Tag: esports

Activision Blizzard To Livestream eSports Matches On Facebook

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Video game maker Activision Blizzard will be delivering live eSports coverage to a global audience via Facebook. The video game company will launch a new eSports network and programming on Facebook with the MLG Anaheim Open, a two-day Call of Duty tournament that is scheduled to kick off on June 10, 2016. That tournament is run by Major League Gaming (MLG), one of the biggest eSports leagues, which Activision acquired in January.

Why Brands Should Care
eSports is outgrowing its status as a niche industry for gamers and turning into global entertainment. According to new research by market intelligence firm Newzoo, more than one billion people will know about eSports by the end of this year. While eSports is no stranger to live streaming, it is still an interesting move that Activision chose Facebook over other gameplay streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming for its live eSports coverage. Facebook has been making a strong push for its live-stream features, going as far as paying media companies to use it. Activision says it picked Facebook mainly for its unmatched reach among global Internet users. As Activision tries to engage part of Facebook’s massive audience, it can also increase the audience for brands sponsoring eSports tournaments or teams.

 

Source: Variety

Yahoo Expands eSports Content With Mobile App

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Last month, Yahoo launched a dedicated eSports site to capitalize on the booming popularity of competitive gaming, Now, the company is expanding the content vertical to mobile with an Android app. In addition to the eSports coverage, stats, and commentary featured on its desktop site, the app will also use push notifications to deliver customizable alerts for breaking news in competitive gaming, tournament analysis, and the latest reports about your favorite teams or games.

What Brands Need To Do
With top eSports tournaments now drawing audiences that rival the biggest traditional sports events and popular live-streams routinely attracting more than 100,000 viewers, brands such as Coke, Intel, and Nissan have been sponsoring tournaments to get their names in front of the massive eSports audience. Now with Yahoo expanding its eSports site to mobile, brands will have one more mobile platform to reach video game fans, made up largely of the coveted demographic of young Millennial guys.

Source: TechCrunch

Yahoo Launches Dedicated Site For eSports

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Yahoo has launched a new dedicated eSports site to capitalize on the booming popularity of competitive gaming. The new site will cover live tournaments, statistics, interviews, and news in the digital gaming industry. In related news last month, Yahoo announced that it is shutting down several content verticals, including those dedicated to food, travel, health, and parenting topics, and choosing to instead focus on four of its popular content verticals – News, Sports, Finance, and Lifestyle.

What Brands Need To Do
Yahoo’s move mirrors ESPN’s decision earlier this year to launch a dedicated content portal for eSports, as both companies aim to leverage their experience with sports coverage and vast reach of sports fans into capturing the ballooning eSports audience. Previously, brands like Coca-Cola and Geico have been sponsoring eSports tournaments to reach the millions of fans those events draw. Now with Yahoo and ESPN on board, brands will have more platforms to reach the much-coveted demographic of Millennial guys.

 

Source: Variety

ESPN Gets Serious About eSports

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
eSports have been receiving increasing attention from mainstream media lately. Turner Broadcasting announced in September its plan to air eSports tournament on TBS during prime time this year, and now ESPN, the leading cable channel in sports, is also getting into the eSports game by launching a brand new vertical to cover competitive gaming. The Disney-owned network has launched a dedicated section on ESPN.com to cover eSports news, videos, and profiles about influential members from the eSports community. Plus, a new Twitter handle @ESPN_Esports is also created to support the new vertical.

What Brands Need To Do
Over the past few years, esports have grown into a massive media platform that attracts hundreds of millions of spectators and generates billions of dollars. This new ESPN vertical shows how serious eSports have become in today’s media landscape. Previously, early-moving brands like Coca-Cola and Geico have been sponsoring esports events to reach their staggering number of viewers. Now with ESPN on board, brands will have more platforms to reach the much-coveted demographic of young millennial guys.

 

Source: Engadget

Header image courtesy of @ESPN_Esports

This eSports Championship Event Had More Viewers Than Game Of Thrones

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The League of Legends 2015 World Championship tallied 36 million unique viewers for its finals match on Oct. 31, marking a new record for esports event viewership. Riot Games, the company behind the popular game, reports that the largest peak concurrent viewership hit an impressive 14 million during the finals match. In comparison, the latest Game of Thrones finale scored 8.1 million viewers in live plus same-day ratings.

What Brands Need To Do
This staggering viewership number serves as a reminder of how much esports has grown the over the past few years. Once dismissed as a geeky niche, it has quickly developed into a massive media platform that attracts hundreds of millions of spectators and generates millions of dollars. In fact, many brands, including Coca-Cola and Geico, have started sponsoring esports events in order to reach the highly coveted young male audience.

Source: LoL eSports

Event Recap: Highlights From The First-Ever TwitchCon

Posted on by Angel Mendozza

Twitch’s first ever conference dedicated to its community was far from ordinary. From September 25th to 26th, the heart of San Francisco was home to over 20,000 fans, gamers, and broadcasters. Throughout the event, the IPG Media Lab team interacted with partners, attended sessions, and even had sit-downs with Twitch influencers Itmejp and DansGaming. Here are some of the highlights of TwitchCon 2015.

During the keynote, Twitch unveiled that they will be finishing their roll out of their HTML5 video player in early 2016, and that there will finally be a Twitch app available across the Playstation Network. The apps will feature full chat integration, complete emoticon support, and will highlight broadcasts across PS4, PS3, PS Vita, and PS TV.

TwitchCon1

Aside from the staggering $173,320 prize pool, the H1Z1 Invitational was a showdown amongst some of the most popular broadcasters on Twitch such as Lirik, Summit1g, Itmejp, and Sodapoppin. H1Z1 is a combat-oriented game forcing players to fight to the death on a shrinking map until there is one player left standing. At one point there were over 130,000 concurrent viewers watching the live stream on Twitch.

Later, SF-based Twitch and LA-based Red Bull faced-off on the main stage in a Super Smash Bros. exhibition match where the winning office got to choose the location of a $10,000 prize-pool Super Smash Bros. event. Twitch beat Red Bull 3-0, unsurprisingly.

TwitchCon3

Even though TwitchCon primarily focused on offering its community workshops and classes to help improve their Twitch channel, brands should take notice. The event offered great insights on how Twitch built such a tight-knit community of influencers and fans and how they propelled the service into what it is today. It showcased Twitch’s wide variety of influencers, their tastes, and how they represent themselves to the community, and the ways influencers promote brands on their channel without offending or losing their followers.

Overall, TwitchCon was a huge success especially among millennials. Not only did the event attract a mass audience but also topped 1.9 million unique online viewers across the event’s various streams.

TwitchCon4TwitchCon2

 

Header image courtesy of www.twitchcon.com

 

Why Brands Need To Heed eSports

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following DraftKings’ announcement of extending its fantasy sports platform into esports, rival platform FanDuel unveiled a similar plan to enter competitive video gaming with its acquisition of AlphaDraft, an esports site that offers fantasy contests.

In related news, TBS announced today that it’s teaming up with WME-IMG to air 20  live programs of professional gamers playing the popular video game “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” beginning next year in prime time.

What Brands Need To Do
Over the past few years, esports have grown into a massive media platform that attracts hundreds of millions of spectators and generates billions of dollars.The TBS deal marks a significant milestone for the competitive gaming industry, as the show holds a primetime slot on a widely distributed basic cable network. Previously, brands were only able to reach its highly coveted young male audience by sponsoring esports events, and this new TBS show, along with the new esports fantasy sports platforms, offer new places to reach millennial men.

    

Source: Recode and Digiday

DraftKings Expands Fantasy Sports To eSports

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Popular fantasy sports site DraftKings is expanding its platform to cover a hot new sport – competitive video gaming, also known as esports. Starting Oct. 1, fantasy sports players and video game enthusiasts will be able to take their bets on the League of Legends 2015 World Championships. DraftKings has also partnered up with several prominent esports teams in a bid to help boost the new addition to its fantasy ranks, similar to the partnerships the company signed with NFL and MLB.

What Brands Should Do
While relatively new, both eSports and online fantasy sports have been showing tremendous growth in recent years. A recent survey by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association reports that over 56.8 million people participated in fantasy sports in 2014. Bringing eSports into the fold would certainly give it a significant boost, in terms of both capital and audience size. As more and more brands infiltrate esports events via sponsorships. Those searching for young millennial guys need to start to pay attention to this burgeoning platform.

    

Source: Mashable

PlayStation 4 To Support Gameplay Livestream To YouTube

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Sony’s PlayStation 4 just received a major update, adding more cloud storage and the ability to stream game footage live on YouTube. Already equipped with the capability to stream gameplay live over Twitch, this new added support for YouTube would make streams visible on its newly launched YouTube Gaming mobile app and channel, no doubt helping to attract a bigger audience.

What Brands Should Do
With the rapid rise of eSports, also known as competitive gaming, a whole new media platform largely built upon livestreaming platforms like Twitch is now drawing hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide.  Sony’s decision to support YouTube Gaming will no doubt further expand the reach of eSports. Therefore, instead of dismissing it like Jimmy Kimmel recently did and alienating a significant segment of young, digital savvy audience, brands of all types should get on board with eSport, which some big-name brands like Coca-Cola, Red Bull, and Samsung are already vying to sponsor.

 

Source and header image: PlayStation.Blog‎

How Brands Are Infiltrating The Major eSports Events

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Thousands of video game enthusiasts gathered at Madison Square Garden this weekend to spectate the North American League of Legends Championship Series, proving once again that electronic sports, or eSports, has legitimately taken off as a new breed in the sports industry.

And as with any big sports event, many brands were present to capture the gamers’ eyeballs through sponsorships. Coca-Cola partnered with game developer Riot Games for prime placement as the sole official advertiser at the venue. Many other brands, including HTC, Geico, and Logitech, chose to sponsor individual teams and scored some on-stage presence with branded hoodies that players wore.

What Brands Should Do
eSports is a relatively new phenomenon that has been quickly gaining momentum in the past few years, amassing an audience size that could rival most programs on cable channels today. According to AdAge, eleven thousand fans jammed into Madison Square Garden on each day of the sold out event, with over one million more watched on streaming channels like YouTube or Twitch, whereas the majority of cable programs today rarely break one million in live audience. So if your brand is going after young millennial guys, eSports events provide a great platform to reach them.

 

Source: AdAge  

Header image credit: Chad Stoller