Gaming
Gaming
Dota 2 comes to Madison Square Garden
ESL One NY is all about spectacle, storytelling and planting a flag for Dota on the East Coast.
Madison Square Garden Theater
© Flickr/vippe
After packing out a football stadium in Frankfurt for Dota 2, the ESL One circuit seemed at risk of peaking early. For the next stop on the tournament’s international tour, going bigger than a 50,000 capacity arena would be a tall order, which is why the New York leg is ‘only’ aiming for the iconic Madison Square Garden.
Though the home of the New York Rangers and The Knicks might seem like a step too far in the size wars, the ESL One venue is set for one of the smaller arenas in the complex, The Theater, with a respectable 5,000 seating capacity. But it’s a case of far more than numbers in chairs for ESL senior manager James Lampkin, who wants to use the venue to stake a claim to the underrepresented East Coast in eSports. Red Bull caught up with James to find out what to expect from ESL One New York, and what’s most important for spectators today.
What lead you to Madison Square Garden after Frankfurt’s open air football stadium?
We were looking at what we wanted to do after Frankfurt when the opportunity to do it at MSG came up, and it wasn't much us saying we want to go bigger or we want to go smaller, it was more just when the opportunity arose we thought, “Yeah this makes sense”. And also it was an interesting test for us because there's not a whole lot of eSports events that happen on the East coast and certainly not in New York and it's a very different set of challenges than say, Frankfurt was for us.
What sort of challenge does it pose holding an eSports event of this size in the city that never sleeps?
There's just so much going on and New York's probably the busiest city in the world in terms of stuff you can do. So we partnered with event organisers Reedpop and Twitch on it. Reedpop run all of Comicon and that's been a big partnership and has made the entire project make sense. It's getting the attention locally, a lot of the stuff we had to work on with Frankfurt. In some regards Frankfurt was actually a little easier to get the word out to people because there's less distractions going on in that area than New York.
This tournament’s being held in The Theater, not quite the full MSG arena, how long do you think it will be until we see a Dota 2 tournament held on the court there?
If you'd asked me two years ago “Could you put 10,000 people in a venue for Dota or any eSport?” I'd have said no. We're not great right now as an industry at being able to predict this stuff because it grows so quickly, and it's really unexplored territory. The way I always think about it is that if I was going to build a bank, there's about 20,000 years of financial systems and trade systems and other banks to look at for which model I should use to build my bank.
But with eSports, you've got a little bit of entertainment expo, a little bit of sports and a little bit of a whole bunch of things with a unique audience that has been kind of trained from the get go that you could just consume all of this online for free at home. And now what we're all testing is if people see enough value in this to actually buy a ticket and come and watch it live. So we're pretty happy right now by the results, especially after Frankfurt and now it’s a case of us looking around at different markets and figuring out what we actually do next.
Madison Square Garden court
© dianasch
What are those other extras we can expect of ESL One NY to make it stand out?
For New York specifically we wanted to focus a lot more on the players. It's a unique case for us because its something I’ve been thinking about a lot. We want these games to be really memorable, and the match itself is a really important part of that obviously. But if you can be a really good storyteller as a league and as a broadcaster, as we are, then I think you're doing fans and people there a much greater service.
So you’re bringing in the very best talent you can and you look at what the stories are and you illustrate these. In ESL One NY's case this is the first time we're seeing all of these teams on LAN all together like this, the first real big test of how well these line-ups work on a brand new patch with brand new features that haven't really been explored properly. So I think that's the real value in this event for people to attend is that this is the real big test after The International, how are these teams going to perform?
You’re offering a community-led contribution for the current prize pool, what extra incentives are there for spectators?
On NY, we did a test to see why people were actually buying the tickets in the first place. Was it the ticket itself that they wanted to watch the games in-game, or was it the item set? So what we did was actually split them in half so that we could have a real clear understanding of both the item set and the ticket contributions to the prize pool. But we wanted to have a much clearer understanding of which people were wanting to buy, was it because they wanted to watch the games or did they want the items? The other part of this is that we do broadcast it for free on Twitch so if you wanted to get the full experience of our production value then that's a great way to experience it too. We're a little bit less concerned about driving up the prize pool as high as possible than creating a really high value product: in our mind you can create something that people want to tune in and watch, that's really the most important part of this for us because then that all trickles down into sponsorships and people being motivated to actually come to the event next time.
What kind of viewership are you expecting online for this event?
It's hard to say right now, we broke some of our own records at Frankfurt, it'll be a little bit different on this one. We're not sure yet because we're focusing now on American time zones, traditionally Dota has a more European audience. But the goal of the event for us isn't so much trying to break our viewership record it's more putting our flag on the East Coast of the United States to create an iconic event where one hasn't really happened yet. And what we're already seeing is a lot of mainstream media looking at this event as “Hey, what are these guys doing? Can we come and see it?” and that's, I feel, a lot more valuable in some senses than hitting 10,000 more viewers on Twitch.
What format will this year’s tournament take?
It's a single elimination tournament, something we did at Frankfurt and what we'll continue doing, we think, because one of the problems I see in Dota is that there are a ton of matches and a lot of them just don't matter. They're not memorable and it never really feels like everything is on the line, so when we bring these teams to big events I want fans to feel like if I missed the match in the morning, you know, it wasn't OK that I slept in because I can't catch that team playing later on now, it's a do or die moment this whole weekend and that helps with our tension and story building. It makes these matches really matter and it makes these players and teams really focus on what they're doing there and not just strategising about maybe they'll play better next match.
Who are the big names to watch out for at ESL One NY?
I think the big ones to look out for right now are Evil Geniuses and Cloud 9. EG of course are probably going to be the hometown heroes. With Cloud 9, coming off their incredible performance at The International, you know. It's hard to say, looking at the team's results since then because the tables have really been wiped clean with this patch and it's really a question of who can perform with just a week or two of adjustment. But that means specifically EG has a really strong captain in ppd and I expect that'll be the team that we see making the big strides in New York.
What about threats from outside the home nation? Anyone from Europe or East Asia to watch out for?
I think Team Secret is the team to watch out for from Europe because this is a team that has traditionally done well as part of Na'vi, as part of Fnatic, but just couldn't find that magic that they used to have going into The International. They're an exciting team for me because it's just a powerhouse of names, you've got Puppey, Kuroky, so we're gonna see what happens to them. VG of course is second place, runner up, as a brand from The International, but the new players on there, Black and iceiceice, two phenomenal players, really strong and also great personalities in the scene. Black especially as someone who has put his life aside to go to China and try out real hardcore professional Dota and to see him now on Vici Gaming who are a really amazing brand and have made it to NY ahead of all the other Chinese teams is pretty amazing, so it's a very exciting moment for him too.
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