Your Gaming and Esports Update
Deals
PlayBrain Raises Series A
Japanese esports event organizer PlayBrain announced a $6 million (£4.8 million) Series A financing round. The round included return investor BITKRAFT Esports Ventures and brings PlayBrain’s total funding since launch to $8 million (£6.5 million). BITKRAFT’s investment amount was not disclosed. PlayBrain is a full-service esports tournament and media company in Japan that helps brands and game publishers to reach gamers and fans through large-scale esports event production and marketing.
Discord Raises $100M
This past week, Discord closed a $100M funding round valuing the company at $3.5B. The also announced that this would help fund their expansion to other markets outside of gaming. “Games are what brought many of you on the platform, and we’ll always be grateful for that,” reads a blog post by Discord CEO Jason Citron and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy. “As time passed, a lot of you realized, and vocalized, that you simply wanted a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends. You wanted a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something, or sharing ideas.”
Voicemod Raises $8M
Voicemod has announced the raising of $8 million in its Series A funding round, led by Bitkraft Esports Ventures. The audio avatar company provides a voice filter that combines AI and digital signal processing technologies to gamers and content creators. The company plans to use the investment to launch mobile applications, work on existing technologies, and further its expansion into the Asian market. Unlike other, traditional voice changer applications, Voicemod enables its users to change their voice in real-time. This ranges from adding the effect of being out of breath during an intense battle or background sounds when driving through tunnels in the game.
ControlZee Raises $3M
ControlZee has raised $3 million to bring instantly playable multiplayer worlds to life. The company refers to its titles — which are controlled by masses of players at the same time — as “massively interactive swarm games.” The San Mateo, California-based company has created a platform, or game engine, dubbed Dot Big Bang that enables people to play and create games with friends anywhere, on any device, instantly, and then share the games via simple web links. The round was actually closed in 2018 and just now announced with Makers Fund as the only investor in the round.
Updates
UK Federal Credit Union Acquires Naming Rights For Esports Lounge
The credit union and JMI Sports, UK’s multimedia rights partner, have announced a naming rights partnership with the university for the esports complex in The Cornerstone, a new multiuse facility now under construction at the corner of South Limestone and Winslow Street on campus. The UK Federal Credit Union Esports Lounge and Theater will be the new home for UK’s burgeoning esports program and part of UK’s innovative plan to become a global leader in esports and higher education. The naming rights will last an impressive 13 years which should allow the esports program at Kentucky to grow.
Crucible Moves Back Into Closed Beta
Amazon isn’t quite pulling the plug on Crucible, but it is making a drastic move on its path toward reviving the team-based shooter. Starting tomorrow, July 1, at 9 a.m. Pacific time, Crucible will move back into “closed beta.” This is coming after the game already released on Steam. Put as simply as possible, this means Amazon will no longer have the game up for new players to download (it’s a free-to-play game). But if you already added it to your library, you can continue to access it without interruption. One of the major problems with Crucible is that it doesn’t exactly have a lot of active players. Crucible hit a peak of only 159 concurrent players over the last 24 hours. That is down from 25,145 concurrents at its peak a month ago.
Rocket League Championship Series Evolves into $4.5M Events Circuit
Psyonix announced today that its Rocket League Championship Series league, which has spanned nine seasons to date, will change into a longer, open events-based circuit. The new circuit approach will have a total annual prize pool of more than $4.5 million (£3.6 million) across the entire season, and culminate in a larger Rocket League World Championship event. According to Psyonix, the new approach — dubbed RLCS X — will open up high-level competition to even more teams than before while rewarding steady performance via a points-based structure.
