Monthly Update June '24

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Dear Supporter,

June was a cracker! The big news was about our new Nativz Esports Club Academy. The biggest esports talent academy on the island will protect our investment in developing talent and support our mission to unlock the power of esports gamer data (more on how below) 🔥

We soft launched our Ireland Esports Collegiate Alumni Guild and revived our Nativz Key Membership product. It didn’t stop there. We’ve also just concluded the first Ireland Collegiate Summer Tournament for current players and Alumni.

Fair to say we’ve been busy 🏗️

INDUSTRY NEWS

🗞️ In Focus – we’re diving into Roblox this month. We saw the R&A launch their first step into Roblox with “Just Swing”. The opportunity to engage young gamers in Roblox and reward them with ‘real life’ outcomes is immense.

Take a look at IKEA, they generated 178K ‘virtual Roblox Co-Workers’ applications for just 10 paid roles. Their ‘IKEA Co-Worker Game’ went live on 24 June, within their virtual store experience they enable gamers to develop a career journey.

We’ve talked about this opportunity for sports and esports rights holders to enter Roblox and engage the vast number of young gamers. Perhaps taking a sport development approach is the way to go? Open their eyes to the variety of esports and sports roles by gamifying in Roblox with a to delivering offline?

Despite that news we have a selection of long reads that suggest all is not lost;

🗞️ FIFA have confirmed the next annual FIFAe World Cup Esports Tournament will be contested using Rocket League. It’s a shrewd move given the popularity of RL and shows the flexibility that FIFA can exploit now.

🗞️ Former NLC Tournament Organisers Freaks 4U were acquired by NODWIN Gaming for €30.3m. Having released an undisclosed number of staff prior to the announcement let’s hope they are now in a stable position.

🗞️ International Olympic Committee and the Esports Integrity Commission announced the signing of a Letter of Collaboration. The purpose, to combat corruption and misconduct.

SUCCESSES

🚀 Launching Nativz Esports Club’s Academy creates Ireland’s leading pathway-to-pro, protects our investment in Ireland Collegiate and we expect will create a rising tide effect on the standard of the series.

🚀 Alumni Guild is focused on reconnecting with former Collegiate Esports players in Ireland from the past 6-7 years. With Adam Conway joining the team to lead this project we expect to build this community into our ecosystem.

🚀 Project Nemesis Alpha stage is complete, we kicked off the initial UI/UX workstream too. Next stop is our Beta version and testing. This next phase will benefit from our ability to leverage the tech talent in our Ireland Collegiate player base.

CHALLENGES

We weren’t capturing enough first party data to drive our growth. Our solution was to activate a number of initiatives that have been in planning for some time.

Each of these are focused on driving further traction via (1) monitisation in our esports ecosystem and/or (2) informing our product development in Project Nemesis as follows;

🎮 Nativz Esports Club: revamped our ‘Nativz Keys’ Membership product to leverage our content, created a media proposition for brands (as opposed to a typical sponsorship product) and we expect to see an increase in retail sales.

🎮 Ireland Collegiate: we’ve launched the Ireland Collegiate Alumni Guild specifically to engage past Ireland Collegiate players dating back to the first ever series and Irish graduates who have since found an interest in esports.

🎮 Project Nemesis: esports organisations rely heavily on earned platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), we’re exploring tech stack options to help them adopt a first party data approach to support their sponsorship acquisition.

Metrics have now been updated in our summary below.

NEEDS

👀 We wanted to try something a bit more interactive. It only takes one click 👇🏼

METRICS

The following metrics are for the period of 1-30 June 2024:

COMING UP

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

📅 Until 17 July - NLC 1st Div Summer Split continues! All games simulcast live on Twitch, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter). View schedule here.

📅 14 Sep (TBC) - 2023/24 Ireland Esports Collegiate Challenge @ TU Dublin Grangegorman Campus. Date for the diary, further details to follow.

📅 23-25 Sep - Esports Insider has moved its flagship event from London to Lisbon and we’re going to be there!

📅 14-17 Oct - Leaders in Sport is back and we’re planning to be there.

📅 Oct - Dec - 2024/25 Ireland Esports Collegiate Series, Winter Series scheduled for this period. Full details to be announced in August.

Hope you like the new newsletter format following our migration over to Beehiiv. More progress to follow next month.

Regards,

Kurt & the Nativz Gaming Team

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