf of Team solomid and we're gonna take an incredible amount of pride in that it's really important winning this tournament we want to make kind of a new name for ourselves under TSM if we win this tournament it's gonna mean a ton for Team solomid vainglory is an eSport isn't still incredibly young I think TSM has taken a leap of faith with us but if we're able to win this tournament my smile will be enormous it is hard to express in words how I feel and moments of that I still can't express how I felt after we won the IPL but winning under the TSM banner will be incredible so one of the things and the reason I played

that video also is the thing that really struck a chord with me last weekend as you know they filmed that video and we listened to the interviews live was previously we were growing this game for ourselves because we wanted it great a great game for us to play and obviously try and create a successful community as possible but now there is literally peoples whose livelihoods right now depend on actually playing the game and it sort of gives you a different sense of responsibility when it's somebody's job to play you kind of think in a different way just how big a responsibility is to ultimately grow that game so anyway so in lots of ways we feel like we've had a great first year out there we certainly learned a lot and we're hoping in fact this year has kicked off incredibly well for us across the board with our first season we run quarterly seasons so we're in the right at the end of winter season right now we just had the North America Championships next weekend are the European Championships in fact I'm flying to London straight after this to host those and we have the Korean Championships as well next weekend and then spring season kicks off end of this month and the cycle starts

again if you like so we've had a good first year but in terms of lessons I figured what I do is I sort of split them into five different parts and all of these have a bunch of bullets most of them are trying to stick to lessons which are specific to touchscreen eSports because I'm sure all of you are many of you guys will know a lot more about running PC eSports then than I do but certainly I've sort of split them into product learnings community learnings marketing learnings business learning learnings and then just a whole bunch of really practical learnings so if we start with a product one of the things which is kind of obvious but really it's probably worth restating is the importance of control accuracy we did an awful lot of work trying to figure out how to bring competitive gameplay to mobile one of our hypotheses early on was hey we need to bring more natural controls maybe gestures swipes gyroscopes any of those things into the game turns out players hate that across the board we hated it ourselves and we could validate it outside because you

want one of the philosophies that has really paid off for us is to think through the control scheme of the game in such a way that you can ultimately after about a minute or two you're playing you even forget that you're playing on a device your fingers just move naturally and the only control input we accept is a tap in fact we spend a lot of time optimizing that tap to make sure that there is absolutely zero control latency across the board and what's interesting is that we thought that in fact leading to the next point we thought that screen size would be an issue because you know what fat fingers in a small touchscreen and you know what even your fingers kind of obscure part of the touchscreen as it turns out and we thought even originally we were a tablet gaming company because we figure who how on earth could you last hit on a small five-inch screen as it turns out kids today are pretty incredible with their fingers and touchscreens in fact you know we spent a long time figuring out controls that doesn't obscure the screen but it turned out that actually a single tap based control is like the equivalent of a feel like a mouse cursor and a keyboard in some ways you have a mouse cursor that you're

pressing with and it turns out that your finger is actually just as accurate and even if you feel like it's not quite as accurate it turns out that when you need to do execute moves like cutting or juking in a mobile which is basically say running in one direction and shooting in the other running in the other direction shooting in the other that is a pretty complicated mechanical thing to do on a mouse yeah I'm a fairly sort of played an awful lot of League of Legends and other other styles of other MOBAs on PC and it is actually one of the hardest things I find say if you play an arranged Carey and you need to move away while constantly shooting the opponent or hitting the opponent or basically the opponent that sort of thing is actually super easy to execute with your fingers and you can even create much more complicated maneuvers where you say pre select the target fire an ability move basic attack and so on with really natural taps and one of the things that we've been delighted by is to see how many hyper-competitive players play on very small screens in fact the number two team in North America right now plays almost exclusively on five and a half inch

screens on their iPhones which is just incredible to me like I have a for me an iPhone 6 plus is probably a good sized screen to play on some people just play on iPads cuz they think they feel that need for the bigger screen it turns out that what you lose in screen size you actually gain in in how quickly you can move so it's a bit like the acceleration setting for your mouse it's like it's either less accurate or it's faster more accurate or faster that way so turns out that when you think about screen size remember that the vast majority of the world is going to probably play on fairly small screens and it's worth thinking about making those guys first-class consumers of your interface whatever it is fun at thirty session length so when we got started and we initially launched the game main Lauri's average game length is about twenty minutes an awful lot of people were pooh-poohing us saying look it's a mobile game people it's been proven over and over again mobile players don't play for longer than three minutes because that's the sort of attention span of a mobile gamer that may very well be true for a lot of mobile gamers turns out it

really isn't true for everybody 20-minute session is perfectly fine for people who are interested in competitive gaming could we also make shorter game modes sure but what we tried to do was create a session length which allows for tactical and strategic depth which is akin to some of the best competitive games on PCs which means that there's are there are different phases to the game there are phases where you out think the opponent you're basically playing a game of chess as well as an action game if you like you build you counter build you think about objectives you think about rotations you think about what you should be about taking objectives at different times what we tried today was squeeze that experience to a short as it can be while still maintaining the build up the tension if you like that something is building up building up building up and resolving itself in a teamfight and an objective and the next thing and then again releasing that tension and then building up the tension again and it turns out that that's worked really well for us we kind of our philosophy from the start was we didn't try to create a game there was particularly easy to learn or a game that was particularly sort of on

boarding friendly or rewards you for absolutely everything with massive coin fountains and things which is what mid core games are very good at today we try to first and foremost solve for core gamers and try to figure out can we create a game that has legitimacy that we ourselves would love to play every day and in fact as a company we still play every day at 5:00 p.m. wherever company gild all of us play and even when we go home I still spend more more of my time playing may glory today than any other game out there partially because I'm part of the community partially also because just as a core gamer I'm hooked I don't have as much time for PC gaming today and I can sneak in a game of in glory almost anywhere right now as opposed to having to be in front of my game PC at home so turns out absolutely core gamers like as was our philosophy from the start we figure we're gonna design for gamers regardless of platform as opposed to designing for mobiles when it comes to session length and that's paid off pretty well for us in terms of the growth of the competitive scene it's probably also inhibited us from shooting to you know the top of the charts immediately also because it obviously has to some degree

constrained the people that we've been able to focus on inviting into the community but at the same time it's really helped us build a community that is incredibly passionate about competitive competitive game play in the game that we've looked fourthly networking so a game like vainglory and any other moba for that matter really relies on faster networking and and high quality networking part of the challenge is that you're always going to be playing on either Wi-Fi or LTE nobody plugs in their phone to like a fixed line network which means and if you think about competitive gaming would you play a competitive PC game of our Wi-Fi probably not right not normally so you have to work really hard on there working on figuring out what sort of optimizations at the lowest level of networking you need to do in order to create an experience that doesn't suffer from ping spikes and that creates as kind of as steady if you like a latency experience as humanly possible and that's something where in particular compared to PC gaming we can grow

everywhere because almost anyone has a phone so figuring out where they put your servers and figuring out how to create high quality connections between the players and those servers is pretty important and then last year I sort of said this early on even to the as an intro to the talk but I feel super cheesy about saying hey we're building a nice part fundamentally the community decides if you're a nice part like we went out to create a competitive game it turned out that the community shouted back to a super loudly we won spectator mode we want you to help us organize ourselves into tournaments and things and that's been the community deciding all of that we are wholeheartedly supporting it but I think especially today when he sports is such a hot word like going out to say we're gonna create a nice part is I think you sort of need to crawl before you walk before you run like you know make a great game then make it great to be competitive and then after that if the community rewards you with wanting to play it competitively then support that activity and figure out how to organize it in a good way and we're still certainly very very early in that journey but we are a company that

lives and dies by our community and we really pride ourselves in just how much we interact all of us in the company but all levels of the company with the community in order to make sure that we are continuing to steer the ship in the right direction which is a good segue to the second big area of learning for us which is community in general there's no other way to build a community than by being authentic being you know delegating community somehow to somebody who creates a false or so nice just a non-starter and all of you guys would probably agree with that but what's interesting about building a competitive game compared to say building casual our mid core games so for companies that I've been I've been involved in our or what from the outside is the engagement with that community has to be at a whole different level when you build a mid core game you can or a casual game to some degree you can sort of rationalize in your mind that yes there will always be a vocal minority but you know what I'm just gonna look at the statistics and the numbers to see what's actually going on behind the scenes not so much for a competitive game here the vocal minority actually tends to be a vocal majority

and a set of folks who actually have a very deep vested interest in what you are doing so what we've tried to do is make sure that we engage with the broadest possible community on every single community platforms you can imagine ranging from forums to ready to Twitter to Facebook to any other channel every every other region today we are more than 18 local language Community Managers whose entire sole full-time job is to sit there and make sure that we listen to our community and hear what they have to say and the engagement all the way from like that sort of broadest engagement all the way to having a private beta group that can help you figure out balancing of the game all the way to meeting up with team captains to meeting up with team owners all of that stuff it's very resource intensive takes a lot of time but it helps us stay have a true north it helps us as a company understand what it is that we are ultimately actually making and for whom in fact one of the biggest surprises that in came completely from the communities when we first launched the

game we felt that the thing that was missing the most were social features we didn't have any chat we didn't have teams wouldn't have guilds we didn't have any of that sort of interaction where you could find other people actually turned out the community didn't want any of that what they wanted was SPECT Asian they wanted a way to watch other people play the game and a way to stream the game and a way to share it with friends so this was actually the spectating client was something that we created we actually because of our engine is a multi-platform engine we actually release the spectating client on Macs actually because that enables us to up with 4k resolution shots from any angle and whatnot in the in the in the halcyon fault so let's people create very high quality experiences and high quality videos but the spectator client has been something that we've been working on together with our community across the board they've asked for features we add features because at the end of the day they are our biggest content creators so that's been a collaborative effort and for all other kinds of content creation it's fundamentally a game-like vainglory grows not through your TV ads or your Facebook ads or your other forms of

campaigns that you put together it grows by having a passionate community that wants to get their friends involved so facilitating that process facilitating how to get your how to enable your community to create content and share that content is something that's turn out to be very important for us and something that we try and support as much as we can and then finally a private beat'em so this is something where for us there's just a combinatorial complexity of trying to balance a game like being glory is too high for us to be able to do it internally and by having a fairly large group of private beta players who get the new patch a couple of weeks before it's out so we can try to figure out find any problems with it it's very useful but it's not just useful for that it's actually a useful way of deepening our relationship with the top players in the world in such a way that we begin to understand sort of the thoughts and hopes and fears of some of these players and begin to understand like what it is ultimately about the balancing of the in-game systems that make them come back

every day and that make them feel very interested in helping push the competitive game moving forward so community has been right from the start something that's been incredibly deeply important to us it's been something that we've really focused on from the start and something that we've found to be incredibly important across the board however marketing as a whole has been something that we've just we've been we've been learning perhaps more about than anything else that the first point here it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone players a pretty darn cynical out there and if this comes as a surprise you know I'm glad you're at GDC and you're learning about gaming because yeah this thing has been true for a while but what's interesting about this is and in particular like a year ago when we came out and we said hey we're trying to make a competitive game on touchscreens like the vitriol that we would hear on places like twitch and reddit and other places where last you would get unfiltered feedback if you like was one of massives get ISM and cynicism and frankly in some ways we deserved it because as an industry mobile gaming we've been pretty

bad at keeping our promises we put out massive beautiful 3d rendered like screenshots and then coupled that with a game session experience which is very janky and two minutes and wants your money on day two and if you don't have any money we don't care about you kind of mobile gaming has been pretty bad at sort of creating that expectation so when somebody stands up and says hey we want to make a PC style competitive experience like the ones that we grew up with on touchscreens the first expectation is that we're lying and that's actually been really an interesting kind of journey for us because all we've done is we try to combat that with authenticity across the board and again rather than trying to buy TV ads saying hey this is the thing you should play because it's awesome we've just worked through the community in fact our best community our best marketing assets across the board the things that have brought people into the game are all community created across the board in fact fundamentally when it comes to marketing a core game and I believe this is actually true for most core games even on PC today that by far the strongest marketing channel and the strongest way to drive awareness of the

game is the player community itself and in fact our philosophy is very much one of we try to create awesome for our player base and if we make awesome for them they hopefully will share it and if they do share it we help with the spotlight on the things that they share because ultimately vainglory is not that a big glory experience as much as much as we work on it every day and try to make it better ultimately it's the players that create the experience for each other and helping highlight that has been a big deal for us so that's why all of these things have been far more important for us than any form of ad spend or marketing sort of internal marketing asset development one of the things that we still struggle with a lot is how the message core game on touch because it's been messaged in so many ways and caused so much disappointment today that in some ways we've actually decided to let the community speak for us on this and we simply amplify whatever it is that they feel is true about the product so that's some marketing learnings a couple of business learnings free-to-play versus pay to win right now the

touchscreen gaming mobile gaming industry as business models are 95% plus pay to win in where for me you are actually shortcutting you become stronger than your neighbor enemy clan mate whatever it might be by spending a bit of money for a competitive game that cannot be the case right we are always have always been fundamentally focused on ensuring total fairness when you come into the game you're exactly as powerful as somebody who's been in the game for 10,000 hours that creates a thing where you have to be much more careful about how you think about business models and how you think about how what kind of in-game transactional models you create to ensure that the business model is orthogonal to your power in the game that is a promise to our players and it's a promise that we have kept them we aim to keep always moving forward and another so it just requires you to rethink the system so you can't simply just take systems from games that you've seen in mobile previously and it's something frankly an area of learning for us as well the other thing that should be obvious at this moment in time

but eSports shouldn't really be thought of as a profit Center at this moment in time yes you have sponsors that get involved yes tournament organizers get involved loads of you can get revenue through all sorts of different sources but I wouldn't think of it as a profit Center a lot of people say it's marketing but actually don't think it's marketing either because if people don't care about playing your game they're not gonna care about watching your game typically there are some edge cases like when TSM joined being glory a lot of TSM fans would check out hey what's this new game that TSM is playing but vast majority of cases people watch the game that they love playing so eSports really for us is all about the product experience it is fundamentally providing our players with the experience of being able to play the game at anytime watch the game being played at the highest level learned from that gameplay and get into this in getting to sort of the usage or consumption pattern that traditional sports has where you play some you watch some you play some you watch them and that's simply what we want to provide through our through eSports finally a couple of practical learnings before I wrap up and these are

kind of ridiculous but it's just has turned out to be things that we didn't expect first thing if you want to play in eSports one way or the other you have to learn TV production and there's a that's like a brick and mortar business it's literally event organization thinking through everything from how do you run a live TV production that's going to work everything from how to plan a run or show to think about talent to training talent to all of those things it's pretty time intensive if you're gonna get into it you need to appreciate that just there's a lot to learn there and we've been doing this now for seven months and we're still learning tons in fact this stuff is so much fun that we sometimes worry that we put too much time into it because we automated me to you know build the game also the other thing is learning Wi-Fi it turns out Wi-Fi is actually black magic dark art in order to make Wi-Fi work really well especially in crowded environments like this is something that you know when you have a tournament with an eighty thousand dollar prize pool that outcome cannot be determined by a ping spike because of your lazy Wi-Fi setup so learning and understanding high performance Wi-Fi is something you need to make a core competence to your

company ridiculous I didn't expect to have to do it but that is what it is we originally dreamed that hey what if we just connect all the devices to you know to a hardwired cable it turns out players want to play on their own device always and they want to sit in all sorts of ridiculous positions while they're playing and there's no way we can guarantee that fixed line internet will work into that specific device so Wi-Fi is the way to go and you need to learn about it tournament setups in general separate tournament servers figuring out you need a separate tournament client which I'm telling you already now you will need a separate tournament client figuring out how you distribute those how do you provision those how do you make sure that everybody has all their hero's unlocked and all the other things that those tournament accounts need to have how do you make sure that the integrity of the tournament environment is correct all of that stuff is something that kind of we just have to we've had to learn and develop the specs for ourselves but then finally and perhaps more importantly ultimately when you think about eSports it is fundamentally about the athletes just like the game is about the players in general the biggest production doesn't matter if the athletes don't get to tell

their story don't get to have their moments of triumph and this has been something that we've ended up learning a ton about and to explain the kind of stories that end up being told behind the scenes because at the end of the day human stories is why players are interested in watching their game as an eSport it is yes it is about watching the great plays and learning from them and the item builds and whatever but it really is about relating to that hero on screen and last weekend we had this we had you know the TSM were that were the favorites by they were nearly knocked out by a team with a twelve-year-old ranged carry who has incredible mechanics his name is dn0 and he's probably one of the most talented players right now in North America it's obviously still at school and and you know he had his parents there which is amazing I just want to play a quick video where the NGO tells his tells his story and tells the story of Halcyon hammers the velocity to give you a sense of just what kind of stories come out of this I think my teammates

are really really good and passionate on how they play like they really do like playing their roles like Omaha he he's really good at what he does when he's playing a hero and he plays it good he almost never messes up an event he's just such a great support like if he's on Catharines we would just win dinsio has no limit I've seen him grow into a player that's tilted after one death then we go in to play a top four team and nemesis and he goes one at five in the first couple minutes then he goes and carries the rest of the game in the first qualifier we lost to Vega in the round of 16 now is our first qualifier together and then we really wanted to go to the live championships and we knew we had to pull off a winning streak in the qualifier and that's what we did in the

second qualifier we came very close to beating TSM and this was huge for us mentally because we're showing ourselves not only everybody else that we can compete at this level when we tied the series with TSM we kind of like didn't focus at that point we thought it was over there's no way we can mess up and then we choked and messed it up we had it we had the game it was arts and then when we lost I was I was so disappointed they didn't deserve that one I want my revenge we're not gonna make that mistake again and we're gonna keep our minds focused for our matches and make sure we take it home and then celebrate [Music] I'm gonna say Feherty Enzio if you ever see him out in soloqueue just surrender there's not much you can do um so these type of human stories is ultimately what eSports engenders and that is for us ultimately the fundamental emotional resonance that

we want to create when it comes to the game and that's the thing that we help we hope that we can help surface across our community and that's the meaning or eSports for us so before I before I leave you guys just just a final reminder why we are doing this we talked a lot about the meta of different games well that we feel like the meta of the industry fundamentally is that companies have built incredible businesses off the back of a PC install base of about seven to eight hundred million gaming PC's out there incredible happy communities of well sometimes salty but mostly happy communities of core players of the back of fundamentally only less than a fifth of the world's population having access to these devices and that base isn't really growing that much that fast by the end of this year there will be over three billion touchscreen devices that can play a game like vainglory we're still very early in this cycle we believe over the next three to five to seven years somebody's going to go out there and build a company that is three to five to seven times as large as the

largest PC gaming companies today that company is going to be built day by day week by week month by month by doing better and better and better with our community make our community happier every day make the product a little bit better every day we're in no rush but we're just incredibly excited to be part of that journey and part of that evolution and look forward to seeing what the industry is going to be heading in the next three to five years and with that thank you very much we have maybe time for one or two questions [Applause] can you talk maybe just a little bit to how you guys handled streaming like it seems like it'd be a lot harder to stream from a mobile device so how do you build an audience for an eSport yeah it's a great question so if you didn't hear it how do we handle streaming so frankly we had to just learn it ourselves first it turns out the best

way to stream from a mobile device you can stream in many ways you can either use something like just a sort of screen sharing if you like from the device but that doesn't look too great best way to do it is we're by a capture box so if you have a HDMI out from the device just capture it and then stream it by a PC it's pretty clunky it's pretty difficult but it's something that the core players out there will do and in fact there's a lot of good capture boxes that are pretty cheap and a good strategy could be just to share some of that equipment and certainly have a pin to post on your forum saying if you want to create content this is how you do it and keep linking to it okay apparently we have to cut it but I'll be obvious the area at the back thanks again to all of you guys and huge thanks to our community for helping us grow this part thank you [Applause]