Monthly Update May '23

Hi Reader,

May was good to us. We started by celebrating our 2nd Birthday then sharing our story across the Irish Startup Ecosystem thanks to our growing partnership with Dogpatch Labs via their monthly Founders Feature (which you can see here).

Importantly we secured our new League of Legends Head Coach and a Roster that some feel will get us into the EMEA Masters.

We then closed the month by nailingour growth strategy for the Collegiate Series across 2023-2026 before seeing our Collegiate Challenge idea come to life at the Summer GamerFest event. Not bad really.

Here's your update on what we've been up to along with some industry news that is well worth a read;

INDUSTRY

👉🏼 Feature - it seems the focus on national positioning for esports is building. The Times (UK) featured a piece on France's view, their push to take a leading position on esports in Europe, pitched around hosting the CS:GO finals. This event was on the same weekend as London played host to the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) event. It didn't stop there, in a coup for our industry the Swedish Esports Federation was voted into the National Sports Confederation 🚀 Nice to see coverage hitting the mainstream press too 😉

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

👉🏼 Fortnite joins the Olympic Esports Series week in what may well be a reaction to the overwhelming disappointment shown by their initial selection of titles, wonder if further additions are looming? 👀

👉🏼 We missed a good one in April (apologies), here's a bit of insight into how players generate money in esports from our friends at ESI

👉🏼 In the past couple of months we've seen teams go to the wall and fold. Well we were relieved to see the opposite when Finnish esports org ENCE revealed profitability in 2022 ✊🏼

SUCCESS

🚀 Our new League of Legends roster was locked in for the NLC 1st Division Summer Split, it certainly turned some heads with our announcement video generating over 30K views and still climbing 🔥

🚀 We also secured John "RNGlol" Crichton as our League of Legends Head Coach. He joins us with some impressive global experience in this young industry. We got him to share his initial thoughts here

🚀 On the Collegiate Series front, Technological University Dublin (TUD) won the inaugural Collegiate Challenge and title of top esports University/College on the island of Ireland for 2022/23 🚀

CHALLENGES

🎮 We've had some technical challenges in getting our Membership programme up and running which has been frustrating. Fortunately we have it solved now thanks to the team at CrowdClass, check out our free Citizen Key and claim one here.

🎮 We've talked a about inaccurate perceptions and a lack of knowledge of the esports ecosystem, particularly here in Ireland, hindering our conversations with non-endemic brands. Our work on thought leadership continues. We've also been exploring a number of opportunities with reputable organisations to give us more strength, in essence partnerships that will help give brands confidence to partner with us this early on in the journey. We're making good progress.

NEEDS

👀 Acceleration of community size is the focus. This is across both B2C and B2B communities and networks. We're looking for PR opportunities to tell our story. Since Dogpatch released their monthly #MeetOurMembers piece for May which you can see here we can see more than 3K views on our channels alone. If you've got any ideas/opportunities for us to explore please do let me know.

METRICS

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

💯 Social audience on official channels = 6.2% continued growth

💯 Unique web visitors = Up 16.4% on May 2022

💯 Opted in marketing database = 9.2% increase in the month

COMING UP

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

📣 Student Rep and Player Collegiate Series Mini-Conference (24 June) - we're getting the student reps into Dublin for the first time to get their thoughts, feedback and ideas. It'll be the first time they've been bought together!

📣 Rocket League Community Tournament (July) - the first of hopefully many, we're launching a series of community tournaments that will be online and not limited to Ireland. We're launching with a Rocket League competition and then will be introducing new titles, some will be new to us.

📣 NLC Play-Offs (July) - our ambitions have us challenging for the Summer Split play-offs so chalk this one down in your diary. Don't forget to check out the schedule of games leading up to then which you can find here.

Enjoy the week ahead.

Regards,

Kurt & the Nativz Team