Will mobile eSports be a hit? Twitch and Super Evil Megacorp discuss

we are going to I'm going to find my notes sorry I'm glad to invite to the stage to other companies are really kind of rocking at the moment in the sports space in the form of soup evo mega call the publisher of vainglory and the leading streaming network twitch so to discuss their views of the market and what they had the projects are working together i'd like to welcome Ryan chapli and honey the sander give around the port at the one walking up lovely come and sit yourselves down how you doing stay you're good I'm doing really well yeah can you hand me a camera I'm on the very I'm very quiet you can probably a me anyway well hello hello I understand we have some video to show we do we have a quick video we have a quick video how is the video going do I need to pad are

we gonna go for it thumbs up okay so hopefully run VT we good oh look at it was actually that is the wrong video but that's okay we can watch this one I like these videos so another video this is another video this one is actually interview with one of our youngest players in Europe he's 13 mr. k cool but I have a probably a bit more interesting of a video which recaps 2015 that kind of out what we did in 2015 in eSports I think that's gonna be so long this one yeah there we go what's really he loves me there's a single running what's going on here you wanna stop and start that again is okay sorry that's technical yeah because you've kind of it's not full screen mode right you should maybe

delete one of those videos so many video i miss you were the problems with eSports the technical the technical situation is very different so it is important this is not what twitch does i was sleeping I've heard some stuff about production value okay so okay were you able to go back to the start and play that one from the start guys yep yep okay at least we get really nice closer okay so you just need to drag that slider back I guess we can play it in the window of it's proving the problem of the ways it might be the format size is slightly different just need the audio and we're good there we go there we go second time lucky that's fine 2015 season I love Kristin

hmm Oh do you normally Oh Oh

familiar face there that's good Wow well that's why yes you've kind of going somewhere questions already gone but no that's very very impressive I think it was really really cool and I guess straightaway that shows the the intensity and the importance and the yeah just the engagement of V sports right now especially what you guys are doing so you had some kind of some figures flashed in there like you kind of recap a little bit on on what you guys have done because it was quite quick for sure yeah it was really quick I'm 2015 was a very big year I mean we kind of started our eSports with the autumn season that was the first event kind of bigger event that we organized by ourselves prior to that we we've partnered together with ogn in Korea so we've run VIP l together with them but ok 2015 it really escalated very quickly considering that pretty much a year ago we didn't even have a spectator client in the game and honestly the community

came to us like hey we want to organize tournaments we want to do all this competitive stuff and watch your game and stream your game and so we had to build a spectator client it was literally from the first packs of the year to the second packs we had built a quick spectator mode of metaphors tournament at pacsun twitches booth oh that's kind of where it all got started and so during last year we gave out 350 thousand dollars in prize pool total um oh gosh if I remember correctly was 155 million minutes watched on twitch of vainglory eSports content our weekend cuz we run our season so we like every year I mean it goes like winter summer fall and so forth at the end of every season we have the north american european championships so one of the weekends um it's what at 1.5 million unique viewers tuned in so on one of those weekends so it's it's pretty impressive kind of growth very quickly um and like the video said we just got started I mean this right now we're in our third season running that together

with twitch we just kicked off summer so we're very excited for stuff that's going on that mean that's that's impressive i mean like you know the site for the size of money the engagement there 155 million sort of minutes of watch and 1.5 that's just that's incredible engagement they're like where I'm sure it's about a bit later in comparison to kind of two regular sports i think i read saw some sort some stats stats to show that already sports tournaments are already up there with everything but you know the world cup and maybe the NFL super bowls that is that right well i think that one of the most interesting pieces when when you come to eSports is just kind of what people do when they go and watch and you see this in the chat sometimes like oh I've been watching this for nine hours today like people get extremely invested in the programs they don't go watch one game on Sunday they go and watch the entire weekend's worth of programming so kind of we we have to look at how does this kind of this minutes watch number in particular as we see it continuing growing how are people doing it how long are they watching these streams for and how are they engaging with the brands

and obviously yeah so we segue to quite I'm going to get between the two of you and I'm going to get all of my questions so so obviously you guys are seeing all the dates for having a boat still there but that's what you're you're the experts in streaming you yourself have had pretty meteoric pizza rustica right in the last couple of years up until can acquisition I guess beyond but your name previously was in or has been in pc based gaming primarily from from why I've seen what we're involved i mean do you i'd move into mobile now from a twitch perspective well mobile is is kind of on this this cusper for a lot of the eSports scene of well we see what are our viewers are going and watching in terms of devices what they're watching on and then we're really hitting the point when titles like van glory are coming in and and presenting experiences that from a competitive perspective really match what we've grown up with or what we come to expect from a pc sports scene so i think one of the biggest pieces that you see people's eyes when they're playing it up packs

that it lights up they go and they play the game and coming in they here oh it's a mobile on touch they have preconceptions yeah and then they play and they're like holy smokes this is like has everything here that a competitive MOBA has yeah it runs beautifully it looks gorgeous and and you can play it anywhere yeah okay and have you got any is only kind we've talked about a 55 kind of minutes is there any kind of any broad numbers or Staten you can share about how how much of mobile content has been consumed in comparisons the content on twit well what I can say is that mobile is definitely one of our you know very dedicated fan bases where people watch it just a number of devices we have what's 70 some billion minutes watched on on mobile devices across 64 million unique users so that I think will will expect to see continued growing dramatically over time here and then you know for vainglory we've been seeing some pretty significant growth over over the past season since they've

started doing these sports scenes yeah and percent wise I think our recent mobile viewership percentage is about thirty-eight percent of our traffic so it's pretty significant for any developers who obviously are creating mobile titles when you're thinking about the viewership perspective though you know obviously a lot of people are going to be viewing the devices that they're using for titles like thank Laurie it is definitely higher so just a bit of a loving kind of a leaders list so so you guys obviously kind of come to go what was it that kind of led to that you just saw my garden look at the engagement of this but God talk to these guys or what was it what was it that kind of led you to come to go in the first place and maybe you can talk a little bit about what it is you're actually doing so I don't know does everybody know about the deal between that spray they're very quiet very hungover most of this so um so maybe you can talk a little bit about the nature deal and how you kind of got together sure so I can kind of start and Ryan can chime in so the current status of affair so to say is we vent to entered a three-year partnership together with twitch where we run our eSports program together sharing cost

sharing profits and really Ryan and I work day to day together all the time anyway so so we're really kind of growing the scene together from our end what it really came down to is that we're a game developer we'd love to be an esports production company but in the end we need to focus on building the game and making sure our players want to continue to play that competitively and eSports is so much fun you can put so much time and energy into it yeah let's play oh sorry oh yeah you know all the things don't you um where was I so yeah as a game developer it's also very important to keep focus on what you're actually probably better at which in our case is building building vainglory so we wanted to find a partner that can really help us grow the scene in a sustainable way because it was really down to like you know either we go out and hire 10 people and figure out how do we support our own or we actually partnered together with someone who's already very savvy who knows what to do

and how to grow the scene and then twitch was a very natural partner for us also from the viewpoint that community is very important for us we're always saying that you can't build an eSport your community has to tell you when you're ready to be any sport like you have to build a great game and let them tell you at which i think is very similar in how community is is really what twitch is all about um so it was we kind of share that vision as well which just makes it great to work together you got anything to add or she done it all she's taking us she's taking most second but I can see the nature the relationship day today yes I should actually add a bit of context around just kind of like a sports in general at twitch so obviously we've been very involved from the the broadcasting perspective yeah the the eSports team as a whole with int which is is a little bit newer compared to the overall growth of the of the company and our our team is just it very dedicated on kind of looking at the eSports industry the eSports scene and helping move it forward in a positive direction most of us actually in there come from competitive backgrounds I used to

compute a long long time ago and you know if you were tired now I i I've done things it soon is it too late for me is that we're saying I I feel I might miss my calling is considering the age of a lot of the vainglory parrot players I think everyone in this room is retired at this point but you know in general like we wanted to focus on having that kind of the getting the eSports products to the consumers and the consumption side but with the background of being players ourselves where can we really improve the kind of overall flow and then we're going with developers with amazing titles too so is this sort of deal this is your first big mobile game blades deal there because I if you work with papers are that with pc titles potato may as well give away but so the sports program in general kinda we have a variety of different everything's customized for you program this is an example of an extremely hands on one where we work very closely with smc rocket league is another example with psionics that we were quite there are other programs that we have

different levels of kind of involvement in between running the program's themselves to more around the production broadcast side okay this is about a bit this is the same mobile as the most hands-on through this mobile yes this is definitely our first and how you're the only mobile time work so um I want asked a lot about we're switching about a little bit about vainglory um you know you've deliberately gone out and got very hardcore for a for a mobile mobile industries generally has been more casual not like exclusively and overseas it's very it's very similar in some respects to a pc pc mobile but so is that I guess that was very conscious choice before you only sport that you wanted to do a hardcore MOBA and as part 1 and part 2 is is where does it differ where what choices you have to make with with the mobile version sure so so for the first part and the founders of the company and actually everyone who works there we're kind of we're people who grew up playing core games you know we we spent hours Len parting with our

friends or in my case I spent way too many hours playing Diablo and those are kind of the experiences that we want to also play regardless what platform you're on and we kind of feel very strongly that you know what mobile also deserves core games I'm not saying there's anything wrong with casual games is great i love them i play them a lot but we also felt very strongly that you know if i want to get into a deep immersive game i almost have to go dig out my pc or my console go through the whole you know update process and you know spend hours on it why can't I just go on my phone open it up and just get in there and get converted or sometimes you need to do those and that's really kind of what it comes down to it super evil we really believe that you should be able to play those deep immersive game experiences regardless of platform and that's really been kind of the building you know thesis for the company and we we stand by that um and so then

kind of tangent ingat into your second part of the question where we kind of compared to a pc pc i'm game i mean obvious be the clearest difference there will be the touch controls and if you if you've played bobas you know it's keyboard and um what I called the mouse yeah so Fashion Technology what is already it's fine English is my second language bare with me so we can do this in Finnish people don't know anything out of it finished so um plate plate you kind of play your mobo using those two hands and then shifting from that and to touch controls where you play either with your index fingers or a few fingers it really depends on your play style that's probably the biggest difference that you you'll notice going from pc to our game and but it's really quick and intuitive to learn and we have we've put so much time and ours really to get the touch controls right because especially if you want to build a game that that's playable on a competitive level the controls need to be out of the way you

can't be focusing on gimmicks at oh shoot what did I need to do to do this thing you need to just be playing right so that's that's been one clear thing and then other than that I mean it's really a full on moba yeah it's shorter the typical session length is about 20 minutes and so that's considerably shorter than the most MOBAs are around 4045 minutes but other than that it really has all the phases of a true MOBA if you like it is 3v3 not 5v5 so that's also a bit different and everything has been built for the tatra for the touch platform so that goes from the map to hero design like I mentioned the controls already we and then also putting a lot of focus making sure that it's it's a competitive game in the sense that you have different kind of MOBAs have a specific kind of pattern of how you proceed we're in the beginning you're you're trying to get a lot of gold you're laning your jungle you're getting objectives then you're thrown into teamfights you really need to push

down the turret get into the enemy base and eventually destroy them or they destroy you so really making sure that all of those important phases aren't in there and also one key thing is that if you make a mistake it can't cause you the entire game right you can't lose because of one single mistake so also having that opportunity for come back so yeah I mean really it doesn't differ that much sure if your mobile player it'll be familiar yeah we have a lot of players who still play or used to play on PC and they've hopped into our game and it's straightforward to get into okay okay let's just get out to lots of long sentence it was a really there's no breathing in that I was good a different question at twitch I guess in the mobile car streaming video spaces there's at the number of competitors as I'm sure there are in pc we've had you know kind of youtuber doing things that are kind of mob crusher doing things there how would you say that got which stands out what's your differential ur what you do better than everyone else come on but we

do we do a lot of great things yeah you've got nice hoodie first half only sorry but no in general there there's a lot of a lot of great things that twitch does and kind of highlighted the the community focus in all the companies you've been in there's always like oh you know we have value stuff right and that just kind of sits there on the wall but but with twitch it's like the the kind of broadcaster first mentality is it's not just there as a placard it's just ingrained and absolutely everything that we do so we're still read a size where we have these abilities to create multi-million dollar partnerships with developers and do awesome things but at the same time we're also having very personal connections to all of the all the broadcasters so that's it we're in that really nice sized spot at the moment additionally like there's there is a community around the viewership of twitch yeah so you know we have a lot of people tuning in to these streams there the chat lots of new features that we keep adding into the how we how we do chat how we're adding the chats you know

the the friends stuff that we just added recently and a lot more I'm not stealing thunder from twitchcon because that's coming up and just little plug for later yeah okay twins twitch come in that's in late-september fantastic timber I think 32 I heard you had like a thousand people came for Tony's last year people do like these huh I know I they're very nice I'm our God there but yeah we have we have all sorts of other really neat swag too as well as the CFC does the hats in particular high school but yeah otherwise there's there's a lot of kind of very very community-focused things that that we work on as well so you know from compare some of the other competitors if you come in and experience the the twitch experience you are really being involved in a different way than you could even even out a lot of them Guillaume times and then I would also say that's for kind of twitches side when it comes to the broadcaster's we're very connected and concerned about making sure that they can have a kind of a sustainable growth pattern too so one of the things especially when it comes

to mobile mobile streaming is not an easy solutions it's always challenging and one of the things that we found is that for for broadcasters who are turning this into a career they're really they're getting thousands of people tuning into all their streams is watching regularly naturally they tend to go to a higher level of production value as well so for a console player if they're doing that they're going to be plugging into a PC they're going to be doing all the complicated overlays and even if they start on console that's kind of where they end up yeah so when it when it comes to the mobile stuff you know I think we're still working out quite a bit and growing that and one of the great things are working with semc is that we have the ability to do that with our youth sports broadcast of saying hey look this is what a a competitive broadcast of vainglory can look like with a quality production side and if you didn't notice and when it's on the front page we have tons of people who come in and they don't notice for a little touch game like holy smokes it's nice on the on the part of whatever I guess I'm either this is probably take it away a little bit from from suz I

don't want to take any shot but if you're a publisher out there mobile publisher developer how do you go about working with with twitch I mean clearly you're not going to get this like this is the top level of partnership you can get and she's not going to anybody get close to that size fight she's gonna be cool it's great i mean honestly i welcome well it was the kind of stepping stones what's that to start working with twitch to help build your game into a potential de sport i guess so i think there's a couple different kind of facets of working with which from that perspective for for the eSports side we we definitely are always engaging and talking with a lot of different developers we have a business development team that does that regularly yeah and then just for the in general kind of product integration side working with different developers to make their their games in ways that really work well with a streaming platform yeah we have an entire developer success team and again i'm gonna i'm going to point out switch cons a really great way to get so go to twitch cops get it done okay okay nice

notes that's interesting okay do we have a question I've got a kind one final closing questions any questions about working with twitch or great in your game for eSports I currently see is like a like right in my face so no okay okay I'll get it um I guess I'm going to let you throw out there with one final thing and in terms of them in terms of what lies in store for you guys working together off the general kind of mobile experts particularly do you have any kind of predictions or anything you think we'll see in the next year you guys going to be doing even more I mean obviously unleased give all the plans but like is it you think just started so is this what's been happening all the evil plans of world domination yeah you are the same people mega cool after all um no so we're definitely kind of how I'd expect the scene to grow mobile eSports kind of if I am shift to higher higher of a level I wouldn't be surprised to see more titles joining mobile eSports I mean super-soul and clash royale are a great example and and I'm like the gang a small following i believe it's light yeah but it's just

like PC eSports I mean there's space for multiple titles yeah and multiple audiences and I do think that the growth of the overall scene of the overall industry is healthy for everyone yeah um having you know more games come in having more people tune in and follow have bigger sponsorships have more more professional team see players actually be able to sustain themselves as competitive players I think all of that is happening and we'll see that kind of escalate further the future and also um production quality will see that increase as well ok cool anything from yeah I think they'll be bigger yeah definitely growth is kind of the biggest biggest factor we just we see the potential side of the number of you know the number of competitive gamers out there is just so huge where we have 800 million pcs three billion mobile devices right so that's kind of the big talking point number of addison one of those big in the other I've picked up yeah yeah and and it's it's not a matter of if it

is just a question of what weight and power k okay well can we have a round round a warm round of applause please for out for thank you you