The Launch of Insights.gg
It’s official. Insights.gg has launched! Since we released our public beta, we’ve supported over 30,000+ competitive gamers and listened to thousands of pro teams, freelance coaches, and passionate gamers on how we could help them improve their performance with a collaborative hub for game footage reviews.
To commemorate the moment, let me share with you our journey, from origin to where we’re at today.
Our Origin
At the beginning, Insights.gg was formed to work with esports teams to conduct data analysis on their team’s performance. However, we quickly realized the problem wasn’t a lack of data. Even if we generated the most accurate and detailed reports, teams lacked the ability to capitalize on the information. The reason being, every team, from the world-class to the newly formed, utilized hacked together processes for coaching.
What we found was that VOD reviews were a vital activity for top teams. Some reasons why this is important include analyzing mistakes in gameplay, dissecting competitor weaknesses, and building game-winning strategies. However, to effectively conduct one VOD review, the process looked like this: record game footage, upload it to YouTube, save notes on Google Drive, and share feedback via Discord. Every part of the process was fragmented and unsecure, leading to long setup processes and data leaks. Some of the newer teams we spoke with even knew the importance of VOD reviews but didn’t have the knowledge or resources to build their own review process.
That’s when we got the idea for Insights.gg. Instead of building a subpar process, take a minute to signup, and instantly get the best setup. The most powerful tools on one collaborative platform.
What we’ve built
Our focus was on creating a sleek interface that gamers could be productive on with three pillars guiding our UI/UX design:
1) All-in-one — all the tools for reviews streamlined in one accessible location
2) Collaborative — a place where friends, coaches, and team members could go to help one another
3) Performance Improvement — apps and features built to help you master your gameplay
With this in mind, let’s jump into the core features:
Record
Insights Capture, our application for recording game footage, leverages computer vision and machine learning to auto-capture and detect game highlights for 13-competitive esports titles including Valorant, League of Legends, Overwatch, Apex Legends, Dota 2, Rocket League, Fortnite, Player Unknown Battlegrounds, CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Teamfight Tactics, and Hearthstone.
One thing to note is that Insights Capture was built with minimal impact on CPU to ensure gameplay isn’t affected. Also, the application can record communications to help team members review player callouts during competitive matches.
With the ability to watch game replays without using the game client and sift through game highlights, Insights Capture is the optimal tool for recording for the purpose of VOD reviews.
Central Hub
Insights.gg is a collaborative hub to securely store, share, and review game footage with others. You can upload videos in multiple ways: recordings from Insights Capture, local video files, and YouTube/Twitch URL.
Once content is uploaded, advanced security procedures ensure only the right people get access to your hub. This leads us to admin controls. Creators of the hub will have the ability to create custom roles that dictate what activities invitees can conduct on their Insights.gg hub. Who can upload, who can leave feedback, and who can organize are dependent on the role that the admin assigns.
Organization management is also a major factor on the platform. We’ve implemented a set of features that ensure you can control what and where content is output on your Insights.gg hub. To understand this, let me break down the platform from highest to lowest order:
Insights.gg Hub — this is your overarching space for inviting friends, team members, and coaches
Channels — this feature helps facilitate the flow of content. E.g. you’re a larger organization that needs a channel for each team under management
Folders — enables admins to organize their uploads into buckets of subcategories. E.g. A folder for week 1 scrims, week 2 scrims, and week 3 scrims.
Video tags — an easy way to categorize and sift through uploads. “Needs review,” “reviewed,” and “not reviewing” are default tags that can be used.
Notifications are also in place to ensure everyone knows the key events that are happening. Things like new members joining, videos uploaded, and feedback shared will be summarized on the top right bell icon, with alerts spread out across the platform.
Regardless of whether you’re one person, or a world-class team, Insights.gg was made to scale based on your organization’s requirements.
VOD Review
This is the part of the platform that has all the coaching and review systems at your disposal. Every video that is uploaded onto Insights.gg is powered with an arsenal of review tools.
If you want to asynchronously give feedback, utilize our timestamped comment function. This enables you to relay comments directly on the frame of the game footage. Each comment can also be synced with an array of shapes and drawings in multiple colors to pinpoint gameplay that needs to be discussed (drawing tool). If you need a way to organize the feedback, colorful labels can be used to categorize each comment. Map overlays and hero icons are also available if you want to discuss macro strategies.
The great part about Insights.gg’s review system is that you can give feedback offline, or with others in real-time. Live sessions allow users to invite others into a room to watch the footage together. Every frame, drawing, and overlay are synced for every user. If the host jumps to 3:10 of the video, everyone jumps to 3:10. If someone circles something on the game footage, everyone sees the drawing as well. If a map overlay is popped open, users can interact with hero icons to conduct the best strategy sessions.
Instead of hacking together processes, leverage Insights.gg and trust that you have the best review system in place.
That’s about it folks! This is what we’ve built so far. We still have a way to go, with many awesome features in our development pipeline. However, we believe the current Insights.gg is an instrumental force for changing the way competitive gamers review game footage.
Try it out today, we provide a ton of value for free users. If you ever need additional usage, we have paid plans with a focus on “one low cost for unlimited members.”
For a limited time, you can also earn upwards of $10 in credits to build your Insights.gg server.
We’re a company that listens. Message us on Discord or click the feedback button to share suggestions for improving the product.
Thank you to the team at Insights.gg, our friends at Overwolf, the government of Canada, our supportive investors, and all our users for getting Insights.gg to where it is today ❤.
To keep up with our coverage of esports professionals and see how Insights.gg is equipping these individuals, follow us on Twitter or visit our website, Insights.gg.
