Monthly Update October '23

Hi Reader,

Apologies for the delay getting our October edition out to you - its a reflection of the progress we're making, I promise. Before we look back there's a couple of things to flag for you, most importantly that we're closing in on our first in-person esports event - the 2023/24 Ireland Esports Collegiate Winter Finals Day.

🚨 We've got an amazing Dublin location secured and our family of partners for this event is building. Expect to see two really exciting announcements in the the build up to the Winter Finals Day, Saturday 2 December.

In addition, the Nativz First Team are well underway with trials for the 2024 Northern League of Legends Championship (NLC). Our Head Coach John 'Rnglol' Crichton and his staff are looking high and low for the talent we need to not only challenge for the Spring title, but also a place in the Spring EMEA Masters.

Take a peek at our esports industry news and number of updates across our successes, challenges and more;

INDUSTRY

👉🏼 Feature - Saudi Arabia has been laser focused in its pursuit to be the esports centre of the world with a reported $38bn set aside for investment to achieve this. While they've got off to an impressive start it's certainly not been plain sailing, most recently we saw this when the UK esports community reacted to British Esports agreeing partnership with the Saudi Esports Federation. Most recently the Saudi Arabian Prime Minister announced an annual Esports World Cup based in Riyadh!

Here's a few other topical articles to take a look at which focus on the state of play for the esports industry;

👉🏼 The esports investment landscape had a seismic shift during October, this was lead by Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard finally getting a green light on 13 October. Once valued at $1bn, FaZe Clan was acquired by GameSquare for just $17m and Astralis leaves the LEC having sold 66% of their slot to Karmine Corp - yes the organisation that Nativz narrowly lost to in the EMEA Masters!

👉🏼 Staffordshire University announces £2.9m esports expansion as a follow on to their revamped degree. Shifting their focus from London to their Stoke-n-Trent Campus, the new space will have more then 80 devices.

👉🏼 The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced it is ‘exploring’ plans to create an Olympic Esports Games. The IOC’s announcement was made during the 141st IOC Session in Mumbai, India, and builds on several previous Olympics initiatives in esports.

SUCCESS

🚀 Despite our decision to approach the NLC's ProAM knockout tournament (known as the Aurora Cup) with a new roster of talent under consideration for 2024, the team did themselves proud by reaching the quarter finals.

🚀 In our pursuit to start building content we ran a pilot co-stream of our Aurora Cup Quarter Final against JLingz. Now if you're not aware, one of the innovations in esports (that traditional sports could learn from) is the ability for participating teams to take the official broadcast and deliver it on their own channels. The collective total of viewers feeds back into the competition metrics. Expect to see us take this further in 2024.

🚀 Sticking with that theme of content creation we announced the signing of 14 talented individuals to our Nativz Creator Team! This team is primarily focused on the Ireland Esports Collegiate Series, delivering live coverage of two games per evening from Monday to Friday. We then added a further three creators to the team for our Aurora Cup co-stream. This co-stream was successfully broadcast while we also streamed the Ireland Collegiate Rocket League games of the round (impressive).

CHALLENGES

🎮 We're struggling with mainstream media recognition of our contribution to the esports ecosystem in Ireland. Recently the Irish Examiner covered the annual Irish Campus Clutch Valorant league, the winning team will head to Turkey for the global final. The host university of the final was acknowledged as was Wylde who recently hosted 'Ireland's Biggest Valorant Competition' with 8 teams competing for an Academy place and €5K (they did a great job by the way!).

The disappointment for us was two-fold, firstly the talent had emerged from within our Ireland Esports Collegiate Series which has 32 teams playing Valorant. Secondly, we signed those players on semi-professional contracts back in June 2022 and only disbanded the team in May this year (change in strategy, more info coming!).

Don't get me wrong, of all the challenges we could be facing right now this one is in our gift of skills to correct. Next step, let's announce a mainstream FMCG brand as a partner, host our first in-person event and start building our media influence!

NEEDS

👀 We've made significant progress on shaping our tech solution in the past month, the time spent has been invaluable. We're now scoping the product features and building the commercial model. The ask is for anyone who is exploring a solution to gamify their audience/fan base to reach out, I'd appreciate some time to talk through some of your objectives and challenges - just drop me an email on [email protected]

METRICS

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

💯 Social audience on official channels = up (again) by 6.5% 🔼

💯 Unique web visitors = Down 28.7% on October 2022 🔽

💯 Opted in marketing database = 19.5% increase in the month 🔼

COMING UP

Take a look at what we've got coming up before Christmas:

📅 2023/24 Ireland Esports Collegiate Winter Semester Finals Day - this will take place on Saturday 2 December from 9am and run until approx 6:30pm. The live broadcast will be simulcast across our official Ireland Collegiate Channels on Twitch, YouTube and X. More details to follow next week.

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

Regards,

Kurt & the Nativz Team