Monthly Update January '24

Hi Reader,

Christmas ✅, New Year ✅, New Northern League of Legends Championship Season ✅ and now the new Ireland Esports Collegiate Spring Series ✅...feels like we were only updating you yesterday!

2024 is going to be a big one for us as we start the next phase of our growth. Expect to see progress in the following areas as we continue to build in the downtimes:

👀 announcements for at least two new in-person events within Ireland

🎓 increased engagement with our island wide network of educators

🏆 improved pathways for our community of +100 registered teams

🏠 scaling of our international community through strategic partnerships

🏗️ growing capacity and skills within the Nativz Gaming team

💡 We also wanted to take the opportunity to shine a light on Alotmeant, our Official Environmental Partner. Please take a moment to have a look at their website. The story it tells about the regeneration underway in their first project over in Koh Tao, Thailand is impressive! 🪸

Here's our selection of esports industry news and updates across our business successes, challenges and more;

INDUSTRY

👉🏼 Feature News - consolidation amongst the publishers and game developers continues into the new year as social platform Discord laid off 17% of its workers. That was shortly followed by Riot Games reducing its workforce by +500 people because it "has too many things going on." Microsoft also joined the list dropping almost 2,000 people across its newly acquired gaming business Activision Blizzard and Xbox division. That combined led to around 6,000 talented people out of work already in 2023.

👉🏼 Co-streaming now makes up a third of the share for esports streaming hours watched, and it's up 10% from 2020. Publishers like Riot Games and Valve have loosened controls around who may do these types of co-streams, given the rise in popularity. Have you checked out ours yet?

👉🏼 Lando Norris is the latest sports star to reach further into esports and gaming, his venture Quadrant secured a seven figure investment to further its growth - they also brought in YouTuber WillNE as Co-Owner and with him his 5m YouTube subscribers!

👉🏼 Here's a look into the monitisation model for Counter Strike, in particular the 'sticker money' value to teams and their players. These aren't stickers that you put on your laptop or car windows either!

SUCCESS

🚀 Albeit back on 2nd December we couldn't skip over our 📸 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series Winter Finals event @ Dogpatch Labs, Dublin. The first in-person finals for this community in Ireland was broadcast live and has created a platform for us to go bigger for the Spring Finals in April (more to come)

🚀 The Nativz 2024 NLC 1st Division Roster announcement reach is impressive, after just two weeks we were the most liked NLC announcement & are currently at 15.5k impressions!

🚀 We continue to explore more engagement opportunities, most recently with the intro of our 2024 NLC Discord Watch Parties. Designed to support the First Team in their campaign, we've even had the likes of LEC caster Nymaera join us!

OUR LIVE CO-STREAM TAKES PLACE EVERY WED AND THU YOU CAN FIND OUR SCHEDULE OF GAMES HERE!

CHALLENGES

🎮 One challenge that we've started to experience is the perception young people have about esports job opportunities - it seems unrealistically high. While the interest in esports continues to grow, we're still navigating the consolidation that's taking place (thank fully around us). Despite this situation there appears to be a growing number of education courses specialising in esports, in particular at degree level.

NEEDS

👀 Our new NLC Co-Stream for our First Team League of Legends matches went live on Wednesday 31 January, expect to see a variety of content and player interviews when you join us. Our ask is for you to take in a moment of one game and share you thoughts/feedback with me, the schedule is available here

METRICS

The following metrics are for the period of 1 - 31 October 2023:

💯 Social audience on official channels = up (again) by 6.2% 🔼

💯 Unique web visitors = Down 13.8% on January 2023 🔽

💯 Opted in marketing database = 1.8% increase in the month 🔼

COMING UP

Take a look at what we've got coming up over the next 10 weeks:

📅 2024 Northern League of Legends Championship - the Spring Split is underway and here is where you can find all of our regular round games plus links to our Live Official Co-Stream.

📅 2023/24 Ireland Esports Collegiate Spring Semester Finals Weekend - yes, it will go over two days. Final venue preparations are nearly complete, full details to be announced in February.

📅 NLC 1st Division Spring Play-Offs which start on 13 March. Top two teams from the Spring Split gain qualification to the EMEA Masters which run from 18-29 April.

Please keep the faith, we're building and we love having you with us on this journey.

Regards,

Kurt & the Nativz Team