Collegiate 24/25 launched on Nemesis, reseting our Club strategy, Ireland gets a company series, growth metrics and more...

Hello everyone,

Thanks for taking a look at our updates for October, it was a time to deliver for us. We went live with 24/25 Ireland Esports Collegiate Winter Series. Three years in, we’re closing in on a sustainable business model and some exciting collaborations building. Play Aid joined as our Purpose Partner too, focusing on mental health.

Our competitive gaming platform Nemesis went live with the Ireland Esports Collegiate Series. We also closed the month confirming a partnership with Call of Duty Ireland.

Nativz Esports Clubs’ first academy team went live in Counter-Strike 2 with Teamfight Tactics, Valorant and Rocket League next. Our First Team wrapped up the 2024 season after bowing out in the Aurora Cup Quarter-Finals, this now starts the next phase of our reset for the club which will see us leave the NLC (see our challenges below).

We’re building our new competition to unlock our alumni and provide the gamers within Ireland’s tech community an opportunity to compete, enter Office Showdown: Ireland’s Esports Company Series.

Finally, we couldn’t send this without including Riot Games’ 2024 League of Legends World Championship Grand Final even though it was on 2 Nov. It’s all laid out below 👇🏼

INDUSTRY NEWS

🗞️ In Focus – on 2 November Riot Games held their League of Legends 2024 World Championship Grand Final in London’s O2 Arena. The event was expected to have an economic impact of £12m for the capital city.

Notorious for it’s cross-over with music, in Sep Riot announced Linkin Park as the headline act for Worlds 24 - after a seven-year hiatus they released ‘Heavy is the Crown’ as the official anthem of the Grand Final (check it out here).

There’s more on the entertainment front, Ashnikko performed ‘Paint The Town Blue’ from the second and final season of Riot Games’ television series Arcane - released from 6 November, two days after Worlds. An adult animated steampunk action-adventure television series distributed by Netflix, Arcane is set in Riot's League of Legends universe and was released to widespread acclaim.

The event went on to break the record for the most watched esports event ever with a viewership of 6.9m peak viewers, this excluded China who’s stats are never released. While the show took place in London, the broadcast was delivered out of Riot’s Remote Broadcast Centre in Dublin.

Where to next? Riot confirmed they are off to China for the 2025 League of Legends World Championship while announcing an extension of their global partnership with OPPO.

Here’s a few other news pieces that we found interesting from across the esports and gaming media during October;

🗞️ Challengermode raised €2m and is looking to develop its offerings for game developers and AAA publishers, which includes leveraging its in-game technology.

🗞️ UK students gaming spend jumps 21% annually to £3.4 billion in 2024, new Unidays study reveals, following NSE partnership

🗞️ Epic Games’ Fab marketplace, which is designed to serve as a unified place to get digital assets like environments and animations, is now live

SUCCESSES

🚀 2024/25 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series went live and continues to grow. Not only are we up 36% on the number of teams, we’ve got 17.7% more players competing.

🚀 Nemesis went live. Ireland Collegiate is the proof of concept. What’s more, we’ve agreed a partnership with Call Of Duty Ireland to close the month.

🚀 First Academy team live with Counter-Strike 2 in the ESEA Open, the European Open League. Undefeated after first round loss, we’re ranked 48th of 400 teams!

CHALLENGES

Building a rights business in esports from the ground up can be done in a number of ways. Investing a significant amount of capital is the obvious place to start but we didn’t have that luxury when we started this journey in May 2021. We took the opposite approach, to build Nativz Esports Club from the ground up and started in the League of Legends third tier (Danish National League).

Since then we’ve been promoted to the European Regional League (ERL), dominating the 2023 Northern European Championship by winning the Summer Series and challenging the best of Europe in the EMEA Summer Masters. Now it’s time for a change. Why you might ask?

⛔️ NLC is heavily Nordics focused with no commercial experience in the UK&I market. Audience has been declining since 2022, ambitious 2025 growth ideas are unfunded.

⛔️ Central distribution is a €3K stipend per team. This easily gets absorbed by player budgets, teams struggle for marketing resource as sponsorship is hard to come by.

⛔️ Player fee expectations for the 2nd tier in League of Legends are wildly unrealistic, we saw this more and more as we experimented with our team budget model.

⛔️ Remote teams mean no relocation costs however, this approach limits any chance of generating ticketing revenue around player access in-person without addition costs.

⛔️ While in traditional sports we have a culture of volunteering, not just for community clubs but also for pro clubs, this isn’t the case for esports. We’ve been lucky.

🚨 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. 🚨

🕹️ Local players gives us a chance to play in-person, allowing fans to attend games. It will enable us to build a ‘club’ environment in time for both broadcast and tickets.

🕹️ Irish talent is there. They’re playing in the Ireland Esports Collegiate Series and if not, they’re playing within the Irish game title communities (such as Valorant Eiré)

🕹️ By developing local talent we aim to reset wage expectations. Let’s not forget that outside of football, for academy level talent it’s about giving them the tools to get to pro!

NEEDS

👀 We’re after your help to start spreading the word, if businesses are willing to support staff entering 5-a-side football and tag rugby why not esports?!?

Please take a look and also share the website link below for us 🙏🏼

METRICS

The following metrics are for the period of 1-31 October 2024:

COMING UP

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

📅 Weekly Mon & Wed - CS2 Academy Team Games (profile and matches here)

📅 19 Nov - Winter Semester Teamfight Tactics Finals Evening from 7:30pm

📅 26 Nov - Teamfight Tactics Mini-Tournament (new set)

📅 6-8 Dec - Winter Semester Finals Weekend @ Dogpatch Labs

Thanks for your continued support.

Regards,

Kurt & the Nativz Gaming Team

OFFICIAL PARTNERS OF NATIVZ GAMING