AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

• Announced the signing of an Affiliate Marketing Agreement with Global Speedrun Association, which hosts and administrates races on a broad variety of speedrun games, most notably Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Odyssey, across their three Twitch channels
• As the first platform to offer wagering for speedrunning, this agreement is another milestone for vie.gg, the world’s first and most transparent esports betting exchange.

ST. MARY’S, Antigua, Dec. 03, 2018 – Esports Entertainment Group, Inc. (GMBL:OTCQB) (or the “Company”), a licensed online gambling company with a specific focus on esports wagering and 18+ gaming, is pleased to announce the signing of an Affiliate Marketing Agreement with Global Speedrun Association (“GSA”), which hosts and administrates races on a broad variety of speedrun games, most notably Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Odyssey, across their three Twitch channels.  As the first platform to offer wagering for speedrunning, this agreement is another milestone for vie.gg, the world’s first and most transparent esports betting exchange.

GLOBAL SPEEDRUNNING COMMUNITY GROWING RAPIDLY

GSA is a relatively new company dedicated to pushing speedrunning into the mainstream and helping speedrunners achieve the same success that esports athletes now enjoy.  Despite its relatively recent entrance into the speedrunning space, GSA has generated impressive traffic with 860,000 views from 3 Twitch.tv channels over the last 30 days.  More importantly, GSA is growing rapidly and this partnership with VIE.gg will only serve to help accelerate that growth.

The global speedrunning community is growing at a very fast pace, with single events raising over $2,000,000 for charity in 2018, and is expected to continue growing at a very rapid pace for years to come. As the premier P2P betting platform for speedrunning, VIE now gives fans the ability to be on their favourite players, which will serve to broaden the fan base and their attention times, as well as, help attract the top players in the world, including top esports players with an affinity for speedrunning.

Brian Cordry, Head of Esports at Esports Entertainment Group, stated, “Groups like GSA help raise the standard of production quality and push speedrunning forward. We love speedrunners and we love what GSA is doing. I expect speedrunning to grow exponentially and that is why it is so important for Esports Entertainment Group to partner with the likes of GSA for the long term. Together, we will help push speedrunning to the heights that esports is currently achieving.”

Steven Adams, Chief Executive Officer at Global Speedrun Association stated, “GSA is the premier organized speedrunning league and our goal is to increase the consistent quality of our broadcasts and competitions by working with VIE in 2018 and beyond.  The key differences this relationship will make are being able to fund larger prize pools for our leagues and tournaments to catalyze higher levels of competition, as well as, attracting and compensating key people that make our broadcasts so entertaining, such as great commentators, video editors and other GSA staff who will be able to increase the output and quality of their productions. Working together will help push speedrunning to new heights and help grow this budding sector of the video game industry, which will lead to betting growth on VIE. Looking forward to the future!”

VIE.GG

vie.gg offers bet exchange style wagering on esports events in a licensed, regulated and secured platform to the global esports audience, excluding jurisdictions that prohibit online gambling. vie.gg features wagering on the following esports games:

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO)
• League of Legends
• Dota 2
• Call of Duty
• Overwatch
• PUBG
• Hearthstone
• StarCraft II

This press release is available on our Online Investor Relations Community for shareholders and potential shareholders to ask questions, receive answers and collaborate with management in a fully moderated forum at https://agoracom.com/ir/EsportsEntertainmentGroup

RedChip investor relations Esports Entertainment Group Investor Page:
http://www.gmblinfo.com

About Esports Entertainment Group

Esports Entertainment Group, Inc. is a licensed online gambling company with a specific focus on esports wagering and 18+ gaming. Esports Entertainment offers bet exchange style wagering on esports events in a licensed, regulated and secure platform to the global esports audience at vie.gg.  In addition, Esports Entertainment intends to offer users from around the world the ability to participate in multi-player mobile and PC video game tournaments for cash prizes. Esports Entertainment is led by a team of industry professionals and technical experts from the online gambling and the video game industries, and esports. The Company holds licenses to conduct online gambling and 18+ gaming on a global basis in Curacao, Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kahnawake Gaming Commission in Canada. The Company maintains offices in Antigua, Curacao and Warsaw, Poland. Esports Entertainment common stock is listed on the OTCQB under the symbol GMBL.  For more information visit www.esportsentertainmentgroup.com

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
The information contained herein includes forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or to our future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond our control and which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects our current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. We assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. The safe harbor for forward-looking statements contained in the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 protects companies from liability for their forward-looking statements if they comply with the requirements of the Act.

Contact:

Corporate Finance
1-268-562-9111
[email protected]

Media & Investor Relations Inquiries
AGORACOM
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http://agoracom.com/ir/eSportsEntertainmentGroup

U.S. Investor Relations 
RedChip
Dave Gentry
407-491-4498
[email protected]

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Check out today’s News

VB Staff

“What you’re seeing is a tectonic shift in viewership and consumption from the millennials and Gen Z — gaming is the preferred entertainment,” says Kent Wakeford, Co-founder and COO, Gen.G.

According to Wakeford, more than 22 percent of American millennials watch esports, which is more than the number of millennials that watch either Major League Baseball or the NHL.

And it’s a global phenomenon. If you look at the global reach which includes over 300 million viewers and enthusiasts of esports, over 50 percent of that audience is in APAC, with 15 percent in North America, about 18 percent in the EU, and the rest scattered around the world.

But as the industry has grown, the revenue model has stayed very much the same, mimicking the traditional sports template — which is why you see so many traditional sports teams moving into esports, Wakeford says. The key revenue drivers in esports are media rights, sponsorship sales, live events, merchandise, and prize winnings, but there are a number of unique and innovative areas of activation and engagement between the teams and leagues and fans in several areas.

Traditional revenue models are evolving

Media rights, for instance, is becoming a big area of change and growth recently. Wakeford points to the significant partnership that the Overwatch League formed with Twitch, setting new records for partnerships in the space, plus the partnership with ESPN for linear broadcast

These big media deals are not quite of the scope you see in the NBA and the NFL, but are significant media partnerships, really showcasing the power of the audience and the viewership for esports. But it’s not just staying at the league level.

“I think what you’re going to see is media rights growing not only with the big leagues, but also with the individual teams and the player streams,” Wakeford says. “That’s a key area of differentiation from traditional sports, where esports teams are highly engaged and doing a lot of innovative content creation through streaming platforms, through social platforms, doing IRL [in-real-life] content.”

Sponsorship is going to be the next big growth area for esports, he says.

“Every month you hear about another big brand stepping into the esports space,” Wakeford continues. “Well-known Fortune 500 brands and marketers coming into the space. That trend is going to continue, especially as you have more structure around the leagues and a more clear understanding of who the top teams are and who the top players are.”

He predicts that we’ll see a lot more brands coming in and a lot more innovation around the types of activations that teams and players and leagues will do around esports, in order to really include those brands in an authentic way in front of consumers.

Live events is another area of growth to keep an eye on, starting in 2019, but growing significantly in 2020 and beyond.

“You’re starting to see live esports events become part of the cultural fabric,” he says. “As these arenas start to come online, you’ll start to see innovative ways to provide live entertainment and live experiences for fans. Live events is just going to keep growing and growing.”

As a by-product of all of this, as the teams continue to grow and the leagues continue to grow, merchandise becomes a bigger and bigger area of growth for teams, with a number of leagues jumping into the category by creating merchandise that has an authentic feel for consumers.

But esports can still learn a number of significant things from media and broadcast.

A lot to learn still from the old world

One of the most important ways to engage fans is to tell the story of the players, by adding rich backstory, Wakeford says.

For example, if you watch ESPN or listen to podcasts, so much of the content is about individual players, the dynamics and the stories of the players, and what they’re doing. As a fan, you can engage and form a deeper connection and relationship with those players based on all the content and programming that’s been developed by the ESPNs of the world. And that’s going to start coming to the esports world, he predicts.

“As these traditional broadcasters like ESPN start to come into the market, they’ll start to tell the backstory of the players and the dynamics and the rivalries, and that will really help a lot of people start to engage at a deeper level with esports,” he explains.

The esports world already has a leg up in the digital world, with its teams and players. Many esports players stream on Twitch, and post or stream on YouTube, creating a direct relationship with their audience. It’s that direct, one-to-one relationship that’s going to further grow in the next couple of years, Wakeford says.

On the sponsorship side, one of the key things the esports world can learn from traditional sports is leveraging sponsorship packages and activations with major brands that are measurable and that fit into the way brands are used to engaging in sponsorships or buying media. There are tools being developed, whether it’s companies like Fan.AI or GumGum that are able to put a lot of data behind the sponsorships and ensure measurable outputs. Those technologies are going to really help enable the flow of sponsorship dollars into esports.

Connecting to the global market

“What you’re seeing with esports is that it is truly global,” Wakeford says. “In order to reach a global market, streaming is a great way to connect with fans, but you need to be thinking about platforms that are not just Twitch and YouTube, but may be very specific to other countries.”

Global streaming is going to be a key area of growth, and something that you don’t necessarily see with a lot of more traditional sports.

Social is also important, as is getting a foothold on platforms which have really deep engagement, a passionate fan base, and a number of ways for players to engage.

“These platforms that are connecting players with their fans are going to continue to grow esports, and it’s on a global basis, not just a regional basis.”

The future of esports

“I’m a big believer in esports,” Wakeford says. “I believe that in the future we’re going to see viewership continue to grow and surpass traditional sports, including the NFL. I think live esports events will become prevalent in every major city in the U.S.”

To learn more about the growing esports phenomenon, the rich opportunities to mine for esports gold, and where the money is coming from, don’t miss this VB Live event!

Source: https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/29/how-to-get-a-piece-of-the-growing-esports-pie-vb-live/

On August 25, the professional Dota 2 eSports team, OG, caused a major upset by winning the richest eSports tournament to date, The International 2018. Held at the 20,000 seat Rogers Arena in Vancouver, the $25 million tournament was witnessed by a capacity crowd over its six-day run and live-streamed by a peak audience of close to 15 million people.

In many respects, despite a total airtime of 122 hours, an eSports tournament workflow for an event such as T18 looks very similar to a conventional sporting event, as the graphic below from Newtek shows. The only real difference lies in swapping the cameras and audio that would normally be capturing physical sporting action for gameplay capture, with production cameras being deployed essentially for cutaways, commentary and reaction shots.

With little or no heritage of using legacy broadcast circuits, IP-based workflows are increasingly dominant in the eSports field as is remote production, which is becoming commonplace even at an intercontinental level. Coupled with the growing use of cloud-based tools, there’s a sense that eSports is pushing workflows that will become mainstream in regular sports coverage not too far down the line.

This can inevitably entail the use of serious amounts of bandwidth and fewer and fewer productions are happy to be using the public internet, preferring to rent large pipes for their exclusive use.

As a case in point, The Switch supplied the 12th BlizzCon last month with 800Mbps of connectivity between California’s Anaheim Convention Centre to AWS, not to mention a 50Mbps link for ESPN to handle content for Twitter.

Private networks also minimise the problem of latency. Aside from the desire to attract audiences — and BlizzCon, for example had 40,000 attendees — one of the main reasons that tournaments take place in arena settings rather than having players log in from home is to provide an even playing ground when it comes to connectivity. Lowest costs circuits are not always the best nor the most direct route, a factor which contributed to League of Legends developer Riot Games building its own dedicated backbone, Riot Direct.

This is a move more commonly associated with major tech companies such as Google and Facebook, but provides a much more direct route. The diagram below shows the impact when the return path, marked here in red, from Chicago to a player in Portland was computed by the standard Border Gateway Protocol.

Solo streamer
eSports is, however, about more than the tournaments, with influencer-based social video a key component on platforms such as the Amazon-owned Twitch, the Microsoft-owned Mixer, Smashcast, Caffeine, and an increasing number of other outlets.

Monetised by a combination of adverts and subscriptions, some of the players are becoming genre stars in their own right, led by the Fortnite-playing Ninja, who currently has over 12 million followers.

The tech behind connecting player to audience tends to be the standard value-end of broadcast kit list as developed and refined on YouTube over the years, with added computing grunt and specialist live-streaming and video mixing apps such as player.me, XSplit or OBS to allow broadcasters to intercut the gameplay. Additional specialist broadcasting software such as StreamLabs, StreamElements, Muxy and OperaEvent provide an impressive and constantly evolving array of engagement and monetisation tools.

Over 200 third-party extensions are now available for Twitch alone, which generate customisable onscreen info about everything from player stats to avatars to viewer polls, provide tipjar functionality, enable charity donations, viewer-chat and a whole lot more.

Sports crossover
Viewer chat and the live, interactive and communal nature of game streaming is considered by many to be one of eSports’ killer apps and live viewing is very much where the action is. Data from the most recent Nielsen eSports Fan Insight survey suggests that in the past 12 months 72% watched a live streaming event online, dropping to 48% for a pre-recorded match.

So far, so normal sports, but one of the dangers of mapping traditional sports paradigms onto eSports is that it is a very different mindset.

“Monetisation remains problematic when measured against an established culture of free content”

According to Nielsen data, eSports fans are, in general, video game fans first and foremost. They may spend on average 8% of their media time consuming eSports, but they spend nearly a quarter of their time playing video games themselves.

The reason they watch eSports is primarily to become better players themselves; they are active participants in the same games in a way that traditional sports organisations trying to build grassroots fanbases can only dream about.

This has implications. First, despite the draw of live events, there is a huge audience for VOD highlights and replays. Add in that factor and YouTube actually overtakes Twitch as the most popular source of eSports programming, at least in the US market. It means there is distinct demand for clips and highlights, and a real opportunity for analysis and annotation.

Second, it will necessarily impact on the way that the increasing amount of eSports athlete data being captured is presented. Traditional sports player stats such as metres run or tackles made, serve to highlight the difference between the elite athletes and the watching viewer. But given the different levels of engagement with eSports, the sense is that data should be presented more as aspirational: you can do this too if you practice hard enough.

As an example of the sort of metrics that are starting to feed into the game, Turner Sports has started to use eye-tracking technology to track individual player’s focus of intent during games which are then analysed post-match. The broadcaster is also adding the sort of sports science analysis that has become a staple of traditional sports in recent years, measuring factors such as response times and the visual acuity of the players.

Monetisation, ads, and evolution
One interesting current trend in eSports broadcasting is the demand of the narrative, which is stemming less from a traditional sports model and more from a sports entertainment perspective. This demands both additional resource on behalf of the streaming services for capturing content specific to it, as well as more input at the tournament planning stage to ensure the ‘right’ personalities end up pitted against each other. Whether this will become the dominant format becoming further emphasised moving forward or whether eSports will default to what can be considered a more purist, skills-first model will depend on the audience sizes achieved.

As will monetisation. As with much of the online media space, monetisation remains problematic when measured against an established culture of free content. Nielsen data suggests that as many as 1 in 3 eSports viewers would refuse to pay anything to watch any eSports content, though that has to be contrasted against culture that is happy to crowd-fund the huge purse on offer at T18, for instance.

Happily for continuing to fund the expansion in eSports, a similar figure suggested they would pay for ad-free video. This might be tested sooner rather than later though. Amazon-owned Twitch drew criticism for ending ad-free viewing on Twitch Prime (essentially a suite of benefits for Amazon Prime subscribers) in September, directing those who wanted an ad free experience to the $8.99 monthly Twitch Turbo service.

Measuring the impact of that will be instructive, though, of course, apart from revealing that over a million people are watching at any given moment, like its owner Twitch tends to keep its viewing figures to itself. It continues to innovate to stay ahead of a surging market though, for example announcing the forthcoming karaoke-style interactive Twitch Sings that allows viewers to request songs through chat only last month.

Speaking at the October TwitchCon 2018, Twitch CEO, Emmett Shear, said: “I think we’re still at very early days on Twitch. It still feels like the start of the streaming world.”

And with eSports revenues predicted to hit $905 million or more this year and still rising, the real tournament is only just starting.

Source: https://www.ibc.org/delivery/all-in-the-game-taking-esports-to-the-masses/3463.article

• Hangzhou government planning 14 esports venues before 2022 Asian Games
• A new Â¥2 billion RMB (US$280 million) ‘esports town’ has opened to the public in China, according to a report from People.cn.
• The complex – apparently one of the biggest projects of its kind in China – has been unveiled in Hangzhou, the capital of China’s Zhejiang province, and will be managed by the local government.

By: Steven Impey

Getty Images

A new ¥2 billion RMB (US$280 million) ‘esports town’ has opened to the public in China, according to a report from People.cn.

The complex – apparently one of the biggest projects of its kind in China – has been unveiled in Hangzhou, the capital of China’s Zhejiang province, and will be managed by the local government.

The project is expected to reel in ¥1 billion RMB (US$140 million) in tax revenue, according to the report, and attract more than 10,000 aspiring esports professionals.

Around ¥15.45 billion RMB (US$2.22 billion) has been earmarked for the multi-venue project, which will reportedly involve various esports facilities including an academy, hotel, theme park, a business centre, and also a hospital for esports players.

LGD Gaming, which signed a partnership with Allied Esports to build the facility in Hangzhou, will make the venue home to the League of Legends Pro League (LPL).

Overall, the Hangzhou government plans to build 14 esports venues before it hosts the 2022 Asian Games, which is set to include an esports medal event for the very first time.

Hangzhou was also recently named as one of the expansion cities for the second season of Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League.

Source: http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/league-legends-esports-town-china