Gaming
If you stream it, they will come: eSports is reaching out beyond the arena and onto the big screen.
It's a big business, eSports. But you don't need us to tell you that: you only need to look at the thousands who flock to see The International, pack out football stadiums or Madison Square Garden, and the millions who tune in online to watch Worlds.
As great as the casters are, watching by yourself on Twitch isn't quite the same as sharing the experience with other fans. But there are more eSports fans eager to watch tournaments than there are seats in even the largest stadiums, which presents something of a dilemma: how do you get fans in a still growing community together, in every country, to watch must-see events?
It's a dilemma that ESL thinks it has solved. Last month, the influential eSports tournament organiser announced plans to begin streaming major eSports events to cinemas across Europe, letting fans across the continent come together to watch live.
Esports In Cinemas, as the project is called, seems like an obvious next step for the eSports scene, although as we found out, it owes its origins to a happy coincidence. Before any tournament simulcasts, the initiative will begin in late July with a theatrical screening and streaming live Q&A session with Patrick Creadon, the director of a new eSports documentary focusing on the Intel Extreme Masters tournament, All Work All Play: The Pursuit Of Esports Glory.
"We've been followed by Patrick for a year for the documentary, we're getting along well," explains Michal Blicharz, ESL's managing director for pro gaming, and a former eSports athlete himself. "[His team] were figuring out creative ways to basically bring the film to the biggest possible audience."
Creadon and his team hit upon a novel solution: to premiere the documentary with an interactive element in the form of a Q&A session with questions pulled from an audience, as well as social media. ESL's Burbank, California and Cologne, Germany studios were the obvious venue choices, and Creadon knew just the company to help bring the project about: BY Experience, a New York firm that specialises in live streaming events such as plays, in more than 60 countries.
"We didn't have a partnership with ESL – they appear throughout the documentary we made about the Intel Extreme Masters tournament," Creadon tells Red Bull. "That said, my team and I have worked very closely with ESL this past the year, and along the way we've developed an appreciation for ESL's passion for video games, and for the hard work that goes into the global events that they produce throughout the year."
This got Blicharz and the ESL team wondering: why stop at a documentary screening? After all, if you can stream a football match or an opera to cinemas, there's no technological barrier to giving eSports tournaments the same treatment.
"From then it was a natural step to figure out, 'Hey why don’t we try to put a major ESL event in the cinema in the same way?' If people go to watch opera in the theatre then why not? I think it's something we can try. From that we continued our conversation with BY and thought that we could try to pilot something with that," he says.
Though the project is still in its infancy, ESL now plans to work with BY to stream several of its tournaments in the next year; Julie Borchard-Young, BY Experience co-president says the documentary is only "a first in a series of cinema broadcasts". While it's too early to say which ESL tournaments will be streamed to cinemas, Blicharz already knows which games the company will be targeting first.
"Dota 2, Counter-Strike and League of Legends," he reels off without a moment's pause.
"Those are the three big ones – it's no surprise to anybody I guess. At the end of the day it's about the fanbase, and how used they are as a group to gather in on particular place and enjoy an experience like that. Sure, you can watch [eSports] on a stream on your cellphone or on your 27 inch monitor, but if you can watch it with five friends on the couch that's much better already."
"But if something amazing happens, do you want to be in your slippers in your living room eating chips, or do you want to be with 600 other people screaming and cheering as if it were a stadium? We're not trying to generate a new habit with that audience, we're tapping into a habit that already exists."
ESL hasn't settled on the number of screens or the targeted countries for its tournament broadcasts just yet, but BY has access to more than 2,000 screens worldwide, opening up a potential live audience of dozens to hundreds of thousands watching together – outside of the arena.
It all depends on demand, though Creadon believes it will be there. We're social animals by nature, after all. "As we've travelled around the world attending different tournaments, we've come to appreciate that eSports fans are like fans of any other sport. They want to cheer for their teams together, and they want to be close to the action. The excitement we saw at these tournaments is what we've captured in the film, and seeing our movie in a theater is a great opportunity for fans of eSports to come out and celebrate their love for these games together."
Blicharz says that the goal isn't so much to reach the biggest possible audience with the project, as grow it at the correct rate; predict how many people will want to buy tickets, as well as how many of their friends they’ll then tell. "I think we need to scale it correctly, no-one's ever done it before on this scale," he says. "So a success would be for us to scale correctly and fill up the theatres, however many we select to begin with. If we fill those up that's a success already."
Save for ESPN's brief flirtation with Dota 2 during last year's International, watching eSports tournaments has always required you to attend in person, or tune-in on your laptop. Not that that's stopped viewers from tuning in anyway: the Intel Extreme Masters and ESL One Katowice live streams recently reached a peak concurrent viewership of over 1,000,000 viewers, smashing Twitch's current record. But if Esports In Cinemas takes off, it won't just change that: it'll completely upend how organisers market a tournament. Advertising ticketed events offline only made sense in the direct vicinity of the host arena before: soon though, billboards with your favourite players on might be popping up all over the place.
"If this model works for us in the long run then absolutely [it will change our marketing]," Blicharz says. "So for instance when we did Intel Extreme Masters San Jose we promoted to the local audience there for the people to come in and experience that. But if it works on a grand scale then it changes the game completely for us. We change our marketing plan to cover all the areas that have the cinemas that will run the event as well. Marketing our events just becomes a much grander scale of a project in itself."
And there-in lies the next challenge for the team at ESL. Making that trip to the local flea pit worth your time. "We're also going to have to figure out not just 'Come In And Watch', but how to make it an experience that people will want to come back for because they had a much better time than watching it at home on their couch.”
How do you do that exactly? Blicharz is coy.
"I'll be vague here, we do have ideas, we're working on ideas, but definitely the audience has to feel included in the show to a degree. There needs to be a certain element of activity. Going there needs to give you value beyond consuming what is there on the screen. Like, say, unique things that you're able to access if you are in the cinema."
What those elements are is still to be revealed, though it's easy to imagine fans being offered the chance to vote for their player of a tournament via an app, or even picking the character bans in an All-Star match.
Whatever they are though, they're necessary: eSports are all grown up and it's high time the channels through which we enjoy it grew too.
"ESports is no longer at the stage of being a side event at Comic Con, but at a stage of its own," Blicharz points out. "ESL One Katowice just this March gathered as many eSports fans as Comic Con in New York gathered comic fans."
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