Introducing Insights.gg
An all-in-one platform for competitive gamers to elevate their performance.
Our History
In 2016, our team was building a pro-esports organization called Meta Gaming. If you’ve been following the Overwatch scene since the beginning, you’ve probably heard of one of our teams: Meta Athena, Meta Bellum, Meta Skyfoxes or Meta Imperium. Our mission was to scout high caliber amateur players and provide them with the resources necessary to help them go pro, including teammates, facilities, coaches, analysts, and general managers. By 2018, we successfully built our organization to supply 1/6th of the entire Overwatch League’s players and coaches!
As our organization continued to grow, we sought new methods and processes that could positively impact the development of our players. When we reflected on the tools at our disposal, we realized that there was a gap in technology.
In traditional sports, there are countless tools and software solutions to help coaches and players conduct in-depth analytics and video analysis; in esports, however, our research reveals that most teams rely on hacking together solutions from multiple platforms like Discord (for communication), OBS (for recording), Notepad (to take notes), YouTube/Twitch (to watch VODs), and Excel (for stats/analytics). While these tools can be useful, formulating solutions from multiple platforms that weren’t designed for competitive gaming leads to a desynchronized and disorganized process. It was through the feedback of the esports community and hundreds of organizations that our platform concocted its initial ideas. After identifying core problems and figuring out how to solve them through technology, we began hiring designers and developers to build a solution.
That’s when we built our earliest prototype of Insights.
What We’ve Built
Insights.gg is a web-application designed as a collaboration hub for gamers, players, and coaches to review and analyze gameplay. Our mission is to create a platform that encompasses the most powerful and comprehensive set of tools for gamers, all in one platform. To accomplish this goal, we’ve worked closely with reputable esports organizations across multiple tier-1 titles (LoL, Overwatch, Fortnite, Smash, etc) to gain critical insight on the challenges that pro teams face and how we can alleviate those challenges with the introduction of technology. However, our tools aren’t just meant for pro teams, but all levels of competition ranging from tier-2, to collegiate, to casual teams.
Cloud-based gameplay depository
When building our cloud-base depository for sharing and storing VODs, we focused on integrating high levels of privacy and security. Using the industry’s best-practices for data encryption and storage, all our features aim to protect users’ videos and data. We also provide flexible solutions for admins by allowing them to customize roles and permissions to ensure full control over what individuals can access.
To start collaborating, admins can invite members to their Insights.gg Team via link or email. Members can then contribute to uploading and reviewing videos in a streamlined and organized way. Uploading is simple. With a paid plan, one can upload their videos via local drive. However, at Insights.gg, accessibility is one of our top priorities and we commit to this by ensuring that all users can upload their videos via a YouTube/Twitch link, regardless of whether it’s a free or paid plan.
Video collaboration tools
A key feature of Insights.gg is our VOD review tools. Our VOD review tools help users highlight key moments in the game, allowing you to keep track of pivotal gameplay. With coaching fundamentals in mind, you can draw and add shapes on top of the video to highlight those amazing kill-streaks and even save them for later. This feature grants you the ability to create moments of interest you can skip to when reviewing with your team. To help aid organization and maximize your team’s efficiency, we offer custom coloured tags for organizing and filtering your VODs.
Fundamentally, strategy within positioning in competitive gaming has been and always will be important in competitive play. We have implemented game-specific map overlays and character icons into our toolset. Rather than having to go through the video to find the perfect camera angle that describes the situation you’re talking about, teams can utilize the map images alongside character icons and drawing functions to seamlessly relay game-winning strategy.
Collaborate with others in real-time
With social distancing becoming the norm while we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic, our Live Session feature provides coaches and users with the tools to host virtual review sessions to learn and collaborate remotely. Think of this feature as a virtual classroom. Coaches can showcase exactly what they’re drawing on top of the video as well as being able to stream the same gameplay in real-time — almost like using Netflix Watch Party… but you can say that you’re being productive!
Insights Pro — utilize computer vision to extract key statistics
So what is Insights Pro? To keep things short and sweet, Insights Pro is a platform in which gameplay videos can be uploaded to, and analyzed by our computer vision and machine learning programs to extract data directly from the gameplay. This data includes but is not limited to: where players have died, what abilities they have used, and what maps are being played. While the initial launch of Insights Pro mainly provided support for Overwatch, our team is currently exploring solutions on real-time analytics for streams and other various game titles like Valorant, Smash Ultimate, League of Legends and more.
Even though Insights Pro is currently in closed beta, we are already providing access to our software to teams that compete in Overwatch at the highest level. As we work with these top teams and organizations, we are building upon our understanding of how computer vision software can be integrated for all competitive games, and at all tiers of competition. Whether that’s understanding which key statistics or finding out how to best display the dataset, our end goal is to simply help teams strategize and win. Ultimately, our Pro tool will allow for higher-level coaching and feedback supported by analytics derived from every moment of your uploaded gameplay.
Building community
We recognize that our product is more than just a productivity and analytics platform — it’s also a tool that connects people to their community, allowing them to communicate complex ideas and thoughts with each other. Esports is a community, and here at Insights our goal is to nurture a respectful, kind and helpful community within our platform. We want to help individuals elevate not only their gaming performance, but also their character. As we grow closer to launching Insights into the esports market, our goal is to connect with players of all skill levels as part of our efforts to build a vibrant and welcoming community.
In order for our team to ensure that our product is easy to learn and use, we’ve been working closely with VOD reviewing communities, content creators and aspiring pro organizations across the esports ecosystem to fine tune our toolkit. Our goal is not just to empower communities and organizations with the tools they need to collaborate effectively, but also enhance the experience for all individuals that take part in the process. We want to see Insights users be successful in whatever path they take in the esports realm, and will direct our focus to help users achieve their goals. Your success is our success.
We’d love to hear from you! Whether you are a competitive or casual player or even a non-gamer, feel free to reach out to my Discord at Insights.gg — Stephen#5184 with your thoughts, feedback, and insights (pun intended). Be an early contributor on our platform by having conversations with the Insights.gg team and help us design and create the ideal tool for our users. We’re excited to see what the community and teams around the world will do when they begin to use Insights in ways we never imagined. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Discord for exciting updates and announcements!
