Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/878567
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER 2017 IV Gaming Facebook: All in with eSports The leading social network explains why it is partnering with so many developers and their professional gaming leagues FACEBOOK is determined to become the next big platform for broadcasting eSports, recently announcing another exclusive partnership with a popular com- petitive title. Hi-Rez Studios and the World ESports Association is launch- ing the Paladins Premier League this autumn and will broadcast all league content solely through Facebook Live. It follows the $350,000 Paladins Global Series announced in July. The deal comes after similar partnerships where Facebook has secured 5,500 hours of ESL's tournament coverage, 1,000 hours of Wargaming's eSports content, and four monthly broadcasts from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It's a remarkable start given that Facebook's eSports entrance only began last year with MLG stream- ing and the tech to enable people to stream from their PC/laptop to Facebook profiles went live in March. Leo Olebe, director of global gaming partnerships, says this is just the beginning. "We're all in," he told GamesIn- dustry.biz. "We're putting all of our cards, all of our chips on the table. We fundamentally believe that games are an incredible way to connect people to each other and videos are an incredible way to do that too. With our under- standing of those two concepts, we're going to invest and invest. Some things will work, some things won't." Hi-Rez cites various reasons for partnering with Facebook rather than a platform more attuned to video games content - Twitch be- ing the obvious alternative. For one thing, the Paladins Premier League and Global Series essentially arose from the studio's discovery that members of its 15m-strong community were us- ing Facebook to form teams and arrange matches - something the developer now assists with via an official Paladins Facebook Group. For another, Hi-Rez points to the "tremendous reach" of Facebook. "It's really not comparable [to anything else]," co-founder and COO Todd Harris said. "It's also very global, and Pala- dins is a very global game. We've seen the Facebook statement and actions around enabling commu- nities and powering video - both of those concepts are forged into our DNA. That's the way we think about marketing our games. Hav- ing a partner that shares that gives us optimism." Olebe was also quick to stress that while Facebook is an all-en- compassing social network rather than one designed specifically for fans of video games, the active audience that uses its platform to share gaming interests is, to say the least, extensive. "We have 800m connected Facebook gamers every month," he says. "The scale is there, so through great partnerships like this one we can help gamers find each other, create meaning- ful connections and provide a great experience for [games like] Paladins. "The volume is there, the passion is there, the people are the. Gamers are on Facebook, there's a hell of a lot of gamers on Facebook and they're having a good time. There are so many gamers active in groups that we don't even know about... so it's a real opportunity. If anything, the world just doesn't know exactly how many core gamers are out there. We just know they're all there. We just love to do great stuff for gamers. It's great fun for us." Harris cited Paladins as an example of studios can create "comprehensive eSports ecosys- tems" on one site. Players can use Facebook Groups to find fellow fans, form teams that can compete in the Paladins Global Systems, broadcast their matches and through doing so potentially be discovered by one of the Premier League teams. "It's a pretty comprehensive vi- sion and we need a pretty compre - hensive platform to accomplish it," he said. Patrick Chapman, eSports and gaming partnerships manager at Facebook, was particularly keen to explore the possibilities afforded by live tournament coverage and the ways in which the players themselves can help to spread that content. "What gets me very excited about publishing content and broadcasting eSports on Facebook is the ability to use every partici- pant in an eSports event as a dis- tribution channel for that media, using the power of sharing and the ability to use a new publishing product that we call cross-posted video," he said. "It's the equivalent of Man- chester United having a game broadcast on NBC Sports but Wayne Rooney is also broadcast- ing it from his Facebook page. It's a very powerful distribution mechanism." The exclusive broadcast partner- ship also ties in with Facebook's wider strategy of hosting more gaming video content, whether that's eSports competitions, con- tent by YouTube-style influencers, or even trailers and interviews posted directly by developers and publishers. "When people have the opportu- nity to share experiences through video, they're more connected, they're more engaged, they in turn are going to share more and build even better communities. As a company, we changed our overall mission to give people the opportunity to build better communities and bring the world closer together." Olebe also stressed that Fa- cebook's entry into the eSports space was not commercially driven - at least, not yet. "Yes, we have an amazing ads business and all of these incred- ible things happening around Facebook, but we approach the challenge of building incred- ible communities around games extraordinarily altruistically," he said. "We're building great video technology, entering as many amazing partnerships as we pos- sibly can, and we're looking to see what really works on the platform and then we'll lean into it. We're invested because we want to give gamers an incredible experience and help them build communi- ties." And Facebook is on the hunt for more. The firm had a strong pres- ence at Gamescom last month, no doubt reaching out to more de- velopers and publishers to arrange similar partnerships, and it's keen to find the next game that its users love to watch. "It's got to be a great game," Olebe said. "Something that everyone's going to fall in love with, that 15m people are already playing. If you don't have a great game experience to begin with, you can't force anything from that moment on. "We're looking for great developers. There needs to be a willingness to think deeply about where can this stuff go. This isn't a partnership where we're focus- ing only on today. We're thinking about new technology, new ideas, and the opportunity to get feed- back from the Hi-Rez team about what we do well and what we could work on. That's invaluable, priceless to us." "At Facebook, we always talk about building amazing things first and then figure out how to turn it into something economi- cally viable at the end of the road." Leo Olebe