Monthly Update September '23

Hi Reader,

September marked the return from Summer holidays for just about everyone for us it signaled the start of a series of activities. We started implementing our plans for the new and improved Collegiate Series in Ireland. We also closed off our preparations for the Northern Europe League of Legends Aurora Cup, think of the FA Cup format and you're on the right track.

🗣️ Our reveal of the new and improved Ireland Esports Collegiate Series stole the show for us. After a year of evaluating and taking some quick wins, this was the first step in deploying our 3 Year Strategic Plan to build a robust product and give creative freedom to the student community. 👀

🚨 This esports product will (1) give the Irish Student Community a solid platform for social engagement with their community via esports and (2) provide the first step into a considered development pathway with Nativz Gaming. 🚨

From a Nativz Gaming perspective we are creating a sustainable product and highly engaged community. This community will prove pivotal as we start our technology journey, developing our solution for a specific problem that we believe gamers are encountering on a daily basis. In the coming month's you'll see us bring this pillar of the business into focus a lot more here.

We've got some really interesting esports industry news to share with you and number of updates across our successes, challenges and more;

Ireland Esports Collegiate Series: A New Era

INDUSTRY

👉🏼 Feature - League of Legends European Championship (LEC) has announced their Sporting Financial Regulations. This is what we believe is their first attempt (and step) in putting measures in place to achieve a long-term financially sustainable ecosystem from the top down. Is it enough? We'll let you judge that but it certainly is a start and 50% of the fines will trickle down to our level.

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

👉🏼 The IOC has appointed an Esports Commission tasked with further popularising IOC’s esports efforts and includes notable people from both esports and sports industries, after Paris 2024 the focus will obviously ramp up.

👉🏼 Speaking of national representation, we've pulled out this ESI Esports Around the World feature focusing on France. We've looked at Denmark as an early mover and celebrated Sweden's Sports Federation recognising esports - France is also making moves, some really good ones with President Macron as a driver!.

👉🏼 We had to include this one, the EMEA Masters Roundup / Numbers 2023, this is the competition we qualified for recently and finished 7th after taking K Corp (they're massive in France) to a tie breaker for a quarter final berth. If you like viewership numbers these will give you a sense of the reach (and potential value).

SUCCESS

🚀 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series rebrand video has generated 11.6K views on X. Registrations for the Winter Semester close tomorrow Saturday 7 October with Round 1 starting on Monday 9 October. Plans are building for our first in-person finals on Saturday 2 December, a huge step forward.

🚀 While it hurt to see them go, we released our League of Legends summer roster last month. Our new Aurora Cup roster is a mix of two returning players from our successful 2022 roster and three new players, they've all been signed with our 2024 campaign in mind - players we want to have a close look at.

🚀 We starting unlocking perceptions around young people and gaming with our recently released Annual Irish Student Esports Research review. This inaugural survey will play a key role as we influence the Irish ecosystem and educate those brands and rights holders non-endemic to esports as they look to enter.

CHALLENGES

🎮 We encountered a slight delay getting the Ireland Esports Collegiate Series brand reveal completed, our Winter Registrations were also slightly late as it took us a little longer to get the new dedicated Ireland Collegiate platform launched - the delay was worth it due to the improvements we've built into it.

🎮 Our 2nd Annual Ireland Esports Industry Thought Leadership event has been postponed due to a clash of events at the venue. We're looking at an alternative date.

🎮 Aurora Cup was introduced by Freaks4U in 2022, the format was attempting to mimic the FA Cup by bringing all levels of the NLC together in a knockout competition. Unfortunately the value just hasn't been realised and as such our approach this year was to use the opportunity to try out potential talent for 2024.

NEEDS

👀 Insights and observations from our community are critical to our growth which is why we're asking for your thoughts - we are currently researching gamer focused tech driven solutions in the market and would like to hear of any that you feel are ones to look out for - please share with me via email [email protected].

METRICS

The following metrics are for the period of 1 - 30 September 2023:

💯 Social audience on official channels = up 7.1% 🔼

💯 Unique web visitors = Down 10.4% on September 2022 🔽

💯 Opted in marketing database = 0.9% increase in the month 🔼

COMING UP

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

📅 2023 Aurora Cup (2 October) - Group Stages commenced on Monday 2 October with a build up to the Final on Wednesday 8 November. We took a 2-1 victory of London based Lionscreed and play DMG tonight at 5pm GMT.

📅 2023/24 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series (9 October) - Valorant (Monday's), Rocket League (Tuesday's), Counter Strike 2 (Wednesday's), League of Legends (Thursday's) and Formula 1 (Friday's). Games will commence at 7:30pm each day with selected matches streamed live in the official Ireland Collegiate twitch channel here.

📅 GamerFest (21-22 October) - don't forget to get along to the GamerFest Winter edition, tickets are now on sale here.

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

Regards,

Kurt & the Nativz Team