What the mobile games industry needs to do to get mainstream recognition

[Music] so we have we have a variety of people different spaces on the each sport space now I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the issues there's a lot of the steps on the side and let you put what you've very angelic up as well so how do you like to come along I'll let you pick your way let's sit and grab some water yeah edge itself down so cool and we've got a seat walk I'll sit down with your other than standing up that's great cool so we're just going to Segway straight into it so um thank you for coming along I'm going to start off by saying that I am an enthusiast but by no means an expert in these foot is full space so I'm kind of so don't even I say that's ridiculous then feel free to cut me down and make make a mockery of me in front of everybody in my conference I appreciate that is good well I do know

that if we've seen some great presentations earlier setting the scene saying how much eSports is growing and how big the potential is and you know and particularly with the mobile with the scale of mobile devices out there so but the question of the power really is how can eSports kind of go mainstream now at where are we in terms of really smashing through a sea and that's what we can I kind of debate in a wonderful way so to kick things off one good dudes papel just quickly introduce what who they are than what they do in the in the East or space or where they fit in it and and to answer the question broadly where where you think we are in terms of our potential we right the start are we kind of making progress so we'll start here with inks you're right you're right next week so what tell us about what your what you're doing these was definitely definitely great to be here great to be here with you gentlemen William Webb founder CEO of jackpot rising we are a tournament platform solution for for game developers as well

as publishers that allow them to implement real money tournaments into their games really in eSports mode into their games it's a flexible open tournament structure that allows players to compete against each other in progressive jackpot tournaments as well as fixed jackpot tournaments so in terms of where eSports is right now I've tip of the iceberg the iceberg David how would you obviously people reporting that you David did but hello hi I'm David I overlooked the mobile eSports or mobile gaming part of SL also announced council we we currently produce the the vainglory 8 which is the professional league for vainglory and the crown championship global series in six different languages across Europe and Brazil and we also do critical ops which

is a first-person shooter on mobile and we're going to be partnering with two to three different publishers later in q4 I think this year to kill free serving at any point yep anyone be doing that yeah no I think I think mobile eSports right now is approximately right where PC sports was around the starcraft brood war era when it was very very early and has lots of diehard fans but hasn't hit mainstream yet I think I think eSports now has like PC Sports has now become mainstream mobile is about a few years behind okay I went to the Bangalore World Championships last year those great yeah I agree owned the team that won it okay look at how briga hang on hang on so it's chilly to the ring others that could come complimentary and I was doped America so on John Robinson from Bessemer Venture Partners before joining Bessemer I was at Nexon and at

Electronic Arts Bessemer is a large venture capital fund most notably we were the first investors in twitch back in 2012 we've also done a variety of things across gaming and consumer internet I'm helping them focus on both games and eSports and I would I would agree with the panel so far it feels like PC 10 years ago yeah we're really really bullish on the mobile game streaming space and the community space right now and I think naturally the the eSports kind of elements will will naturally flow out of that but I don't see them becoming really mainstream or huge okay for another couple years burn Oh last but by no means least case each Afghan founder and chief marketing officer of skills skills is the leading eSports infrastructure and live operations provider for about 4,000 mobile game developers we've hosted about a million mobile we've hosted about million mobile eSports tournaments and about sorry 100 million mobile

eSports tournaments gonna recreate 500 now 500 thousand a day we were we're kind of huge believers in in eSports as a landscape looking a lot like physical sports in the in the broader ecosystem which is to say there are many many sports being played concurrently some of them are very large and very popular and then other ones are smaller and played more recreationally and I think when I think about where eSports is today relative to to where it will be I think there's an easy exercise that you can do to benchmark that and that is to you can do this with your friends or your family or your uber driver and you can ask them if they play sports and almost invariably everyone will tell you that they have some relationship to sports they'll say like I you know I golf on the weekends or I Bowl with my kids or I go jogging in the mornings or they'll just say I don't but I like watching the Giants or the Warriors or something like that they'll tell you they have this relationship with sports and then if you

ask them if they play eSports or they participate in eSports in any way they'll look at you like you're insane and so you can try this you can replicate this experiment but long-term I think that you'll get the same reaction to the question about eSports that you do about physical sports today and so that kind of gives you a sense of a pretty square I think it's going okay guys challenge what a building is ok I won't get to where the building is asked or not that's fair enough we can do but we can move on from that um I think um if you kind of answer a little bit of the second question what they will ask which is relation to kind of framing the question we're talking about here what what would mainstream we talk about this being a mainstream thing what would mainstream success look like for for mobile esports esports as a whole we've had some interesting research earlier talking about how amongst Millennials the you know they had a stronger relationship with eSports potentially than we did with or young 21 to see or mouthing was with them with maybe sports in terms of time it's been consuming it so what does what does the mainstream success look like when are we going to

know we've hit a mainstream thing so tap on from youtubers like I mean privateer I think it's yeah I mean I think it's for a participatory level everyone will acknowledge and say that they have played in at some level played in an electronic sports competition I think it's I think of you know John and I were just talking about this before the panel but multiplayer competition is kind of founded a foundation of electronic sports and one level above that you have kind of crowd funded competitions or third party organized competitions on a small scale recreational this is like your your co-ed kickball league or your rec basketball league and kind of one level above that you've got larger scale competitions that are organized so it's like beta breakers for running and then you have professional level tournaments that are subsidized by brand sponsors and and viewed viewed by fans both people who participate in the sport and people who don't but understand it and so like for me when I think about mainstream it's it's reaching the point where everyone is in everyone is

involved in the ecosystem much in the same way that historically if you ask people if they were gamers or if you look to people and said are you gamers they would think do I own a console and you know you get relatively small penetration today with mobile almost everyone plays games and so what where I think you're going to get to is almost everyone participates in the eSports community okay that's but anybody got a different opinion on that or anything about how how success would look like and I think it's useful to say Joe I mean John up see you're kind of investing this you've probably gone out an outcome that's desired it's not another core it's very quite nice yeah we're looking for multiple hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers we didn't get at that point on kind of like a weekly basis we think they're it's like the sponsors get interested the distribution channels get interested kind of like the the infrastructure of an industry can really lean in then yeah I don't know for their just yet but we're getting pretty close it's kind of brand advertising a key metric as it went you know when kind of the color to the world and you know the sports

brands kind of is that this is one we go yeah we're there now I mean because it does that not matter because that's typically being a thing like you know I mean can you get sponsorship from a big so I think the markets pretty smart and everyone's watching this and I would give some credit to the brand sponsors okay I'm not saying that really closely and I think those two things happen and almost almost simultaneously yeah okay fair enough so I guess a side question today is who is going to you know which particular groups going to push it you've got a lot of different players in the space literally you know you've kind of got the game owners you've got the people organized the league you've kind of got sort of brands if there was going to be we needed to make the most kind of progress to to push this this forward or is everybody I mean like you know you might question make sense of you it does it does I think that it's a mixture of a few things case you just mentioned the infrastructure aspect that's that's all staying still being built up I think that there are a few main pieces in place the content aspect

that's that's there that's been there and so I think the content is definitely there but it's to get all ties back to the content owners when you look at the successful titles they're owned by that IP is owned is fragmented so it's owned by by the the content owner you know Call of Duty owned by an individual entity and then go through the successful titles and so it's the power really all comes back to those those content holders and owners that that have those user bases in those eyeballs off of which successful and major tournaments can or leagues can be enough of I'll disagree with that I don't know but it's what we want my whole point of how great under via our mobile site it's like well well traditionally as we look at eSports we have some massive massive companies Activision Blizzard and Riot who are able to invest in kind of their infrastructure I think on the mobile side some of the largest mobile mobile games that could become eSports have very small small teams supercell for example super evil and they really need

partners to help them grow that as any important so I actually think on the mobile side the other players that are also in the ecosystem have a huge opportunity to kind of help helped deliver that value and temperature of the space I completely agree with you I completely agree I think it's multifaceted if you'd the titles that you just named though are some of the biggest mobile titles that there are and so they definitely are the tip of the spear and hold a lot of power but I agree with you in this in the sense that it's an ecosystem and there's multiple fronts to attack yeah and I guess from that is that maybe a challenge or a problem that there's quite a lot of fragmentation there's a lot of looking it from the outside and I'm not as engaged yet as I've never liked to be but you see a lot of different leagues there's lots of different people running local leagues and national leagues and the games are running competitions here celebrating in competition you know maybe it may be mo esports Kaiser sets me up with her if that is that just a mark of the young industry or is that potential problem there yeah I think I mean you can the

analogy the reader recent analogy is mixed martial arts and so 15 you know 15 years ago I don't need neither 15 years ago you had you know you had a incredibly fragmented sports industry everyone there's kind of this human acknowledgement that hand-to-hand combat is a sport for better or worse and but you had you had a bunch of rival League organizers going at it and I think I don't think that's problematic for the development of a of a sports industry I mean I think it's I think it's potentially problematic for the league operators but but generally I think it's a you know it is a situation where something will evolve rise exactly they'll become a clarification and stratification as it progresses okay um is is going back secondly if eSports in some ways unhelpful term because of the connotations of a-holes you know people understand sports so

they're come in with expectations that eSports is going to be like sports but with games when in fact there are similarities but also a lot of differences and we also have under eSports competitive you know skills and and the a polarizing competitive gaming elements which maybe aren't the same as having a tournament can it eSports the bottom it is problematic only and I mean you get the same you I mean you have the same you know four years ago when we started the business and we trademark eSports for everyone the first question people got from her investors like what is eSports but then you know then it's like well how do you have eSports on mobile and I think these questions have existed in the physical sports world too so you mentioned in half jokingly but right so is bowling a sport and there's this positive ated like is it or isn't it and like you know and then you start you get into the world why why is it why is it or why isn't it and is it because you know and I think eSports are it's interesting because they require it's a similar it's a combination of both physical dexterity and mental acuity you're using different a different

muscle groups so it's fine motor skills as opposed to gross motor skills but it's largely the same skill set but I don't I think you have the same debate I'm I grew up as a competitive runner and people would say like runnings not a sport that's that's the punishment for real sport and that's well but I'd mail my counter was like it's the original sport and so I think you have the same I mean I think I don't I don't know the terminology is the problem I think we're always we're always going to have these debates about what is and is not a sport what's a game what's a sport what's a competitive game yeah okay trying to find we go different viewpoint oh you my big esports just became an umbrella term because it's been such a popular buzz buzz word so it just became something that became easily understandable for anybody using the word so I think a lot of a lot of publishers use user term organized gaming like or Opie some people use competitive gaming others use eSports I think they're all

there might be three different things yeah at the end of the day eSports somehow ended up becoming this umbrella term so everybody just understands its competition but I think you gather in mobile particularly I PvP is the thing it's been a you've been every game for why was kind of PvP and now it's finally can take awhile to get to the westbr it's now more and more games coming out it's PvP is competitive gaming you know against other players but is a distinction between I mean there's competitive gaming there's a game you can play as people and then as eSports as surely that's come over there's a differentiation that the eSports to me suggest as a structure around it there's a kind of you have you know you have basically made rankings and all that sort of stuff for them but maybe ask my problems I think spectatorship is is typically ship actuator shape I think is kind of the key differentiator at least in my mind between kind of competitive game what what is a competitive game and what as a sport made will do I would say but I think that their each one builds from the other so you start with a game then you add multiplayer to it and then you have competitive gaming and I think so

so you know might it might benefit us as an industry if we invented a few more terms inside of inside of the world of sports so you know if we if we differentiate it between professional eSports and amateur eSports if we differentiated between eSports and and you know an FPS or something like that just like but you know baseball is a sport and then there so that they're you know one fits inside the other and then there's all levels in baseball so we might be bent we might benefit from some some additional its inter I think I think I see mobile developers seeing kind of eSports in competitive gaming as a as a for various reasons as a you know way of engaged in increasing engagement and getting cheaper UA in a very competitive space as well as you know an end in itself but I guess it's can you come out as a mobile developer to garden making an eSport as kind of what vainglory and then a super mobile court did I don't know with what supercell would deliberately doing that it feels like they're doing that more with broad styles new where maybe with clash Royale but is that you know can you go out and

make any sport can can use a developer I go I'm going to make any sport or juice make a competitive game and then someone else decides it's nice poor by the viewers the the player I think it's a mix of both going out so if you if you build an awesome competitive game and nobody wants to watch it you don't have an eSport but at the same time you know if you don't build a structure for it if you're not mindful you're not intentional about it then your game cannot succeed it in eSport so if you look at for example Starcraft who are which many people refer to as the grandfather of you know video words you know there there were many players in the in the background creating this creating this structure so that eventually it could it rise as a nice points platform so I think spectators we mentioned a couple of times that's clearly you know again in the earlier presentations or a lot of interesting comparisons drawn between number of people playing any sport

unread people kind of watching you never we never play the game tour but a spring time on Twitch so where are we in terms of us or spectator there's a lot of work to be done there we have we nailed it with twitch I mean and O's and issue gaming with is a more we need to do we need to have more kind of structure with more cast as you David yeah that's you I mean yeah it's your opportunity to shine yeah so I think for this a lot of mobile game developers where they're missing the boat is it's when they're released before they release the game they don't have custom game lobbies which allow people to create tournaments in the community to run tournaments and grow that competitive and tournament type of scene basically custom game lobbies are the ability for two players anywhere in the world to match each other they play against each other another thing is a spectator client if so if there's a match the ability to watch as match so if you're familiar with a hearthstone or a clash Royale they all have spectator modes so you

know I think when mobile when mobile developers get a more intentional about creating the competitive foundation of their game I think we'll see a lot more mobile eSports titles take off yeah I think that's exactly I think we're ready exactly right and there's a huge opportunity I mean even in even in the mature games that we think of as sports today so you think of Counter Strike which is considered by most people one of the kind of like a pillar of eSports and spectatorship today is kind of a you have a two teams playing against each other and they're they're broadcast is like a rotating heads-up display and that that's like kind of like watching an NFL broadcast where all the players are wearing GoPros and you cycle from like the quarterback to yeah for the running back to the linebacker and like at least for me even as someone who's played casually I have a really hard time knowing what's going on yeah and that makes it I think really difficult for people who haven't played the game to play the game and the great thing about software right it's like we can we can make it to anything so great great

counter take players it's like they shoot someone and then they turn before the bullet hits the hits the other person and we broadcast that today in real time we could you could slow down to bullet time for that broadcast because the software knows that we're going that that bullet is going to make contact it's going to kill that person it's going to be a pivotal moment in the game and that's where I think the really big future opportunity is is in isn't how we like as game developers start building with the spectator I mean you have to build the core competitive experience but then if you have that building with the spectator in mind I saw I saw some interesting technology and I'm in the name of it delights me I was talking about earlier where it was a kind of YouTube kind of an extra layer on YouTube or twitch for us and it allowed the the viewer to kind of control and said number of things because obviously the feed is kind of data feed and they could almost choose the camera they could kind of choose to annotate what was going on because they were kind of had a different kind of game than you could have with like you know sports I was kind of it seemed really interesting potential er um from an investment

perspective I mean clearly pitchers would be good investment well done so that was actually mr. you mister that memories to come earlier when it was they were saying how he thought to issues was was worth this sort of money kind of for years ago clearly clearly you other guys that did but it's not it okay but fine you can take it as fine but who what I talk to invested and and I see what people investing in like things like teams at the moment it seems like the investments base is kind of I get a little bit kind of fragmented is people more in the teams than the leagues maybe all the games I just see like a really healthy ecosystem across the board so the platform supporting competitive gaming and streaming the teams that are playing in that space they gain publishers that are taking advantage of basically like like flipping margins on their head by growing games without studying anything yes I think across all three of those aspects there are great opportunities now so I think we're bullish on on also

investment straight to looking at mobile games I notice and anything but something to have any sports angle potential is straight away I'll be more interesting than a community angle yes and I think well-executed there could be eSports potential but think the seeing the community and the streaming side of things is certainly an early indication that we're looking for and kind of uptick on on YouTube and twitch is a great great way to validate that or see that okay currents come back something was touched upon a minute ago in terms of a game design perspective is there what are the key things if from a developer that you know is anything absolutely pivotal if you want to you know be thinking about this making a game open to being any sports any competitive game from the ground up that have to be in place yeah I mean I think I guess I would covered a few them right but I mean it I think it starts is you need to have a fun competitive experience so I think there's this there's kind of the business notion at least we've seen it as a platform that powers these game developers the initial games that work with us were just like

I'm going to jam in some competitions we'll have some prizes involved with them and like people are going to flock to this and the reality is people don't want to play unfun experiences competitively it sounds really really obvious when I say it like that maybe but what it starts with it starts with a game that the people enjoy competing them because you're not people aren't going to want to compete at higher levels if if they're not if they don't enjoy competing so I think for us we've seen that as kind of the first piece the the second piece of it is kind of this concept of easy to pick up but with a high high skill feeling so one of the things that I think overwatch is done really well as a game is that they made it so that you can start playing really really easily and that allows you potentially as a spectator say I don't want to play this game anymore but I at least understand the fundamentals so they can watch it in the same way that I've tried I've tried throwing a ball before so I might be able to watch football and appreciate the skill involved with a quarterback right I mean that's like growth this is a gross motor skills versus fine motor skills though it's hard to appreciate fine motor

skills so I think this idea of enabling people to participate and consume in it at some level to me is the second the second really big thing there okay okay I'm where that cost a little bit slow because we started a bit early but but do you have any kind of questions I've got playing more questions but got a couple time time a couple of questions you have any questions in the audience that Joe I can't see so yeah Jeff sorry Jeff can't very but like what do you guys think about daily fantasy sports integrating with you sports cool good question I think so I can I mean we are our series a investors it was the was a series and draftkings so pretty familiar with with the FS but I think it's these are companion industries for sports so I think daily fantasy or sports gambling or like any of the any of the ancillary industries that get built around sports are generally helpful because they they help in they generally enhance the spectatorship experience for people who

want to play so the people who play DFS tend to watch lots more sports because they're more deeply engaged so I think I think you'll see the same the same companion industries build up around eSports that you see around physical physical sports because well I guess I'm sounding like a broken record here right but that they're like I genuine it's the same evolutionary track that we're on are you are you in the daily fantasy space okay or drag duel has it be called next week a little bit no okay so I was on that okay no no comment on that yeah I wasn't gonna bring man okay um any other questions we have other there's a question gentleman in the corner there we use the mic is it because it records on to the nether knuckle you this one is related to the previous speaker actually who was talking about the need for security and verification of what people do in games and there's this parallel technology called blockchain and I'm wondering if you all have thought about how to integrate blockchain verification of people's accomplishments and so forth

into your enterprises thank you Wow to go what's writing together this is like books a family sports well record we've we've taken a look at that and and and are definitely on a road map you know I'd say trajectory there have different elements of what are you talking about encryption and insecurity of maintaining maintaining the integrity of a tournament or gameplay or transactions whatever that may be there I think there's there's definitely a parallel there it's just a matter of use case and and I mean did you have a stool with it just a general blockchain or different applications of general I'm a generalist who deals in a number of systems and at one of the technology conferences in San Jose last week the augmented world expo the use of blockchain was brought up as a solution

to the problems that were introduced by the previous speaker of people saying we need to know these games are fair that they're secure and that people actually own the accomplishments that they have done at certain levels to make it a level playing field if you will and with with hundreds of millions of people playing here how else do you do this without a anonymized accounting system that could actually show people that you know that there's no there's nobody's hand on the scale it's actually anonymized and accurate so I think you end up with a multi-faceted approach so security ends up being paramount to I think it's foundational to any sport so you're trying to avoid Romi Rui Rosie Ruiz like riding the subway in the 1980 marathon or like maybe he did or maybe didn't deflate some footballs like Tom Brady or like you know corking your bat and baseball I think like any time you have any time that you have kind of fame and fortune on the line there's incentives for people to become bad

actors or to tow the line unfairness and I think the the reason sports leagues focus so much on that is that you can't as a spectator appreciate it if you can't appreciate the accomplishments if if they're not real accomplishment so but I think it ends up being I think it has to be a multi-faceted approach and the other big one at least that we think about is is data and pattern recognition and so like this is when you look at you know wallhacks in first-person shooters I think that the most compelling way to stop that that I've seen is actually data signatures and you look at kind of how how is a player where is their gun pointed when they're walking around and so what you see is that people who have soldered their video cards that their walls are invisible and first-person shooters they tend to be looking at the person they're going to shoot even when there's a face some that should should be translucent in front of them and so I think there's like a I think big data is another way that you needed that you can attack that problem but that again is a kind of incumbent on capturing the right data points okay we've got some for one file

question if there is one or we will okay I'll give you one very quick very quick prediction where we going to be in a what what's gonna happen the next year we're going to be in a in a year two years time it's mobile going to be if mobile can be bigger than the regular eSports is it is it is it going to be a caught up I don't know it's a big project prediction I think that's take that it I know I was giving you option I think it even if it wasn't I don't hit I maybe I'm wrong but I think I mean mobile is the most popular gaming platform in history and so it kind of stands to reason in my mind that the competitive mobile gaming and competitive eSports are going to be larger on mobile than they will be on pc and console but you know mobile is I just think of it as an extension of PC it's not they're not they're not competing they're merging okay I'll say in three years supercell is going to have the most popular eSports title across all platforms cool there's good because I think you could do this success I think it's about time yeah

Russia yeah I think I think it'll I think it'll grow immensely in the next year I don't know it's going to overtake PC okay Burnham I think that in the opening a lot of panelists we agreed that that that Mobile is a little bit obviously behind it's it reminds everyone of where PC was years ago but the rate of growth is this it's going to be faster technology technological advances Hardware advances scalability it's just fabulous okay that's good time to jump in so have a big round of applause please smite with some panel thank you very much you make Oh [Music]