44 GENIUS INTERVIEW James Dean
FEED How did you go about building that UK eSports community? JD We looked at all the dierent games that had an eSports following to see what the UK community interest was and to see what we could do first and fastest. Our first UK tournament was for Dota 2 in tandem with a FIFA tournament. We got some reasonable numbers, but it was still only 20,000 viewers online. And that was the UK’s largest tournament in a long time. We kept testing the water with dierent communities to see what their interests were. Inadvertently, we started to discover new talent. We picked up CS-GO (Counter-Strike Global Oensive) and League Of Legends. It turned out to be a very large, sleeping eSports community, just waiting to get involved. The next move was to launch a UK national league. We partnered with the MCM London Comic Con to run our finals there and it got amazing traction. At that time, every time we ran an event, we’d set a new record for maximum concurrent viewers online. Our first tournament was 20,000 people in total. Now we had grown to 20,000 people concurrently watching a 16-hour tournament. We were starting to hit total viewership in the hundreds of thousands and that is what helped build the commercial premise with sponsors and advertisers. The physical attendance was key too. MCM Comic Con is a large event with a lot of gamers, we were easily filling 500 seats there with people keen to watch the tournament. That was our first break, introducing the Premiership. We did it with three titles, League of Legends, Counterstrike and then Hearthstone. FEED So you took eSports to a national level in the UK. What was the next move after that? JD It’s all well and good a team becoming the best in the UK, getting prize money and winning the title, but where do they go next? So we’ve been doing League of Legends which oers qualification for the next level at the European tournament, and that has really changed the game. It has started to secure that career path. If you’re the best in the UK at League of Legends, then you should be starting to compete at a higher level – and that means moving on to the European and global tournaments.
FEED How is UK eSports aected by national players moving to an international level? JD Viewership starts going up, the player base starts going up and the interest commercially starts to increase. eSports is a global activity. If you’re a player online, you’re already a global player. There are a lot of people who are interested in who will be the next team moving up to the European level. We’re all familiar with the big global players like Fnatic, Team Liquid and Power Of Nine. But the real interest is where the next teams are coming from – and those big teams will want to be finding new talent as well.
IN THE FUTURE I DON’ T THINK AUDIENCES WILL BE PAYING FOR CONTENT . I’M WAITING FOR THAT TO BE A THING OF THE PAST
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