2024 In Review

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Hi there,

Before we launch into the new year it wouldn’t be right to not look back at the Milestones, Successes and Challenges which Nativz Gaming faced across 2024. We’ve also evaluated our predictions for the year that was 2024 and look ahead to 2025.

We got through a lot. It was our first full year with a Full-Time CEO, a bigger leadership team, new business structure and a number of new challenges to navigate which in part became opportunities!

The diagnosis is good, we go into 2025 in a position of strength with some exciting plans. There’s a lot of highlights but we’ve kept them snappy with links included for those that want to look back at any deeper reads.

TOP 5 MILESTONES

Word of the year? Reset - at the end of August 2023 our CEO stepped in full-time. In close consultation with our Advisory Board and Leadership Team, the outcome of those following four months resulted in a clear and considered direction of travel for 2024.

1️⃣ Four new events building further value - we needed to create signature events which the community wanted and to increase sponsor appeal. Building on the Winter Finals pilot (Dec ‘23), we held the Spring Finals Weekend (Apr), launched a Summer Tournament (Jul) and popped-up our Collegiate Challenge at TU Dublin (Sep).

2️⃣ Completed our Leadership Team - we strengthened our team with the addition of Conor Noctor (Content), Jan Biernacki (Academy) and then Adam Conway (Alumni Guild). Alongside Yannick Gloster (Technology), Ronan Monaghan (League Operations), Ryan Fleming (Production) and Sammy Davies (Head of Social & Content).

3️⃣ Announced Ireland’s biggest esports academy - in June we set out to provide our collegiate talent a clear pathway-to-pro. Nov saw us go live in CS2 and in Dec we completed our Rocket League team. By the stroke of midnight on NYE the League of Legends trials were all but done. Teamfight Tactics negotiations are in the final stages. Valorant trials and our plans for EA FC and F1 talent follow in Q1 & 2 of ‘25.

4️⃣ Launched our competitive gaming platform Nemesis - our goal was to get the MVP live in Sep for the 2024/25 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series, our proof of concept. This led to us partnering with Call-of-Duty Ireland. The pipeline is building.

5️⃣ Continued to build IP - we started the year by trialling a live co-stream of the NLC, built a dedicated Ireland Esports Collegiate Series website and revealed the Alumni Guild membership to reconnect with 6-7 years of past collegiate players. Finally we revealed Office Showdown: Ireland’s Esport Company Series for 2025.

SUCCESS

🚀 2024 NLC Roster release reached 15.5K views, we were the only Club to intro a live co-stream and followed that up with a schedule of Discord Watch Parties - we've even had the likes of LEC caster Nymaera join us!

🚀 Partnership with GG Machines, key stakeholder in the competitive gaming environment. KOKA Noodles joined the partnership family in time for the 23/24 Spring Finals Weekend and Logitech G joined for the recent Winter Finals Weekend event.

🚀 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series 23/24 Spring Finals Weekend was a hit! Increased footprint enabled a stage-led event with studio production plus sponsor activations. Featured in Silicon Republic thanks to the continued support of the team at Dogpatch Labs. This Spring Finals announcement gained +2.5K LinkedIn views.

🚀 Digital overhaul across Q3 and 4 saw us launch nativzgaming.com, positioning our Irish esports ecosystem alongside our ‘platform as a service’ tech to underpin our growth strategy. IrelandCollegiate.com was also launched for the 2024/25 series.

🚀 New Ireland Esports Summer Tournament and the rescheduled Collegiate Challenge pop-up at TU Dublin, they hosted (and beat) SETU, completed the roll out of our live collegiate events. With these two events we now have four total, three in-person, building participant and sponsor value.

🚀 Launching Nativz Academy creates Ireland’s leading pathway-to-pro, protects our Ireland Collegiate investment and will create a rising tide effect on the standard of play. Jan Biernacki joined the Leadership Team as Academy Lead, the current Esports Society President at SETU is a well respected member of the Collegiate Community.

🚀 Development of our competitive gaming platform Nemesis started in May. MVP went live in Sep for the 24/25 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series thanks to our Tech Lead Yannick Gloster and team, this POC completed its first semester with +650 users.

🚀 Collaboration with Motorsport Ireland commenced in July, call it series zero.

🚀 First Academy team entered Counter-Strike 2’s ESEA Open, the European Open League. 16 wins from 19 games, ranked 13th of 400 teams! Next to go live is Rocket League, Teamfight Tactics and League of Legends with Valorant to follow.

🚀 Alumni Guild launched to reconnect us with former Collegiate Esports players from the past 6-7 years, led by Adam Conway the launch featured our new podcast. With an impressive group of guests lined up, we kicked it off with Heroic’s Sam Molloy.

🚀 Nativz Esports Club finished 6th in the 2024 NLC 1st Div, securing the slot for 2025. After exiting the knock out cup in Nov we announced our NLC departure in Dec, this kicked off a reset for Nativz Esports Club.

🚀 2024/25 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series went live in October, we’re up 36% on the number of teams and 17.7% more players. Winter Finals returned to Dogpatch Labs, creating a live in-person esports event platform for our talent to shine.

🚀 Call of Duty Ireland went live on Nemesis with the first season complete and a second one recently announced, there’s a further eight planned over next 12 months. After establishing Jun 2024, they’ve already amassed over 1K community members.

🚀 Office Showdown was revealed and the soft launch began, interest is definitely there. We’ve targeted March for the Spring Tournament, now to drive early registrations.

CHALLENGES

🎮 After securing High Potential Startup status with Enterprise Ireland in Dec 2023, our proposed investment fell over due to macro events as we entered 2024. While we honoured the commitments we made through Q1 and 2 of 2024 it forced us to undertake a review of our business model. As it turned out this was for the better.

🎮 More uncertainty crept into the running of the Northern League of Legends Championship (NLC). Riot’s cull of staff meant a shift in focus, Spring Champions Lionscreed were ejected for not fulfilling their financial obligations with players and staff, and the Tournament Organiser license was in its final year of the 3 year term. ’Reset’ was the word of the year for our League of Legends First Team operation.

🎮 Unfortunately there is no national esports strategy for Ireland. Despite progress in Europe with countries like Sweden and Denmark, this isn’t unusual. The Esports Olympics will help sharpen focus but without a national governing body for esports it will be inefficient. Our focus has remained on making the Ireland Esports Collegiate Series sustainable and building a pathway-to-pro for Irish talent.

🎮 We weren’t capturing enough first party data to drive our growth. First party data is blindly overlooked in esports' second tier and below. Our solution was to explore tech stack options for a first party data approach to support sponsorship acquisition which will inform Nemesis product development. Ultimately we see this helping esports organisations given their heavy reliance on earned platforms such as X.

🎮 Previous leaders of the Collegiate Esports in Ireland didn’t retain their registration databases, that’s five academic years of relationships gone. So we launched the Alumni Guild with a monthly newsletter and podcast at the heart of it. This membership is designed to re-engage past collegiate players from 2017 to 2022 and Irish graduates who have since found an interest in esports.

🎮 Establishing a footprint for growth is always a challenge and it has been one that we’ve focused on across Q2 and 3. We increased our physical locations, doubled down on our leadership in Irish esports, amplified our digital reach and started collaborations to bridge sport with esports. Each is focused on driving traction via (1) monitising our esports ecosystem and/or (2) informing product development in Nemesis.

🎮 Unfortunately Brexit and production timelines limited our ability to maximise the retail opportunity. So, we revisited our supply chain for the 2024/25 Winter Series. We secured a supplier for bespoke shirts (production time down 2 from 8 weeks), set ourselves up with a drop-shipping leader for leisure items to pick, print, pack and post within 72 hours (down from +3 weeks) and built a dedicated online store in Shopify.

🎮 Building a rights business in esports can be done in a number of ways. Investing a significant amount of capital is the obvious place but we didn’t have that luxury in May 2021. We’ve decided to sell our slot in the NLC and reset our League of Legends strategy. The objective is to rebuild with an Irish roster in the 2025 UKEL Four Nations - the feeder competition in to the NLC.

🎮 When we first took over what was Legion Collegiate it was a free-to-play competition that was losing money - “it’s always been a free-to-play tournament, the same as the UK.” We’ve now managed to start building a family of partners, unlocking merchandise options and with three LAN/in-person events ticketing is now on the table. Two years on and our competing Universities have agreed to start contributing via a Participation Levy. Sustainability is now achievable.

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METRICS

📊 45% inc in social audience on official channels (from 7,149 in 2023) ⬆️

📊 10% inc in social reach across official channels, players and staff (108K in 2023) ⬆️

📊 40% increase to 8,102 combined web visitors (5,794 in '23) ⬆️

📊 30.8% increase in our marketing database opt-ins (1,717 at end 2023) ⬆️

📊 47.3% overall email open rate, 5% click through rate (36.5% and 4.9% in 2023) ⬆️

DID WE DELIVER IN 2024?

✔️ Further work building our 'Pathway-to-Pro' pipeline for Ireland Collegiate talent, the Nativz Esports Academy is well and truly up and running!

❌ We haven’t yet secured further investment to accelerate our growth, round to follow in earnest during 2025.

✔️ Launch our technology solution that will address three problems; (1) niche community, (2) limited accessibility and (3) poor data utilisation.

✔️ Expected to see more in-person events which became true, we’ve introduced the Winter and Spring Finals Weekends plus our All-Ireland Final on campus @ TU Dublin.

✔️ Purpose is important to us, we said we’d double down in 2024 and we did with Play Aid, our Mental Health Partner. Expect more exciting things to come in 2025.

PEEK INTO 2025

👀 Continued innovation through technology, leveraging our ecosystem as an incubator for developing, testing and releasing new features into the Nemesis platform.

👀 Doubling down on education across our network of participating Universities and expanding into Secondary Schools, growing our local base and depth of engagement.

👀 Achieve a sustainable revenue model for the Ireland Esports Collegiate Series and lead top line revenue growth through a mix of Projects, Office Showdown and Nemesis.

👀 Developing Irish talent across esports performance and business capability areas of specialism. Our growing engagement with Collegiate Alumni will be beneficial here.

👀 Revisit our investment round, secure capital to accelerate our growth with a focus on product development, sales and marketing.

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Thank you for your support in 2024, now let's go and get 2025 together!

Regards,

Kurt & the Nativz Gaming Team