IBC
Returning to Riyadh this month for its second outing, the
Esports World Cup is being billed as the most ambitious and technologically
advanced global competitive event in history.
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With 25 tournaments across 24 games and 200 Clubs from over
100 countries, the EWC will feature the largest prize pool in esports history,
over $70 million.
“It's monumental. There is nothing like it,” says Mike
McCabe, COO, Esports World Cup Foundation. “Most other esports events are built
for a week or less of operation. We're talking about seven weeks of operation
on a scale that is of an order of magnitude greater than anything else in
esports.”
In the first week beginning July 7, for example, the four
venues will host the group stage games of Valorant, Dota2, [sim racing game]
Rennsport, Fatal Fury and Apex Legends building to play offs and then finals.
“If you imagine we're building the equivalent of a
traditional three day Esports event but we're doing that in four different
venues simultaneously for seven weeks in a row.”
McCabe is a former head of digital for Nike, senior exec at
Electronic Arts and managing director of international publishing at Epic Games
who joined EWC to build on the inaugural event.
That saw 250 million hours of content streamed across 21
different games to 500 million viewers. The League of Legends hit a peak
viewership of 3.5m during its grand final, according to organisers. The EWC
also claim that over 2 million people attended the event in person last year.
“There have been lots of singular gaming events around the
world but this one is unique in bringing it all together,” says McCabe. “That's
important from a broadcast standpoint because it enables us to create an
economy of scale when it comes to the technology we're building into the venues.
We can aim for a far wider audience than traditional Esports events where
they're focused very much on an endemic Esports community.”
He says, “The only way we can elevate esports is to go as broad as we can
within the gaming ecosystem both from a genre perspective and also from a
geographic perspective.”
He also aims to increase “esport literacy” in order to reach
audiences less familiar with the intricacies of first person shooter Call of
Duty or battle royale formats Free Fire and PUBG Mobile.
To achieve that objective, linear broadcast is an important
component. KSA broadcaster MBC took all the games live last year and is likely
to do the same this time out. The event will be live streamed over Twitch and
YouTube and also by some of the game publishers “within their own ecosystem.”
There are also a larger group of content creators or “co-streamers”
on site delivering content to their followers on social platforms.
“They have that connection with their audience so for us to
be able to broadcast to that full gaming community is incredibly valuable from
a co-streaming standpoint,” says McCabe. “It’s very important for us to reach
out beyond all the traditional streams.”
One of the key lessons from last year was that more needed
to be done to make mainstream audiences feel at home with esoteric to gameplay.
“We found latent appetite to understand more. People are
inquisitive. They keep hearing about esports and they want to know more but the
core content that we create from a game stream doesn't have enough explanation
or enough entertainment content. We're creating a new broadcast product that we
will be trialling this year to specifically target that more mainstream
audience.”
While there a lot of similarities with traditional sports broadcasting
there's also a lot that's different.
“There's no one party that has that skill to be able to span across all of the
different pillars,” says McCabe. “It is much more of a first party and very
game specific because there are specialists at the publishers who really
understand a particular franchise. The crew supporting EA Sports FC are very
different from the people supporting League of Legends. But having that in-depth
understanding of the intricacies of the game and what action should be focused
on screen is vital
“It's a little easier perhaps with EA FC because the action is where the ball
is but for a game like Tekken 8 or Starcraft II, where the strategy is often
happening in different parts of the screen, you want to take the fans and the
audience there too.”
While camera operators in the venues covering fans in the stands will span all
of the different game many of the producers and technicians in charge of a
particular esport production will rotate in and out based on their specialty.
The competition is facilitated by ESL Faceit Group
(EFG), a division of esports’ event organiser ESL and a subsidiary
of Savvy Games Group – itself owned by the Saudi government’s Public
Investment Fund.
EFG is integrating the studio-based infrastructure capable
of taking in all of the live feeds into the main control room as well as the
technology on the venue stages, such as LED screens.
Vlad Petrescu, EFG Executive Producer EWC 2025 explains,
“Each stage has multiple production lines that interact with one another. It
starts with In-game production, which shows the match and directs the
observers. Then comes Stage production, which handles the stage show and big
moments like player reveals. From there, our English, Arabic, and Chinese teams
take the feed and add localised content like match analysis and custom video
assets.”
All production lines are equipped with Grass Valley vision
mixers, EVS media servers for replays and playout, Lawo audio stations, and
2110 IP distribution.
Although each venue is host to multiple different games and
the stages are dressed with different layout and presentation, the basic
broadcast infrastructure remains consistent. Every gaming station across all of
the different stages features player-based cameras from Chinese PTZ developer
OBSBOT which have the ability to dynamically track movements. OBSBOT is also
supplying its Tiny 2 webcams.
McCabe says, “We're going to test some features at the
beginning just see if they work because there's a lot of gesture controls that
are able to recognise player actions but these actions will differ according to
game and even individual player. These cameras will give us really high quality
player-based feeds that we can then use whether in venue on the LEDs or pull
into the live stream.”
Another key objective is to make the EWC a destination and “repeat
draw” for people in the wider Middle East. “That’s why the supporting events as
part of the Festival are so important and why will rotate fan engagement
activities each week. It’s the reason the EWC will be rotating games in venues
over the seven weeks to give people a different reason to come in week one and
return in week four based on the games that they're passionate about. That is a
massive differentiator from my perspective.”
Alongside multiplayer games like DOTA and Rainbow 6 Siege,
online chess makes its debut at the event with a huge $1.5m prize pool and
world number one Magnus Carlsen leading one of the teams. Also helping influence sports fans outside of
the esports bubble is Saudi resident CR7. Cristiano Ronaldo is an ambassador
for the EWC even appearing as a playable character in Fatal Fury: City of the
Wolves, one of the tournament’s official games.
Another piece of brand marketing is a five-part
docuseries chronicling the EWC 2024 and providing background stories to
players. Level Up, from Oscar nominated director R.J. Cutler and his
team at This Machine Filmworks, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
McCabe explains that the Esports World Cup is divided into
two ‘products’: the Club Championship which is where gamers compete in teams in
one of the xx tournaments. The club that generates the most points is crowned Champion.
Running in parallel is the Festival, described as “a celebration of everything
that is gaming from cosplay to education to influencer content creators.”
This area of Riyadh also includes live music, retro arcades
and cafes. The tournament is played played over 7 weeks this year, as opposed
to the 8 weeks of 2024, with the addition of a fourth stage accommodating an
increased number of games. The number of competitors rises from 1500 to between
1600 to 1700 this year.
The EWC is intended as an annual event and would also run
parallel to an Olympic Esports which is planned to be held every two years,
also in Riyadh. The KSA is busy constructing a dedicated entertainment, sports
and video gaming city called Qiddiya in the southwest of the capital.
“We will ultimately end up there, but that is scheduled to be completed closer to 2030,” McCabe says.
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