Queue Brings Real-Time Collaboration to eSports Video Replays, Powered by Croquet.

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Croquet

5 min readJan 14, 2020

Masud Hossain and his co-founder Jean-Philippe Gagnon (JP) met while playing World of Warcraft in 2008. Then, in high school, they built a gaming service that allowed gamers to “rent” other gamers’ accounts. They would reunite about a year ago, and Queue, an app that lets gamers collaborate on their video replays in real time, was born. The “gg” in their URL is short for “good game”, a common abbreviation used by gamers in the gaming chat app, Discord.

With Queue, review your replays live. Everyone controls the video replay, drawing, and more.

Gaming had been popular amongst the youth since the days of Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Game Boy and Game Gear, and the maximum number of players in game was somewhere between two and four people. Then networked computers gave rise to the popularity of games like Counter-Strike and Command & Conquer: Red Alert, which allowed many people to play in teams in the same room. Later, consoles like PlayStation and Xbox connected to the Internet and teams could compete from around the world. When the iPhone’s App Store launched, games found a new home, and gained widespread popularity amongst many who hadn’t grown up with gaming consoles. As graphics got better, and Internet speeds got faster, gaming took on a new life, and exploded into the eSports industry that it is today. eSports is a multiplayer video game played competitively for spectators, typically by professional gamers. It had become a sport and a franchise, just like the basketball and the NBA, or football and the NFL. It was a real, viable business, popularized by the youth. It was an industry that was growing faster than any sport in recent history, it was the new sport on the block.

Sports is fiercely competitive, and it’s no different in eSports. The difference between winning and losing is often so small, which is why player performance has been tracked for decades, and turned into a science. Just watch Moneyball to see how Billy Beane used statistics to the Oakland A’s advantage, turning them from a financially poor team with few wins, into winning legends, because Billy realized that baseball was a numbers game.

Post-game rituals in traditional sports involve watching replays to dissect every second of the game, where coaches and players look for vulnerabilities, discuss them, and work on improving them in their next training session. Finding and fixing every possible vulnerability would help teams get better and gain the smallest advantages during game time.

It was no different in eSports, but eSports were not played on baseball or football fields (although they are good locations for eSports competitions), where computers were viewed as an accessory to the game strategy. They were played on computers, which were a core part of the game strategy, in every sense. Computer networks were the baseball and football fields of eSports. Games would be recorded as they were being played, and could later be watched and analyzed by players and coaches.

Before Queue, teams who wanted to dissect their game replays and get coaching, had to do things the old-fashioned way. They would upload their video replays to YouTube, get on call with their coach, and use an Excel sheet to add comments and timestamps. It worked, but the experience wasn’t great, and it was a problem waiting to be solved.

Use Queue inside your game with a built-in replay system and share a live URL.

Masud and JP saw an opportunity for a product that was designed for the eSports industry. Their minimum viable product included a video player that was buggy, but it validated the need for video replay collaboration. When the co-founders were at Y Combinator’s Startup School in 2019, they met David A. Smith from Croquet, who was building a live collaboration system for multiuser digital experiences, that allows multiple users to work or play together within a single shared distributed environment. With little effort, Masud and JP integrated Croquet into Queue, and gamers and their coaches could now effortlessly collaborate on video replays in real time.

Masud and JP had a few ideas on which industries they would focus their product on, and they decided to focus on eSports. “eSports gamers have a reputation for giving brutal feedback, and that meant that our users would tell us what we needed to hear to iterate the product quickly and make it better, plus they were always on Discord, so it was easy to reach them,” he said to me on a call. That decision paid off, and Queue has grown from 700 users in April of last year, to 30,000 users today.

Everything is real time and your friends can view your screen share online without downloading Queue. Hit share and then share your link.

“We’re like Figma for videos,” Masud tells me. Figma is the popular collaborative interface design tool, and eSports was not the only industry Queue would grow in. Indeed, Masud would be surprised when he saw that some of his users were from places like the army and surveillance companies. Queue had many possibilities to grow in any industry where collaborative work on videos was needed.

Masud and JP were just getting started, and were able to successfully build live collaboration into Queue by using Croquet. Queue was a live collaboration tool, a communication tool, a management tool, a coaching tool, a strategy tool, and so much more. I wondered what product features and industries they would work on next.

Thank you

Thank you Masud Hossain for talking to me about Queue, and for teaching me about eSports. Thank you David A. Smith for encouraging me to talk to Masud and to learn more about how Croquet is being used.