A Wikipedia definition of interactivity suggests that the word denotes the “quality” of interaction. This makes it a useful word in the eSports environment to discriminate between platforms that provide for high levels of interaction between viewers, streamers and other participants and those that provide little or limited levels of interaction.
This article unpacks why interactivity — in the sense of providing high levels of interaction — has become increasingly important for business and marketing worldwide, not just for eSports. It describes the current state of interactivity in the eSports world, and introduces Play2Live, a startup streaming platform that has taken interactivity to a completely new level.
ESPORTS IS NO LONGER ON THE FRINGE
eSports can be defined as professional competitive online gaming of any kind. It is experiencing an exponential rise in popularity all around the world. The audience is estimated to be nearly 400 million and is expected to grow to 600 million by 2020. Most of the real “enthusiasts” are male and millennial.
Fans fill major sporting venues such as the Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Staples Center in Los Angeles and Madison Square Garden in New York. Prize pools for major events have become larger than most traditional sports. In fact, top traditional sports clubs and franchises are putting their names behind gamers. This includes European soccer teams like Paris Saint-Germain (France), Manchester City (England), Schalke (Germany) and Ajax (Netherlands). NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers and Miami Heat have bought eSports teams, and Houston Rockets has hired a director of eSports.
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Shark Tank star, has recently started investing into eSports. He sums up the status of eSports:
“There is no reason to try to legitimize eSports to anyone. eSports is a real industry. People can choose whether to connect to it themselves. The participation numbers and the online viewership numbers speak for themselves. What matters is that people who love eSports really get into it. They watch clips and matches. They play the game. There is no need to try to convince those on the outside.”
Household brands are recognising the industry, and pouring money into it. In China, this includes Alibaba and Tencent, with Tencent owning Riot Games, publisher of the League of Legends game. Amazon has bought Twitch, the leading live streaming video platform. Coca-Cola sponsors the League of Legends World Championships; Geico, the second largest insurance company in the USA, has a pro-tip series on MLG.tv; the E-League, a CS:GO tournament of major teams from around the world, and televised in the USA, have Arby’s, Buffalo Wings and Credit Karma as official marketing partners.
According to Seth Ladetsky, senior vice president of Turner Ad Sales, the attraction for sponsors is the opportunity to market to “a highly-engaged, dedicated millennial fan base”.
This is echoed by Rob Lynch, Chief Marketing Officer and Brand President of Arby’s, who notes that “eSports is built on passion and loyalty from fans and athletes”.
We have previously written about the importance for advertisers, but here we want to focus on the fan base.
UNDERSTANDING THE ESPORTS FAN BASE
It is this fan base that really sets eSports apart from other sports — and is the basis of its growth. eSports was born from community. It becomes part of the lifestyle of its fans, who build social connections, interactions and friendships through the games. It is estimated that 9 billion hours will be dedicated to watching professional gaming by 2021. The accessibility of top stars to their fans is a feature of the sport.
It’s the composition of the fan base that is of most interest. Research undertaken by BI Intelligence identifies an “enthusiast” group of about 150 million. Most are millennials with good incomes. They tend to consume content online rather than via TV or other traditional channels. They are difficult to reach, and do not respond to traditional advertising. The millennial market is huge. They make up 25% of the world’s total population and their buying power is estimated at $65 billion per year.
INTERACTION WITH MILLENNIALS
Marketers all around the world are starting to recognise that the way to reach this audience is by building engagement and connections via social media, and, importantly, via user generated content (UGC). This is the newest form of word-of-mouth marketing. It can be in the form of blog or forum comments, product reviews, memes and videos.
UGC is the new buzzword for business. Nicho, a visual marketing platform, provides some interesting statistics in its “Guide for putting UGC to work”:
- 1.6 billion people use social media, and they spend an average of 5.4 hours per day consuming UGC
- 70% of UGC is created by millennials (people born between 1982 and 2004)
- 25% of brand search results are links to UGC posts
- It matters:
- 84% of millennials say UGC influences what they buy. In fact, millennials are unlikely to buy a product if there is no consumer review
- 92% trust UGC over traditional advertising
- 59% consult UGC before making a purchase
- 86% believe UGC is an indicator of quality
- 35% find UGC more memorable than other types of media
TECHNIQUES THAT CONNECT WITH MILLENNIALS
Multiple people give advice on how to connect with millennials:
- Interaction is key if you want them to come back. This is about connecting on a personal level and building relationships with viewers. It can take the form of live chats, Q&A sessions, the facility for viewers to connect with each other. Fans want the opportunity to engage directly.
- Voxburner points out that they “love to connect and be connected with, through digital conversation”.
- Render Positive information shows that, when they interact with brands, millennials want to be entertained and they want competitions and freebies. When gamification is included it encourages engagement and creates a buzz.
- Scott Baldwin, director of marketing for cereal at General Mills comments, “We don’t want to talk at them, but talk to them and make it engaging and fun to watch.” (Their tag line for one of their cereals surely makes everyone smile — “You either love them or you’re wrong”.)
- Use videos and live streaming and embed your live stream to social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Users can easily comment and engage with content, and they can share it directly, leading to a growth in viewers and popularity. Millennials are comfortable with consuming and sharing online video. An example of the tools being developed for this is Hangouts on Air at Google+, which is merged with YouTube, to provide a free video chat and live streaming service. Live video on Facebook, generates 10 times the comments and viewers stay for 3 times as long as for regular videos.
- Work with social influencers. Social influencers are those who have used social platforms to establish credibility and a following within a specific industry or industries. Millenials identify with them, see them as trendsetters and “cool”– and they are thus more likely to ty out what they suggest. (It’s easy to see how this relates to streamers and professional gamers.)
- Encourage customers to write product reviews, to dramatically improve organic search traffic, conversion rates and time-on-site.
ESPORTS PLATFORMS AND INTERACTIVITY — HOW ARE THEY DOING?
It is obvious that the marketing trends and findings about connecting with millennials apply to eSports too. In fact, eSports has in many ways taken the lead in the interactivity that the rest of the world is now starting to pick up on. Streaming and broadcasting platforms for gamers have become the norm.
Millennials tend to avoid traditional broadcasting media that allow them to be only passive observers. So, the online chats, the ability to get special treatment from streamers through special subscriptions, the ability to make donations and contribute to prize pools, are attractive features for viewers. Viewers can chat with each other publicly on the channels, and chat privately through messaging systems. Groups are then formed, based on common interests, and streamers can align their channels to these groups.
Twitch.tv (owned by Amazon) and YouTube Gaming are two of the highest profile streaming platforms to have emerged dedicated to the eSports and video games markets.
The question is whether platforms are staying ahead? Are they allowing viewers to interact meaningfully in the sport?
Not much has been done for several years to improve the interactivity functions for viewers, and there have been few options for personalization. Viewers have generally had to pay for participating in their hobby, and have often been bombarded with advertising. At the same time, there have been restrictions and administrative barriers for streamers to effectively monetize their contributions.
Recently, Twitch has introduced Extensions, to increase interactivity. This programme allows streamers to personalize their channels and have input from viewers through a touch screen function. Viewers can interact with the streamer or the page widgets to get more information about the game, answer polls and trivia, have music requests and have leaderboard displays.
Developers are also being pulled into the interactive mode. For example, Twitch has given them access to the Extensions programme so that they can develop personalized plug-ins for streamer channels. Ex Machina is a group of developers who have made use of this opportunity and have developed some more advanced forms of interaction, including “Smart Click Maps” which is a form of polling, using the content of the game itself to get viewer feedback. “Polls” is a more structured polling mechanisms, which allows streamers to create short questions for viewers. They also have “Tug of War”, where viewers can compete to have their choice of option selected by the streamer.
It is obvious that gamers want to be more than mere viewers — and often the only way to attract the attention of a favorite streamer is through donations. Passive watching is no longer interesting. Therefore, functions such as “Spectator Mode” on the Steam platform were so popular for the last Dota 2 International. This mode is a form of virtual reality, where the viewer has a 360 view and can choose any view position or choose a player to track individually. Spectators can, however, not interact directly with the game in any way.
Increasingly, millennial sports fans want content that they can rework, remix, and share easily. Millennials believe that anyone can be a content creator.
Younger sports fans love to watch games, but they also love to watch them in their control. Companies like Kiswe and SportsCastr.Live have developed interactive video platforms for viewers of traditional sports. They allow fans to watch traditional games from multiple angles. They can create their own highlights and share on social media.
Silver.tv, an eSports streaming service, setting itself up in competition with Twitch, offers a decentralised service, based on blockchain technology. This will speed up the network speed, allow for caching and relaying of video streams on distribution nodes (with rewards in the form of cryptocurrency tokens) and rewards to viewers who watch the videos.
PLAY2LIVE — TRUE INTERACTIVITY FOR VIEWERS AND STREAMERS
Play2Live is a startup that has identified the need for interactivity — and especially the ability of the viewer to control content — as central to its mode of operation. It has created a comprehensive ecosystem for streamers, gamers and eSports fans. It is a streaming platform which integrates blockchain functionality and has unique interactive features and monetizing tools.
The platform is diversified across various market segments:
- eSports and gaming
- Betting and internal items exchange
- Live and VOD broadcasting of the game content
- Virtual Reality
This provides 15 different ways to generate revenue for the platform — and 11 of these are shared with streamers, viewers and tournament organisers.
One of the unique functions of the platform is the ability for any participant to influence content generation. In other words, not only can spectators watch the stream, but they can also act as content creators. On top of that, any participant of the ecosystem has an opportunity to earn money.
It offers a new level of interactivity:
- Much of the interactivity on the platform is facilitated by the use cryptocurrency. All transactions on the platform are via its own token, the LUC. LUC can be bought using either fiat currencies of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum. Winnings and earnings can be re-converted into any of these currencies, or used on the platform to buy games from partner stores, to make donations directly to streamers, for bets on teams and competitions, for subscriptions and for fees to participate in tournaments.
- Viewers can influence the content and the end-result of tournaments. They can use LUC tokens to vote for the teams they’d like to see competing against each other, the tournament format, the commentators and even the locations. Play2Live works with tournament organisers to set up tournaments to match the wishes of users.
- Viewers interact directly with streamers, not just via chats. They can set tasks and challenges for streamers, vote for the content they’d like to see and make donations. Premium subscriptions give viewers special rights during tournaments.
- Viewers watching a stream can challenge each other to duels on the game, using LUC to bet against others. Viewers are redirected to partner sites where they can play the game face to face.
- Streamers can set tasks for viewers (eg to watch other streamers, or to watch adverts) and reward them for completed tasks. Streamers have 11 ways of monetization and can start to earn LUC from their very first streams, without any limitations. They are B2B partners on the platform, incentivized to attract new viewers.
- Viewers are in control of the advertising they watch. Advertising is disabled by default on the streaming platform. However, viewers are incentivised to watch the adverts, as they are rewarded with LUC every time they do.
- P2P CDN service on the platform allows for content to be distributed via users’ PCs/laptops/gadgets, thereby reducing CDN maintenance costs for the platform. Users are rewarded with LUC for sharing their resources.
- The platform offers a crowdfunding option that allows viewers to contribute to the cost of tournaments, prize pools or the broadcasting costs of streamers.
- Integrated betting and gambling on the platform allows viewers to place bets during tournaments (with no middleman required) or to place bets with outside bookmakers, without leaving the platform.
Compared to the simplistic chat communication and donation options provided by the existing platforms, this is a real step forward in terms of interactivity.
Play2Live clearly understand the eSports world, they understand their millennial audience, they understand the worldwide trend towards interactivity, they understand the need to integrate services in a seamless manner, and they have capitalized on blockchain technology to make it all happen.
Play2Live is poised to become a platform to be reckoned with.
Stay tuned!
