Legally, Outsiders are considered an Armenian team. Even the local Ministry of Economy congratulated them on their recent victory. There is no information on the tournament website about the country that Outsiders represents. It competes under neutral tags.

However, one of the organizers, Michal Blicharz, reported on Twitter that the trophy for the IEM Rio Major went to Armenia. The Outsiders lineup consists of former members of Virtus.pro. Most Russian media also call Outsiders a Russian team, adding Virtus.pro in parentheses.

In April, several GS:GO tournament organizers condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and banned Russian-affiliated teams from competing. Teams Virtus.pro and Gambit Esports also came under these sanctions.

Virtus.pro members actually created a separate legal entity in Armenia and were able to bypass the restrictions. However, they couldn’t resist posting a video with the trophy on the official Virtus.pro Twitter account. It looked strange, considering that the Russians themselves pass off both organizations as two different teams.

One of the organizers of the IEM Rio Major, Michal Blicharz, made a response to this video. He explained that it was an unpleasant surprise since Virtus.pro did not win the title at IEM Rio. A team is not allowed to change the results of IEM Rio in their favor.

Once again, Russians bypass restrictions in front of the whole world. This time they don’t even hide that their deception worked. It is surprising that the organizers of the tournament still allowed the entire team and management of the team, which was directly related to the Russian Federation, to compete. Then they expressed their sincere surprise at the fact that Virtus.pro was flaunting their victory.

• NaVi will receive $180,000 for second place. The winners of the tournament will be awarded $400,000.
• This is the first defeat for NaVi in the finals of IEM Cologne. Previously, the Ukrainian team won in 2018 and 2021.
• The best player of the tournament was the Ukrainian Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev. The NaVi sniper received the IEM Cologne tournament MVP award for a record third time.

In 2021, NAVI won several big esports Counter Strike tournaments. One of them was the PGL Major Stockholm 2021, the event of the year. In June, NAVI won the BLAST Premier: Spring Finals 2022 and was awarded $200,000.

In 2021, NAVI won several big esports Counter-Strike tournaments. PGL Major Stockholm 2021, the main event of the year, was one of them.

This year on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev joining the team, NAVI released a documentary film, S1mple formula. In this film, commentators, analysts, parents, teammates, and Aleksandr’s coach discuss the “s1mple success formula.”

Why it’s important

The Game Awards is the world’s top gaming award. Last year, the audience for the ceremony exceeded that of the Oscars by eight times. The Game Awards has gained tremendous popularity not only because of the awards but also because of the show hosted by Geoff Keighley.

• The funding was secured during the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Among the investors are FBG Capital, NewTribe VC, MEXC, LVT Capital, DCI Capital, and several other investment firms.
• Blocksport.io plans to raise another $500,000 through a public offering of tokens by the end of the year. Its listing will take place later.
• So far, the company has raised $900,000 in September and $6 million through the ICO.
• The investment will go toward Sales & Business Development for global markets, team expansion, and further development of the R&D office in Ukraine.

Blocksport.io positions itself as a sports tech provider focusing on video games, esports, and sports. The company was founded in 2019 by Ukrainian Vladimir Liulka and Semih Kaçan. The company is headquartered in Switzerland.

What’s wrong with the logo

A cursory search reveals that the DPC EEU logo was inspired by the logo of the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization—effectively a Boy Scouts-style organization that existed within the Soviet Union. You can see the comparison between these two logos below.

According to EPICENTER, they had acquired a “legal opinion confirming that the logo is not communist symbols and does not promote anything.” However, they decided to change the logo. Now it is going to be just a plain and a far less controversial “E” logo, as stated in the official tweet.

Why does Valve even care?

Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union for much of the 20th century before the independence declaration in 1991. Soviet and Communist symbols are strictly policed in the country nowadays. That’s why Dota 2 League had to change its logo – to avoid any controversy.

According to Esports.gg, Valve is most likely just playing things incredibly safe. The EEU, or CIS, is a Dota 2 powerhouse, in terms of both playerbase and competitive scene. Doing anything that might get them kicked out of Ukraine is not the best idea.

By the way, Ukrainian Na’Vi (Natus Vincere) also participates in Dota 2 League in the upper division.

• The team won BLAST Premier: Fall Finals 2021, defeating Team Vitality 2:1 in the final.

• NAVI was awarded a $225,000 prize. 
• This year, the last tournament for the team will be the BLAST Premier: World Finals 2021 that will take place in December. The championship prize pool will be $1,000,000.
• Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev has again become the best player of the tournament and received the MVP title.

• NAVI won the championship with a 2:0 victory over G2 Esports in the grand final.
• The total prize pool for the tournament was $2 million, and NAVI won $1 million, the largest prize pool in the history of CS:GO majors.
• The team did not lose a single map. This is also the first time in CS:GO history.
• Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev, with a rating of 1.47, became the best player of the tournament.

• All in all, it has been a very successful year for NAVI — they have won their sixth tournament in 2021.
• The PGL Major Stockholm live was one of the most watched in the history of CS:GO tournaments.

NAVI received $195,000 for winning ESL Pro League Season 14 and another $1 million for the Intel Grand Slam title (awarded separately for four wins in the ESL Pro Tour). The Ukrainians also won a slot in the BLAST Premier: World Final 2021 to be held in December.

This is the fifth NAVI title for 2021. Previously, the Ukrainians were the winners of BLAST Premier: Global Final, DreamHack Masters Spring 2021, StarLadder CIS RMR 2021, and IEM Cologne 2021.

ESL Pro League Season 14 was held online from August 16 to September 12. The best CS:GO player of the tournament was the Natus Vincere player Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev.

AIN.UA’s journalist visited WePlay Holding’s Kyiv office and did a photo report. The CEO Oleh Humeniuk showed and told her how it works and also shared some tips on how to become part of the media holding company team.

How the WePlay Holding office works

The office of WePlay Holding occupies seven floors in a building at 21 Dniprovska embankment. The total area of the space is 2,900 sq. m. The team moved here in 2018, only taking one floor, but soon, it started to expand. The previous office was also located on the capital’s Left Bank. This location was chosen based on the management’s and employees’ preferences. 

In 2021, the company has 348 employees. To give you some perspective, 32 people were working for WePlay Holding during the same period in 2018, 202 in 2019, and 308 in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. The team works in a sprawling open-plan office, with the option to pre-book a workstation online. The office is open 24/7, even though the standard work hours are from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. WePlay Holding provides all the facilities for those who need to stay late, including a shower. 

All photos in this feature: Olha Zakrevska 

The WePlay Holding office was designed by Partner Design. The company also has its own design department, which oversees all the repairs. In 2021, the company is refurbishing the third floor. The total investment into outfitting the office is about $500,000. 

As of August 2021, WePlay Holding has 18 departments. They include Broadcast Solutions, Tournament Platform, R&D, Business Development, Communications, Content and SMM, Design, Finance, Marketing, the Studio team, and many others. 

Oleh Humeniuk explains that the company is experimenting with the number of departments and its internal structure. In addition to media products, the holding company is producing a large number of software solutions, which requires creating optimal and comfortable conditions for all employees. 

One of the main features of the WePlay Holding office is that it houses two studios for broadcasting the holding company’s esports tournaments in two languages — Russian and English. They are equipped with cutting-edge filming equipment, including that which makes it possible to integrate augmented reality elements into broadcasts right during live streaming. Studios are easily transformable and can be redecorated by designers for any league. 

In addition, on the sixth floor, there is a lounge area with beanbag chairs, board games, and a space that resembles a treehouse. Here, employees can spend their free time and relax. When tournaments are held, the floor becomes a dressing room for the talents. 

How work is organized

Before the pandemic, all company employees were conditionally divided into those who worked from the office and those who worked remotely — from other countries and cities. 

When the coronavirus pandemic began, the entire office was moved online to minimize contacts and reduce the risk of spreading the virus. If necessary, an employee could come to the office, but in that case, they had to get tested for COVID-19.

As soon as the situation started to get better, the work format changed to hybrid, which is still in place today: employees can choose at their discretion whether to come to the office or not. The only exception is when the physical presence of an employee is required at the office. For example, studio team employees cannot organize event broadcasts while at home. 

Employee benefits

All WePlay Holding employees are provided with medical insurance after passing the probation period, usually three months. Also, the company offers an opportunity to get the coronavirus vaccine. 

In addition, members of the WePlay Holding team get:

• childbirth, marriage, and bereavement benefits
• paid time off for donating blood
• a 50% compensation of the cost of training
• the opportunity to attend English courses with a native speaker in the office free of charge

The company provides everyone with either macOS- or Windows-based work equipment (at the employee’s discretion). Everyone can get additional work equipment upon request. When choosing furniture, WePlay Holding lets the team test it for several days first. To be selected, chairs and tables must be comfortable, durable, and high-quality.

Corporate culture

The components of WePlay Holding’s corporate culture are its vision, mission, and values, Oleh Humeniuk points out:

“Our vision is to make esports a mainstream culture that brings people from all over the world together.

Our mission is to be a world-leading esports media holding company through the development of a unique ecosystem. We create and distribute premium products and services that help everyone immerse themselves in esports, grow in it, and have memorable experiences.

WePlay Esports’s values are responsibility, esports evangelism, teamwork, initiative.” 

How to get a job at WePlay Holding

Every candidate has to do several rounds of interviews, including bar-raising. Bar-raising is one of the final stages when the candidate is interviewed by a person from the company who is not directly interested in filling this position. The company notes that this stage is needed to assess to what extent the candidate shares its culture and values and will successfully complement the team. It’s an honor to be a bar raiser.

If all the rounds of interviews are completed successfully, the candidate signs the job offer. Before their first working day, our new employee receives a New Hire Package, which describes in detail what their first day will be like. 

“Our ideal candidate is an engaged, proactive, and energetic professional who shares our interest in our company’s area of activity and values and is ready for new challenges and summits.”

As of August 2021, WePlay Holding has six job openings. The team is looking for a Corporate Communications Lead, Product Designer, DevOps Middle+/Senior, PR Writer, PPC Specialist, Business Analyst & Project Manager | Tournament Platform. 

Performance review 

The company conducts a performance review with each employee personally on a regular basis. These meetings are attended by the employee’s direct manager and the People Partner assigned to them. Meetings are usually held every four or six months, depending on the specifics of each department’s work. 

Before the review, a 360-degree feedback collection is done (the employee themselves, their manager, and colleagues all share their assessment). To do this, they use WePlay Holding’s internal tool — Lattice. During the performance review itself, both the employee and the manager share their feedback aloud, analyze colleagues’ anonymous responses, evaluate how well the goals set for the previous period were met, and identify the next steps.

As a result of the meeting, both sides understand what’s next and what the expectations are for the following period. The goals are fixed in Lattice so one can check their implementation status at any time. The company also has a culture of regular one-on-one meetings between an employee and their line manager.

The funds raised will be spent on the development of the main App-as-a-Service product and its scaling in the global markets. Also, the company plans to develop and launch a new NFT platform and strengthen the development team in Ukraine.

About Blocksport

Blocksport.io is a Swiss-based sports-tech agency with a focus on video games, esports, and sports. Its main product is an App-as-a-Service platform — a branded mobile app for sports teams, streamers, influencers, federations, and leagues. With the app, users can monetize fan activity through gamification.

Blocksport.io was founded in 2019 by Ukrainian Vladimir Liulka and German Semih Kaçan. The company went through four accelerator programs: at CV Labs incubator in Switzerland, HYPE Sports Innovation Accelerator (London, Tel Aviv), Acceleradar by Sportradar in Switzerland, and Aves Lair in New York.

The head office of Blocksport.io is based in Switzerland, but the main R&D center is located in Ukraine. As of today, the company employs 15 people.

Blocksport.io already has customers — more than 30 both sports and esports teams and clubs. In particular, the company’s clients include Virtus.Pro, FC Dynamo Kyiv, and others.

According to Liulka, Blocksport.io is the leader in the market of mobile fan apps for esports with a 7 percent market share. The investment will allow Blocksport.io to develop and launch gaming NFT tokens for its customers.

• According to the club’s COO Aleksey Kucherov, roster members will remain in the organization but will not play for the club.
• Regional qualifiers for The International 10 for the CIS was held from June 23 to 26. The best team in the qualifiers gets the right to represent the region in the Dota 2 championship.
• Team Empire defeated Natus Vincere in the regional qualifiers match with a score of 2-1. Accordingly, the team did not get to The International, although according to Alexei Kucherov, that was exactly the goal that NaVi set for themselves.
• After the failed qualifiers, NaVi decided to move the Dota 2 roster to inactive list but to keep the players in the organization.

As the UESF explained to AIN.UA, this means that the federation is authorized to hold official championships, form training bases for teams, assign titles and ranks to eathletes, and among other things – organize a national esports team, which will represent Ukraine in international competitions.

According to the UESF, they are currently signing an agreement with the Ministry to form a national team and have to announce its composition by August 25, 2021. This team will represent Ukraine in the CS:GO, Dota 2, and other championships.

How the national team will be formed

The national team of Ukraine will be formed from members of existing clubs as well as individual athletes. The procces will be held in two stages:

• Everyone who wants to get into the team has to fill out an application. Based on this application, the federation will organize a series of competitions (details will appear on the federation’s website in the coming days). After that, coaches will select the best eathletes, form teams, and train them for some time.
• Next, the UESF will hold a final tournament between the selected teams and existing clubs.

Based on the results of this tournament, the first-ever official national eSports team of Ukraine will be formed.

To recap, the Ukrainian CS:GO and Dota 2 Championship began on July 17, 2021. In Ukraine, eSports is recognized as an official sport since September 16, 2020.

• The International 10 – Dota 2 Championships will be held in Bucharest, Romania.
• The venue is the largest stadium of the country Arena Nationala. It is the same place where the matches of Euro 2020 were held.
• Also, the company has announced the new dates: Group Stage – October 7-10, Main Stage – October 12, the final – October 17.
• The prize pool is $40 million.
• Valve says that information on ticket sales will come later, but for now, there are no details.

Bucharest was one of the main contenders to host the event after Stockholm refused. Kyiv did not get that opportunity.

According to Valve, the TI10 was canceled because of the pandemics. Local authorities decided not to make any preferences for Dota 2 main esports event. Disregarding the fact they were claiming that the Championship would be held, now they reported otherwise. Additionally, Valve stated that the company filed appeals directly with the Swedish government, but they did not even respond. Thus, Stockholm, which was announced as a hosting city of the TI10 two years ago, ultimately would not have the championship.

Valve reported that they are considering other European cities to still host the TI`10. The Championship should run from the 5th to the 15th of August. The program begins with Group Stage from the 5th to the 8th of August. The Main Event kicks off on the 10th of August and continues through the 15th of August that should be the Grand Finals for the winning teams. Thus, there is approximately one month left for the preparations ahead. One of the options considered is Kyiv. There are several reasons for supporting it: 

• There is no outbreak of coronavirus in Ukraine right now, and the number of COVID cases does not exceed a thousand a day.
• Mass gatherings are allowed in Kyiv because the city is in the “green” epidemiological zone.
• Kyiv hosted the WePlay AniMajor tournament with teams throughout the world and there were not any visa-related problems. 
• WePlay AniMajor was organized in just one month – the tight time frame shouldn’t be a problem for local organizing teams.
• In 2017 PGL, who are Valve’s contractors, had run The Kiev Major smoothly.

However, the main problem is the location. There are not many places in Kyiv that can host a tournament of this scale.

We asked a representative of one of the biggest Ukrainian esports organization to share thoughts on hosting the TI`10 in Kyiv:

Kyiv may have a chance to host The International 10. Ukraine has demonstrated its readiness to host major esports events and successfully run them: our WePlay AniMajor became the most-watched Dota 2 major in history, and The Kiev Major in 2017 caused a huge stir among the community.

If Ukraine manages to host a Dota 2 championship of this level, it will incredibly accelerate the development of esports in the country. Of course, the team of esports media holding WePlay Esports is ready to take part in the organization of The International 10. Quality, creativity, and scale are the things we are ready to offer to Valve for holding TI`10 in Kyiv.

The International is a high-level event. And apart from its high-level status, there is a legal concern. It is about running a $40 million [prize pool] championship in a country that has no transparent tax policy. We all love our country. But we have such a tax system that there is no American company that would agree to rush a month-long race of organizing such a huge tournament here. I think it is impossible and believe Valve most probably would not accept such a risk. If they did, I would be happy, but there are too few chances for that. 

So I think Valve will look for logistically convenient options. And if the Swedes don’t back down and figure out what’s going on right now, I think the two obvious options are Copenhagen and Bucharest.

According to a source of AIN.UA, Kyiv does have a lot of chances to host TI`10, especially after the success of the WePlay AniMajor in June this year.

There is also information online that Germany may host the tournament. The problem is that the country has canceled all music festivals until the end of the summer and will not host any mass events. Other European countries may have visa problems for participants or COVID restrictions.

One of the most likely opponents of Kyiv is Bucharest, a city where Valve’s contractor, the above-mentioned PGL, is headquartered. Currently, Romania is hosting some matches of EURO 2020, and the country has a simplified entry regime for athletes and fans. However, it is not quite clear whether there is a chance that the same will be done with The International, allowing players from around the world to enter the country without a 14-day quarantine and visa restrictions. Sweden refused to do that.

WePlay AniMajor 2021

We learned that the new Major would take place in Kyiv from WePlay’s first teaser. It was a natural next stage in the company’s development. In 2020, Ukraine hosted one of the Minors — WePlay! Bukovel Minor 2020. The championship immediately set several viewing records, and all participants and viewers highly praised the visual side of the event.

In May, WePlay Esports made an official announcement about holding the second major in Ukraine. The theme of the event was anime, hence the name of the event —WePlay AniMajor 2021. The company undertook to recreate the atmosphere in all its tiniest details.

Due to covid restrictions, the championship was held without spectators, but I managed to get in. I have never seen anything like it. Stages of this magnitude have never been created for Dota 2 championships, be it Major or even The International. Check it yourself: just put the photo of the AniMajor stage next to, for example, the last TI’s. It was a totally new level of entertainment.

The stage for AniMajor was about 30 meters long and over 11 meters high. It’s the height of two statues of the characters Monkey King and Juggernaut from Dota 2. There were also dozens of led panels that helped to recreate the theme of the event. To erect such a “colossus,” they had to occupy the entire 9th pavilion at the capital’s VDNH (Exhibition of Economic Achievements). I saw something similar only at Sensation White festivals. I’m impressed.

The enormous stage is only part of what helped to recreate the atmosphere. The anchors wore special costumes, discussed matches in Japanese cafes or on the roofs of themed houses. Before the final, the famous Japanese DJ Tokyo Machine, who was also specially brought from Japan, played his DJ-set. For the first time at such a tournament, two locations were used at once: the main stage of AniMajor and the second, decorated in the same style, at the WePlay Arena in the adjacent pavilion. The entire entourage is complemented by video content that was displayed on and off during the whole event.

Event’s Economy

The Head of Business Development at WePlay Esports, Valentyn Shevchenko, told AIN.UA that the company applied to the major at the beginning of 2021. As part of the application, the creative team proposes ideas, a visual solution, describes how everything will happen and look. This year also added information about the safety of participants during the pandemic (more on this below).

The problem is that the Valve company, an owner of Dota 2 and a sponsor of all major tournaments, doesn’t rush to approve applications. It became known that WePlay Esports will hold the second Major a month before the official dates. “At that moment, our team stopped sleeping,” Shevchenko jokes. But there is a shard of truth in every joke.

The entire ten-meter stage was actually built in just three weeks. Dozens of people from the company and many contractors worked on it. Why was it so hard if, in theory, it was enough to put 10 computers, a large screen, and slightly decorate the stage around? “We immediately set the bar for ourselves that we are working to the limit: from creativity to visual design. Now, in fact, no one does that, ”explains Valentin. During the conversation, we sit behind the stage on the boxes from the equipment scattered all over the place. All this is necessary to provide a colorful picture.

An obvious question arises: how much did it cost? Shevchenko refuses to give the exact figure but admits that the stage and design cost over one hundred thousand dollars, and it was only a fraction of the costs. Tremendous work has been done where no one sees it: tournament organization.

Eighteen teams came to Kyiv from different parts of the world. The organizers even had to book a charter to return four teams from Asia home. They also hired talents for the English broadcast. About a hundred people had to be accommodated and fed for two weeks. Each team also needed a place for training, logistics around the city, proper nutrition, safe communication with the press, etc. All while every step is subject to covid restrictions: the personnel was constantly tested, all players were in a safe area and contacted only with those who had a negative test because even one sick participant could disrupt the tournament. “We also had to lay a new internet cable in the hotel because the previous failed, ” Shevchenko jokes again.

They didn’t given the total cost of the event but admitted that AniMajor cost over $1 million.

The Valve company doesn’t provide the financing. Moreover, Valve allocates only half of the prize pool. The organizers provide the rest. According to Shevchenko, they managed to make money due to the tournament’s popularity – it was broadcasted in 9 languages. Studios worldwide buy rights to broadcast for their audience in a language they understand (the studios themselves sell sponsorship and make money on it). “It made up a significant part of our revenue,” explains the top executive of WePlay Esports. The rest is sponsorship contracts.

Who knows, perhaps in the future, Ukraine will become a country that will host the main Dota 2 championship — The International. Two of the most spectacular majors took place in Kyiv, the best minor — in Bukovel. The strongest esports organizers and studios in CEE are all local as well. It seems that only the platform is missing. “We will build our own Olympic Stadium if we need,” retorts Shevchenko. Looking back at the two 11-meter statues created specifically for the two-week tournament, there is no reason not to believe him.

In his interview with AIN.UA, Vitalii speaks about how the company is progressing today, how much it costs to acquire broadcasting rights and quite how they pay off, as well as what has changed in the esports industry due to the pandemic.

How much has Maincast grown since the last interview? In terms of projects, money, people.

Over the two years, we have taken over 75% of premium content and opened two new studios – those of analytics and commenting. The development of two more is underway now, including an augmented reality studio.

We are also strengthening our human resources. At the start, the team consisted of 35 people, and now there are 80 of us. We are constantly increasing our administrative and broadcasting staff, and we are searching for commentators and analysts, developers who work with AR technologies, Unreal Engine, etc.

Our turnover has doubled compared to that in 2019, despite the dire situation during the pandemic. We plan to break even by the end of this year already.

In 2020, we launched some new game categories, including traditional sports. We have the necessary equipment, studios, and professionals who can commentate a wide spectrum of sporting disciplines. We have entered into a strategic partnership with the MEGOGO video service: premium esports content and exclusive shows have appeared on the platform. You could have seen on MEGOGO the fights of Vasyl Lomachenko and Oleksandr Usyk broadcast from our studio. We are expecting a major announcement soon: Maincast is to become the studio location for the UEFA Champions League European Cup matches on the Volia Football channel.

We see two vectors of development for us: reaching new audiences and raising brand awareness, or, alternatively, targeting a B2C audience as a tech contractor that is capable of organizing broadcasts of top sporting events. In 2021 we see prospects for further development in this direction.

How has the pandemic affected your business?

We have switched to remote work almost completely, except for the airtime team, because we have not stopped broadcasting. Of course, there were Covid-19 cases inside the company, and we improved our technical processes so that the majority would have an opportunity to work from home.

Globally, all fears that the advertising market would shrink because of the pandemic have turned out to be in vain. Esports was the only functioning sport, and we did not suffer much from the pandemic but quite the contrary, we received additional opportunities and advertisers.

Despite offline tournament cancellations, the market adapted rapidly and went completely online. We had a lot of negotiations with tournament organizers and, owing to the flexibility of the sector, we lost only 10% of the content, which is minimal losses compared to traditional sports.

What significant projects have you delivered and with what results?

The Maincast channels completed 11,339 airtime hours during 2020, along with more than 50 tournaments in various games. By the number of covered tier-1 and tier-2 events in such games as CS:GO and Dota 2, as classified by Liquipedia, our studio covered the most, and our Twitch channels hold leading positions. Over the last year, the most-watched Russian-language channel covering esports events was the Maincast CS:GO channel.

I should mention the only Dota 2 major over the last year, DreamLeague S13, held in Leipzig, even with spectators still present. The broadcast was watched by 21.8M people, including 5.4M unique viewers.

We also organized the broadcasting of ESL One Los Angeles 2020, within which we broke historical records by the number of Dota2 online tournament views – more than 27m viewers.

Among the major CS:GO events that were covered by Maincast, I can highlight ESL Pro League, which featured a record by the CS:GO online tournament views – 32M, as well as IEM XIV World Championship with a peak viewership of more than 1M people.

It was during the grand final match between NAVI and G2 that our channel showed the best peak viewership results among all Russian-language broadcasts in the CIS – 386,000 simultaneous viewers, which also became the second best result globally in the CS:GO category.

How much did you invest in the purchase of broadcasting rights, and did the investment pay off?

Over the past two years, a seven-digit amount in conventional units has been spent on purchasing Russian-language broadcasting rights. 

The largest deal was the purchase of broadcasting rights for ESL and Dreamhack tournaments until 2023. According to the terms of the contract, we cannot disclose the figures (according to AIN.UA, the deal amount was $13M+, but the company refused to comment on this figure – ed.).

The maximum amount in the history of rights in the esports industry, but it is still significantly less than the cost of buying rights, for example, to broadcast the Champions League on the territory of Ukraine.

We also have broadcast rights to several other tournaments. On average, the cost of buying media rights for one tournament varies from $50K to $300K. 

If we take specifically the cost of the rights, they are currently paying off. But in our business, besides the rights, there are other costs: we create a tremendous amount of content, invest in expanding infrastructure, improving software, and in-game solutions.

Please name the major advertisers you have worked with. What were the budgets? What are the minimum and maximum budgets in your portfolio? 

We want to expand our portfolio of endemic brands in esports. We have engaged such advertisers as Nivea Men, Philips, Borjomi, Haval, PariMatch, GGbet, Lion, Fruttis, Metro, and others.

As part of the cost of integrating into premium esports tournaments, CPM ranges from 3 to 7 euros and depends on the package selected. During the tournament, the brand receives about 15-20 million views. 

The esports audience is currently not yet so sensitive to advertising.Therefore, it opens upsignificant advantages for brands with an adequately built strategy: increasing loyalty and brand awareness, deliveringUSP, stimulating sales growth, increasing audience engagement. There is a myriad of tools for this, and it all depends on the goals and objectives.

The minimum package of integrations within a single tournament starts at $30K. Further, the budget can grow depending on many factors: the duration of the partnership, communication channels, and the complexity of the integrations. For example, a premium partnership for a top two-week tournament could reach $170K. 

Esports allows to not only be limited to media placement but also to develop full-fledged marketing strategies adapted for esports. For example, for HAVAL, we developed esports video ads and creative integration into the game interface from scratch. The possibilities are virtually unlimited, as well as the budgets.

Do you have advertisers from Ukraine in your portfolio? Who is it? How their budgets, goals, requests differ from global brands? 

We have collaborated with several Ukrainian representative offices of global brands, such as Nivea Men and Borjomi. For Nivea Men, we even implemented a few special projects where we held Fifa tournaments for the brand. Globally, we do not make exceptions depending on the partner’s region, so budgets do not differ and depend only on the complexity and set of advertising options. 

Unfortunately, not many advertisers from Ukraine are interested in esports. Such companies as DHL, IBM, Mercedes have already penetrated the world of esports. In our country, Ukrainian companies like Nova Poshta or Rozetka are not yet considering esports. It is a pity.

Have you already hosted tournaments? If not, why? If yes, tell us about the results (where, how much you invested, did it pay off?).

At the moment, the bar in terms of the quality and complexity of tournaments is very high, which catastrophically inflates the cost of holding tournaments. There is a large gap between investments and earning opportunities. Now even an online league costs about $1M, and you can make about $300K on it. Therefore, at the moment, strategically, this is not our growth vector. It is ok for companies that work for capitalization, for example, for our direct competitor RuHub. In our case, we are focused on self-sufficiency.

Maincast has organized many tournaments both online and offline. For example, we held two seasons of the CS: GO ICE Challenge tournament in London for the GG.bet brand. As a tournament organizer, we provided a full range of services, from the development of graphic design and stage to inviting teams, administering the sports part, and promoting the tournament in the media.

How would you comment on what is happening with esports, in particular – Dota2 and CS? It seems that teams compete almost every day. There is one tournament after the other. Plus, the magic of the fact that everything is online and there are no big and beautiful offline tournaments. Don’t viewers grow tired of it?

With the start of the new rating season, we see a positive trend in views. The first DPC season is over, and the first offline Dota 2 Major will start soon, which will be covered on the Maincast channels. We expect an increase in views, as viewers have missed large offline tournaments during the year of the pandemic. We hope that the online year is behind us and that there will be positive dynamics in 2021.

What do people watch more, Dota 2 or CS? It seems that after NAVI and S1mple invaded the CS scene, everyone ran abruptly in that direction.

In 2020, our CS: GO Twitch channel became the most popular channel among the Russian-speaking audience, collecting 39.3 million viewing hours. Now this game has more views, and matches with NAVI team are breaking records for the peak number of viewers in the stream.

There is a significant difference in the number of tournaments covered by games. Last year, we broadcast 28 major CS tournaments and seven Dota 2 tournaments. This year, we expect the return of offline tournaments in both fields, as well as Dota 2‘s main event, The International. Perhaps this will change the viewing statistics.

The Ukrainian esports club Natus Vincere (NAVI) ranked No. 2, rising by four positions for the year.

When compiling the ranking, the authors considered the total amount of match watched hours of clubs from all games in which the organization is represented, except for battle royale games.

The complete list of the most popular esports organizations is as follows:

1. G2 Esports — 92.8 million hours watched
2. NAVI — 86.1 million
3. Team Liquid — 81.8 million
4. Fnatic — 76.7 million
5. DWG KIA — 59.7 million
6. OG — 57.3 million
7. Gen.G Esports — 55.9 million
8. Astralis — 55.6 million
9. T1 — 53.2 million
10. DRX — 50.4 million

NAVI shows the best dynamics among the top organizations

According to Esports Charts, the 2020 season was NAVI’s best one in several years.

As said in the ranking, NAVI rarely dropped below fourth place at tournaments and also won the only world-class LAN in 2020, IEM Katowice 2020.

NAVI’s Dota 2 team is three times behind the CS:GO team in terms of hours watched but has also achieved a lot in 2020. It also has been a regular prize winner and won the last major tournament of the year in the Europe/CIS region, the OGA Dota PIT Season 4.

Also, NAVI showed the best dynamics among the top organizations: it gained 36.4 million more hours watched over the year than it did in 2019. The increase in views is what helped the team climb so high in the ranking.

As reported by NAVI, the team won $600,000 for its performance.

BLAST Premier: Global Final results

After losing in the quarterfinals to the U.S. team Team Liquid, NAVI had to compete with the outsiders of the tournament for the right to get to the finals.

The final game of the tournament was between NAVI and the Danish team Astralis. NAVI won it with a score of 2-0, becoming the champions of the tournament.

The overall results of the BLAST Premier: Global Final and the prizes paid to the teams are as follows:

• 1st place: NAVI — $600,000
• 2nd place: Astralis — $200,000
• 3rd place: Team Vitality — $80,000
• 4th place: Team Liquid  — $50,000
• 5th–6th places: G2 Esports, Evil Geniuses — $20,000 each
• 7th–8th places: Complexity Gaming,  FURIA Esports — $15,000 each

Natus Vincere CS:GO team became the leader in won prize money per tournament among the teams in the post-Soviet states, as stated by Cybersport.

Oleksandr “Petr1k” Petryk, a Ukrainian esports analyst, noticed that no other team from the former Soviet countries has ever managed to win $600,000 in one tournament. The last record belonged to Gambit Esports and Virtus.pro, which got $500,000 each for victories at PGL Major Kraków 2017 and Flashpoint Season 2, respectively.

Oleksandr Petryk also noted that the first place globally in terms of earned prize money for one CS:GO championship is shared by Fnatic (England) and Team Envy (USA) – they managed to earn $800,000 each at WESG tournaments.

Moreover, the Ukrainian team managed to set another record – managed to break the record for the largest number of viewers for an online CS:GO match, reaching 687,691 viewers.

WePlay Esports Arena Kyiv took the seventh pavilion at VDNG. WePlay Esports has held its offline tournaments at VDNG for several years but occupied another nearby pavilion. It is better suited for events with a broad audience. The arena in Pavilion 7 is for online tournaments: there is not much space for spectators, but it has everything for online broadcasts.

The object’s total area is more than 1000 sq. m and the Arena itself (stands, stage, and commentators’ panel) is 450 sq. m. The stands can accommodate 160 spectators. Also, there are separate areas for players, commentators, analysts, and staff.

WePlay Esports invested several million dollars in the arena’s construction, and the pavilion itself has a long-term rental. The main goal is the constant generation of content in all directions: the arena can be transformed for different esports disciplines and much more.

At the Arena, we also met Yura Lazebnikov, managing partner of TECHIIA holding and WePlay Esports esports media holding, who spoke in more detail about WePlay Esports Arena Kyiv.

At what stage is the construction?

All the complex construction work has now been completed. We have started the final part, which is filling it with equipment. I think that we need a month and a half for this, and the arena will be ready to show its first tournaments.

Have you already planned the first tournament to take place here?

Yes, there is even a whole series. WePlay Esports is preparing a calendar for 2021, and I hope even for 2022. We’re planning to bring players from all over the world to the first large-scale international tournament unless some next “Armageddon” happens. It will be in November.

In general, our goal for WePlay Esports Kyiv Arena is to provide the content every week, every weekend, every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday — almost non-stop. Both Tier-1 and Tier-2 stages, and sometimes semi-professional tournaments. It’s not designed to be empty, but to generate crazy amounts of content all the time.

Is the arena multifunctional?

Yes, it was built as a transforming arena that can broadcast any discipline online.

Will you only broadcast your own events, or are you ready to collaborate with others? For example, what if another studio wants to host its event, or “Rozetka” organizes a Dota 2 tournament?

In fact, we are ready for such offers if they don’t change our action plan or our calendar radically. And if we don’t have to postpone our big tournaments for this. We are ready because these are still our tournaments: if WePlay hosts the event at WePlay Esports Arena Kyiv, then, of course, we will be happy to integrate sponsors as often and as much as possible. But it works for our brand, our ecosystem, and infrastructure as well.

Collaboration with other studios is also quite possible.

Did WePlay buy a pavilion, or is it a long-term rental?

Long term rental.

How much have you invested in the project?

These are millions of dollars. The difficulty is that under the terms of the rental, the building’s appearance must be preserved: it cannot be reconstructed. We had to build a pavilion inside the pavilion to keep the historical building: we don’t rely on supporting structures. We made the frame inside. It is easily disassembled and portable.

You previously held tournaments in a different part of the pavilion. Why didn’t you make an arena there?

That part of the pavilion is still available to us. It accommodates many spectators: there are more than 1000 seats, and we can use it at any time. As I said earlier, the goal of our arena is to hold tournaments almost every weekend. And its focus is primarily online. Therefore, it makes no sense to use the space that offers seats for spectators. We decided to take a smaller part of the pavilion to fill it with light, sound, and equipment. It has 160 seats, which is enough for weekly content. For LANs, finals, or majors, we may well move to another part of the pavilion.

You are building an arena in Los Angeles. At what stage is it?

It’s under construction. I think that the announcement and launch will also be in late autumn or winter. The arenas will be ready almost simultaneously, but I think that the Ukrainian arena, at first, will have to take on an additional burden due to logistics because it will be a little easier to bring people to Ukraine. The United States has stricter travel restrictions. But I hope that our viewers will see the American arena on the air in late autumn or winter.

And you should also have started construction in Asia?

We plan to launch an Arena in Brazil, in São Paulo. The agreement of land and areas is at the final stage. Negotiations are now underway on two arenas in China.

Alexander Kokhanovsky also spoke about the construction of the arena. Is this your competitor, or “when there is no arena yet – it’s nothing to talk about”?

I don’t think he is a competitor at the moment. In general, I believe that the industry is growing so rapidly (the annual growth rate is 24%) that no company on its own can provide and fill such a market capacity with high-quality content and high-quality arenas. And I believe that the more entrepreneurs now try to attract investment and build as many infrastructure facilities as possible, the greater it is, and the more profit it brings to everyone else. Because the industry is becoming more respected and larger, it is approaching the old classic sports in terms of the amount of money, finances, and investments.

And it’s silly to call everyone competitors when there is just crazy room for work and enormous prospects for growth. In terms of its capitalization — this is about a billion dollars — the entire esports industry is still relatively small compared to large old industries, especially football. Therefore, I think it’s very cool. The more money, arenas, teams, and events that come in, the more we will all earn, and the more high-quality content we can do thanks to this money and the industry’s growth as a whole.

“Such a decision has just been made at the meeting of the Commission for the recognition of the sport in Ukraine. For our country, this is a historical moment, because esports is not just “shooters,” but a fundamental element of modern digital culture,” the official wrote.

A short while ago, Alexander Kokhanovskyy acted as a representative of the deal for ₴1.1 billion to buy out the Dnipro Hotel in the center of Kyiv. Kokhanovskyy plans to make the world’s first Esports Ready Hotel there. It will include unique esports elements: training zones, an esports scene, special rooms for professional players, as well as the best players’ lounge in the world.

Soon an eSports association will also be announced in Ukraine.

• Analysts from Newzoo forecasted the 2019 global games market to reach $148.8 billion. Ukrainians spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computer games annually.
• In Ukraine, esports is actively developing. In March 2020, the team of the Ukrainian esports club Natus Vincere won the major Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) championship, IEM Katowice. The team won a prize of $250,000.
• And last year, Kyiv citizen and professional gamer Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev from Na’Vi was recognized as the best world’s player in CS:GO.

Ukrainian tournament operator WePlay! Esports organized a professional Dota Pro Circuit series tournament in Bukovel, that the international media called the gold standard of events in its category. A custom approach and original thematic competitions allowed the organizer to become one of the most outstanding players in the business.

Esports is the new black

2020 Summer Olympics will be held in Tokyo. Two days before that, the esports world championship will be held there, organized by the technology giant Intel together with the International Olympic Committee. Yet there is no background for any computer game to be included in the Olympic program, and the IOC itself has ambiguously expressed on this subject. Nevertheless, the growing popularity of esports among a young audience leaves no doubt that very soon the championships in esports-disciplines will become the main sports events in the world. Regardless of whether this happens in conjunction with existing institutions or without them.

The Dota 2 World Cup finals at The International 2019 at peak times was viewed by two million people. And these are official figures only (the Chinese audience, which is tens of millions viewer, was not counted). Of course, these figures are far from the one hundred millionth Super Bowl audience or the final of the World Cup with its half a billion viewers, but the most important indicator for investors, the growth rates, esports will cover in the nearest future. The audience growth between The International 2018 and 2019 was 63%, but even the two-time growth that occurred in previous years is not uncommon for nascent sports.

Business Insider estimates the global esports audience at 450 million people, half of which is the regular game-viewers, and the rest watch games from time to time. Compared to traditional sports, according to the Washington Post, the Dota 2 World Cup in 2018 was viewed by more people than Wimbledon, Daytona 500, Tour de France and U.S. Open, and the last three where lower in terms of the prize pool. Income generated by the industry exceeded the milestone of one billion US dollars, and the volume of investments in just one year from 2017 to 2018, according to Deloitte, grew by a whopping 837%: from half a billion to $4.5 billion.

Obstacles to Success

At the dawn of esports, the average viewer accustomed to a clear streamlining of national and international leagues in traditional sports, was not always clear which of the many tournaments to watch. Tournament operators experimented with formats, and esports organizations often took part in the competitions based on internal rather than sports logistics.

A notable breakthrough in the last decade has been facilitated by several factors, like the development and popularity of MOBA games (primarily Dota 2 and LoL), and an increase in prize pools. Video games themselves have become a full-fledged part of the cultural agenda, and young gamers have grown and gained a really remarkable value.

Valve, the owner of the Steam digital store, made a king’s move in 2011 and organized the first The International Dota 2 tournament with a really significant budget, the winning team won one million dollars. This amount contrasted sharply with the prize pool, for example, World Cyber Games – at that time the main e-sports championship, where players fought for $300,000 in as many as ten disciplines. Millionaires and overnight stars, by the way, then became the players of the Ukrainian NAVI team. 

A few years later, The International moved to the seventeen-thousand KeyArena in Seattle, and the prize pool, now additionally raised by players from around the world, will exceed $10 million. There was no turning back now, the real deal began. In an attempt to increase the overall level of tournaments during the calendar year, Valve came up with the Major format: tournaments with a millionth prize pool, half of which will be covered by the company itself, and the remaining amount by the tournament operator. The Minor format was introduced with the same rules, thereafter, with a smaller prize pool.

The density of the tournament grid has contributed to the overall progress of the industry, e-sports organizations have become real hubs and brought together under their flags, teams in several – often more than ten – disciplines, hired trainers, psychologists, and physiotherapists. Tournament operators, whether ESL and DreamHack or young and progressive ones like WePlay! Esports got a chance to take the competition to a whole new level.

WePlay! Esports recipe for success 

WePlay! Bukovel Minor 2020, yet the largest tournament from WePlay! Esports ended a little over a month ago. In the final, the European team Nigma (they also won The International 2017 as part of Team Liquid) defeated the top Chinese team Royal Never Give Up. Bukovel tourists who learned about the tournament from outdoor advertising at the resort came to see celebrities: Miracle- (Amer al-Barkavi, one of the best Dota 2 players in history) and Dendi (Danil Ishutin, the most famous Ukrainian Dota 2 player).

To get the right to host a tournament in Bukovel as part of the elite DPC series (Dota Pro Circuit is a series of competitions within the calendar year, rating points of which are taken into account before The International), to the WePlay! team I had to go to a tender from Valve and come up with a concept stronger than that of competitors. The best tournament operators compete for the right to host such tournaments around the world – from Los Angeles and Stockholm to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

WePlay! Esports relies on solid, well-thought-out thematic events in which offline experience works in synergy with the online one. Such were the Forge of Masters CS: GO tournaments and Bukovel Minor was the same. Given the dates (January 9-12), they decided to bring the whole Christmas spirit. Commentators covered with blankets drank cocoa, carols were allover the place, a picture of the gaming field in seasonal winter style was replaced by photos of the Carpathians taken from the drone. The incredible atmosphere of intimacy and coziness of the Bukovel minor led to the memory of the legendary tournaments from the Beyond the Summit team when the players lived, communicated and competed in a large house in Los Angeles. WePlay! itself calles its approach to organizing tournaments ‘esportainment’, it is a combination of esports and entertainment.

The concept appealed to the audience, and WePlay! Bukovel Minor was the most successful Minor series tournament in history, and the Dot Esports portal called the Bukovel tournament the gold standard for all future Dota 2 tournaments.

“Esports is a promising business. The audience of both players and spectators is constantly growing. Media rights are becoming more expensive, and the geography of the market is constantly expanding. Setting the “gold standard”, we strive to develop the market and make it even more attractive for partners,” said Oleg Krot, Managing Partner at TECHIIA Holding.

The efforts of the organizers were visible to the naked eye, not at every major tournament you can be entertained by the choir and bunch of pyrotechnics. On social networks, to support PepsiCo, Secretlab and other sponsors, memes and viral videos were running. By the beginning of the tournament, a limited series of stuffed-toy merchandise from WP Merchandise was created.

“Everyone understands that marketing decisions that are aimed at 35+ audience, almost do not affect the younger generation. Esports allows you to reach young people with unique sponsorship activations that organically fit your broadcasts and can even be integrated into the game itself. Many sponsors come to esports just in order to reach out to an audience inaccessible elsewhere,” says Oleh Humeniuk, the general manager of WePlay! Esports.

Of course, before getting the opportunity to conduct a DPC tournament, the WePlay! team had to become noticeable for Valve. Dota 2, Counter-Strike and Artifact tournaments had already been organized, the team also participated in the production of last year’s The International stream. Including the WePlay! Bukovel Minor, the company has already held fourteen tournaments with a total prize pool of more than a million dollars and more than 15 million hours of broadcasting.

Moreover, WePlay! Esports became the first tournament operator to host an official Ukrainian-language studio broadcast. The OTT platform has already expressed their interest in this. For example, MEGOGO, on which it was possible to follow the tournament. The tournament’s final games could also be seen in the cinema. The Multiplex network halls in seven cities of Ukraine organized the broadcast, and viewers could watch the broadcast in Ukrainian. Spectators on Twitch and other platforms turned out to be interested in esports content in Ukrainian, and the company continues to develop this direction.

“Traditionally, esports operators in CIS arrange broadcasts of their tournaments in Russian and English, but the minor in the Carpathians made us think about professional studio production of the tournament in Ukrainian. We saw the interest of viewers and partners in the Ukrainian-language broadcast and decided to go for it. Our WePlay! Mad Moon tournament is also in Ukrainian,” says the Managing Partner of WePlay! Esports Yura Lazebnikov.

From February 20, one more tournament of the company started in the Kyiv Expocenter of Ukraine (VDNG). WePlay! Mad Moon on Dota 2 with a $300,000 prize pool, which lasted until February 23 with some of the most famous teams, like Team Secret, Virtus.pro, Nigma, and others. It was possible to follow the tournament at the official studio broadcast of the competition on Twitch.tv.

The growth of the cyber-center industry is facilitated by global trends:

• the capitalization of the gaming industry in 2018 exceeded the performance of the movie industry – 138 against 136 billion dollars;
• the in-game shopping market is bigger than the boxing office in the whole world – 50 against $ 41 billion;
• over the next 10 years, the video game market will double, making it dominant in the entertainment industry and completely unattainable;
• The new Esportainment industry (eSports + entertainment) has appeared.

Modern arenas are being created with stages for several hundred people and large screens for tournaments. And if you also add here the hardware in the form of computers and monitors for players, it becomes clear that all this business must be properly managed.

The Ukrainian software company called ENESTECH developed the SENET cloud solution for managing its own gaming center and then monetized this SaaS service.

Today, SENET serves more than a million computers in almost a thousand cyber clubs from 40 countries. On what was the starting point, what contributed to the development and how the company is doing now, more and this is in our blog.

If you want to do something properly, do it yourself

Initially, the software was created as a solution to meet the needs of their own network of cyber centers called IT Land. The number of computers there was getting to 500, and badly needed a system that would simplify the administration and maintenance of such a large number of PCs. Its operating system turned out so successful that it became obvious – it has the potential of a full-fledged commercial product.

The first thought was to use outsource development, but the price-quality ratio was the thing that discarded this idea.

“We created the ENESTECH Software company in 2014 and our own team has already developed a solution. At that time, we had an excellent “training camp” in the form of the IT Land network, so the solution could be tested at any time,” said Oleg Krot, managing partner at TECHIIA holding, of which the ENESTECH company is also a part.

First of all, the developers changed the architecture and moved to the cloud in advance. We started from the CIS market, which we knew and understood better than others. When the number of customers who used SENET to manage their gaming centers for a long time exceeded ten, it was clear, now is the time for the product to go to the masses.

Just a couple of years ago, many of today’s ENESTECH customers used standard free of charge systems, which were essentially alarm-based applications. In addition, they are not completely safe, such software can collect user’s personal data for the purpose of further resale. For example, social networks access, game accounts and even bank details of the gamers. In the first few years, the development team had to spend on fighting the habit of using free or cracked software in centers.

“Constant modification is one of the critical success factors in the computer center business. It is crucial to update the hardware every couple of years so that the most demanding games were running smoothly, and gamers didn’t lose interest. The same story with a number of major software,” says Elchin Aliyev, CEO of ENESTECH. “Adding bigger monitors and comfortable seats, but not thinking about a reliable and functional managing system, is obviously a failed strategy. In fact, this is the heart of the club, which runs the blood through the veins of this gaming center, allows you to receive a fixed payment, see all statistics, update content on a hundred of PCs at the touch of a button from the admin panel, increase customer’s loyalty, give gamers the opportunity to book and pay for seats before going into the club and even organize their own tournaments. When a club is stuffed with cool gadgets and gaming chairs for $300, but it uses free software, it’s like if the Ferrari’s car has electronics from the old Daewoo Lanos.”

Recommendations in the market, user’s trust, availability of the trial period, optimal tariffs for using SENET, effective marketing, all these things gave an impetus to the growth in the number of customers.

It’s not enough to be just good software nowadays

The company does not consider itself to be b2b or b2c, ENESTECH creates a unique ecosystem for the club, in which it should be easy for the owner to manage the business, for the administrator to work comfortably and for the gamer to play comfortably.

SENET price rates vary by market and region. The features of the economic situation in the country, the number of connected computers, the cost per hour for a player are taken into account. Approximately the cost of the package varies from $55- $200 per club per month. Even with a very rough calculation, it turns out that the monthly cost of using SENET pays off in 2-3 hours of club operation.

Cloud technology allows owners to manage their cyber center without being physically there. You can be on the beach in another hemisphere and watch the club’s load or cash flow in real-time from your smartphone, while there is no possibility to pay “off the register”. You can collect more ambitious statistics, conduct promotions, create your own loyalty program. SENET offers its customers quite a wide range of possibilities of customization and monetization, increase profits by using additional features.

Club employees, like system administrators, cashiers, technicians – derive their value from SENET. Remote control and centralization of the system allow them to update software and games on all computers in one click, solve problems by connecting a 24-hour SENET support specialist to their monitor, which ultimately increases their efficiency and reduces costs.

The company also cares about gamers and improves their user experience. By creating your own account, a gamer, on the one hand, gets access to a loyalty program, which can reduce the cost per hour depending on the total amount of time spent playing a game (similar to airline miles), and on the other, can participate in tournaments.

The tournament module integrated into SENET allows gaming centers to connect to WePlay! Esports tournaments or even create their own tournaments for gamers.

Online booking of a PC allows a customer to reserve it in advance, pay for their favorite place, come and start the game on their own without the help form administrator.

Shops, which have become an invariable attribute of the modern computer club, also work in both directions. The owner and cashiers control the sale of goods and their stock, and a gamer through the ShopShell module can buy a Coke, sandwich or merchandise not interrupting the game. 

The ENESTECH team has more than 70 specialists from 12 countries: Ukrainians, Americans, Azerbaijanis, Pakistanis, Ecuadorians, Turks, Colombians, Russians. This benefits 24/7 customer support to provide help on the customer’s language. SENET already has localization in seven languages.

In addition to the development of cloud software, the company has a hardware direction – a patented device for game consoles has no analogs in the world. The main advantage is that PlayStation or Xbox can be connected and managed along with your PC’s in a single club admin panel. All thanks to the SENET controller.

What future holds

A computer club is no longer a business for renting a PC. It is rather a format of recreation and entertainment, competing with home comfort and coziness. 

“People go to restaurants and cinema while having well-equipped kitchens and large TVs at home. The same idea underlies the modern cuber center. People come here not only to play, but also to spend time with friends, eat, sometimes even smoke a hookah, and relax after school or a workday,” underlines Elchin Aliyev.

Clubs are increasingly merging with the HoReCa sphere. The bar in the club can bring 30-40% of revenue.

The sales of eSports souvenirs and accessories is quite a big part of the revenue as well. Computer mice, rugs, backpacks, T-shirts with symbolics, stuffed toys in the form of heroes from your favorite computer game.

The universe of computer clubs today is very diverse and has its own specifics in each country. 

There are three most popular types of sites: 

1. Huge ones. Cyberarens, a large network of clubs, franchises with eSports shows and tournaments.
2. Medium. With very high-quality hardware, but a limited number of PCs and several clubs in the network
3. Small ones. Internet cafes with several PCs and copy centers.

The first type is growing fast and in demand more than others. For example, in Europe, cocktails and disco bars are popular, which have a dance hall and a gaming PC room. One of the most famous franchises is Meltdown, it already has 22 clubs in Europe and is constantly updated with new discoveries.

Large networks and franchises for 50-100 clubs attract large sponsors like Nvidia and Logitech and rely on competitions and cooperation with eSports organizations.

A new and rather peculiar market is eSports faculties, which are massively being opened in many Western universities and which need to administer their PC’s. And today, some of them are testing SENET for effective management of computer classes.

The most interesting market for ENESTECH is Southeast Asia, where the cyber-clubbing culture is unique and has been developing most intensively and for the longest. Elchin Aliyev believes that no standard functionality can cover both the legendary Korean PC bangs and Japanese “cafes for the homeless” at the same time, so they are going to modify the product for success in this market.

Cyber center as an investment

Pretty much soon computer clubs will compete with movie theaters. Can’t believe it? Then imagine that someone telling you 5-7 years ago that you would go to the gas station to grab a cup of coffee. Cinemas around the world broadcast tournaments in various disciplines. Multiplex has sold out numerous times for Dota2 finals.

Experts estimate the number of spectators of eSports events at 394.6 million people. Multiplex even created its own computer club as a pilot project, which will eventually grow into a network. This is logical if a teenager has UAH 50 for small expenses, then he will not have enough for a movie ticket, though it will be enough for a couple of hours in the game center.

Starting with a computer club management solution, ENESTECH went further. 10 years of experience in managing their own centers and accumulated expertise guarantee customers high-quality business consulting. Upon request, the company’s specialists can develop a business plan, a strategy for opening, managing and promoting the club, offer PCs and components at reasonable prices through partnerships with manufacturers and distributors.

ENESTECH offers a full construction option. The first customer was Force Arena in Lutsk – the largest establishment in Western Ukraine. And the cloud solution of the service allows anyone to expand the business of cyber clubs into hundreds of computers in Mexico or Australia in a matter of days, and sometimes even hours.

Opening a club with 30 gaming places will cost an average of $50,000. Calculating the average club possibilities, you will learn that such a project can pay off in up to 2 years.

In fact, there are not so many computer centers in Ukraine, this niche is not competitive and starting a business here is much easier and cheaper than opening a coffee shop or barbershop. At the same time, Ukraine is consistently included in the world’s top 10 countries for the achievements of eSportsmen. The development and creation of new arenas is inevitable, and progress in this direction should occur within a few years, which can already be seen in countries with similar situations and market conditions in this area.

I have one large project, a few smaller ones and lots of MVP. According to my estimate, the total number has reached 32. I can talk about five cases publicly:

• Analytical agency Esport Charts;
• Service for organization of esports tournaments ESM.Zone. In Ukraine it operates under ua brand;
• School of streamers and a channel tv;
• Platform for donations us;
• Own esports teams.

Other projects still have no domains nor public presence. Let me explain it one by one.

Esport Charts

Esport Charts is an agency that is engaged in analytics for esport teams and organizations, isn’t it?

Yes. We sell data to teams and organizers of esports tournaments. The data is presented as reports. In other words, they get a PDF file containing all the relevant details on a monthly basis.

The document shows team performance and compares it with competitors. For instance, our client Fnatic is one of the world’s largest esports teams. Their report contains approximately 6 slides dedicated to their performance: participation in tournaments and quality of the game, number of followers, the activity of audience across various channels. 3 more slides are dedicated to competition.

Esport Charts website

Now we are working to show presence brands, i.e. show the frequency of sponsored ads during streams. There are summaries for each team member. For example, a player had 8 hours of streaming and every minute such and a such number of people were watching him. The brand concerned got such and such level of awareness. This metrics is screen time multiplied by a number of hours watched by the audience.

These reports are very useful to teams. They allow them to skillfully set their pricing. Clients can reasonably increase the placement price based on statistics. Without our answers, there wouldn’t be any assessment criteria, and everything would boil down to a single question:

— Are you ready to pay us 100,000 for an ad in the tournament?

So, does that mean that you provide advertisement metrics? Do you have competitors?

We do have competitors, but they are not as global. Everyone is primarily focused on Twitch, which is the most open and comprehendible platform that gives a lot of data via API. We definitely collect more information and divide it into channels. It is an added value.

We aspire to become “Google analytics” for streaming resources and the entire broadcasting industry.

We do not just indicate how many viewers were on the channel – but also tie it to what is happening. Our analysts analyze all streams and write: “On these days there was such an event, the following teams participated in it, the result is the following.” Our rivals analyze only the numbers of the stream per day, while we know what was happening every minute.

What data do you collect and how do you do it?

All that is publicly available. For example, the number of viewers across all possible platforms. We save the stream and analyze it using algorithms. So, with the help of “machine vision”, we are looking for logos and discern content types.

Ivan Danishevsky. Photos hereinafter by Olha Zakrevska

There is also a technology that I hope will appear on Esport Charts later this year. These are very advanced bots that “sit” inside the game and get all the data. They give out a stream of pure information: in-game purchases, movements, events, up to the touch of buttons. This is very detailed information from inside the game. The bot is a spectator during the match, which is completely legal.

You can instantly get a feed from one player or you can get it from all of them – but with a delay. It works with Dota 2, CS, LoL and others. We are developing a similar thing for PUBG, Fortnite, and their mobile versions.

Are there reports that cost more than US$1,000-3,000?

Yes. Reports that cost US$1,000-3,000 are very automated. Figuratively speaking, they comprise dozens of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of machine-hours.

There are also very specialized requests for reports, which cost between US$15,000 and US$25,000. For example, they ask “How many people have visited offline LoL events over the past year? What are these events, in which countries and cities were the arenas?” This is not what our analytical system says right away. But analysts, having made several dozen requests and spent several days, will be able to provide the answer. This is very unique information: there are about 600 cities, and no centralized information is available.

Team reports usually cost US$1,000-3,000. Studios and tournament organizers will have to pay US$2,000-5,000, and betting companies US$5,000-15,000.

On the interesting side: we are currently negotiating with the Ministry of Education of Thailand, which asked us “What is the most popular game in Thailand?” Apparently, Thailand does not know which game is popular!

And we find such information. But there are also nuances. Thailand does not stream on Twitch and YouTube. They stream on Facebook, on private channels in groups that are difficult to access from the outside. This is very unusual and difficult to monitor. But we will find it by hook or by crook. Such a report is expensive, because you have to write software, and come up with custom solutions.

We had 5 custom reports in the past year alone.

How do sales work — actively or passively?

We have never sold actively, clients always come to us. Most often these are team managers who use free Esport Charts resources. 80% of letters are practically the same: “Hello, I love your website, and I have the following question.”

We give away a lot of information. That is, you can get almost all data yourself, but it takes a huge amount of time.

People who value their time do not waste it. They do not save US$3,000 on getting the statistics they need.

Our site is the largest in this domain with 200,000-500,000 unique visitors per month. I can safely say that 8 out of 10 top publications in the world like CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, The New York Times use our statistics.

Do you have clients from Ukraine? Starladder, Natus Vincere?

Some Ukrainian companies buy statistics from us, we work with some in exchange for their services, but I will not disclose the details

How much do Ukrainian brands spend on advertising in eSports?

About 4 million UAH per year. These are pennies, of which, 2 million are spent thanks to our efforts. Prominent names include Silpo, Novus, Fornetti. It should be at least 40 million a year. To do this, Ukrainian eSports must grow. It has to have an appeal for a brand to want to spend money.

How many people are working at Esport Charts?

20 persons.

Did you raise the funds?

Yes. About half a million dollars. Of them about US$300,000 are angel investments, another US$200,000 came from a Chinese accelerator. This does not take into account the funds that I paid from my own pocket.

Which accelerator? Why China?

Chinaccelerator of SOSV firm. As a matter of fact, we were invited to quite a few accelerators, including Ukrainian, but they offered too little money. I’m talking about US$20,000-50,000 for a share of 7-10%. We don’t value a business like that.

So what was the valuation for the funds raised in China?

5% for a little short of US$200,000. The first conversation with representatives of the accelerator was held in November; we reached an agreement in February, and by March 3 we prepared all the documents and flew to China. Our accelerator is software-based, it focuses on Chinese-international products and the market.

I was interested because China is the dark horse of the gaming industry. In China, they do not stream on Twitch, Facebook or YouTube. They use their own platforms.

According to the Chinese, their market has 50 times more viewers than Twitch. We did not believe it, so we decided to check it out for ourselves. In the past month, we have visited Tencent, Alibaba and the largest companies in China. At the same time, there are no requirements to do something exclusively tailored to the local market.

Is the company registered in China?

No, in the U.S. In Delaware.

Why didn’t you go to the U.S.?

It is somewhat unattractive, nothing to learn in our esports affairs. I was interested in China. I have been to the U.S. many times, we have a lot of friends and partners there. I know America well enough, and Europe too.

Whereas China is a total mystery. But a lot of things are happening there, records are being set, and I don’t believe them. I would like to make sure that there is trust in the Chinese market. In eSports itself, it’s difficult to teach us something, we can accelerate ourselves now.

Now it’s clear about the accelerator. Who gave US$300,000 of angel investments?

These are people not from venture or angel investing in Ukraine. Friends and family in other words.

Have you been looking for the money in Ukraine?

So far it is difficult. They do not give anything nor know anything about eSports. I spoke with many, but to the point, I talked only with Victoria Tigipko and Alexey Vitchenko. They do not offer anything. Although we are a quite popular, technological and robust product with real people behind it.

For a long time, I was hoping to do something in Ukraine. I really wanted to start with Ukrainian investments. But Ukraine wants to “invest in venture capital” in car marketplaces and plane tickets.

How does your business make money?

Well, it’s too early. We have income, but there’s no revenue.

What about proceeds?

In 2018, Esport Charts brought us about US$200,000. All projects — US$300 000. We are hoping to get half a million this year.

What’s missing to become profitable?

We don’t have a sales department. We are in the process of building it. On the other hand, our operational costs are quite low, at about US$40,000-50,000 a month.

Does that mean that you have investments to keep you afloat for a year?

No, we have almost exhausted them. But the project still has my personal funds.

What’s next?

We will attract in the near future up to half a million – one million through convertible notes on the same terms as with SOSV (and they are good). Then either self-sufficiency next year, or rapid growth through the next investments.

Efficiency of advertising in CIS and Ukraine — estimate of Esport Charts

How to spend 10M on CIS’ eSports market

How to distribute the budget based on the results of the year 2018:

• 75M — Starladder;
• 75M — RuHUB;
• 2M — Maincast;
• 5M — WePlay;
• 1M towards native twitch ads.

Approximate result:

• 14M of Russian-speaking audience;
• 200M views of broadcasts;
• over 300M hours of stream views by viewers;
• primarily male audience (~80%).

Holding an online tournament between the CIS countries (1 discipline) – over 1 million viewers, 200 hours of broadcast, 400,000 hours of views, more than 3,000 participants

What one can expect from 1M annual budget on the Ukrainian market

• You should not focus on broadcasting because the Ukrainian audience there is only 18-21%, the rest will go towards foreign users.
• Broadcasting in Ukrainian will give 250,000 – 300,000 viewers. If you add broadcasts in Russian – the number of viewers will grow 6-10-fold at the cost of blurring the geography of the audience.
• Advertising of eSports event on Instagram and Facebook will yield 4 million coverage in Ukraine

Competitions on the Ukrainian tournament platform sponsored from this budget:

• a series of online tournaments and offline finals (1-2 disciplines) – 3,000-5,000 participants, 10,000 viewers, about 1,000 visitors of the final;
• a series of amateur online tournaments throughout the year across a variety of disciplines, including mobile games – over 35,000 participants.

eSports team – Dota 2 or CS:GO:

• PRO — Natus Vincere (the third most popular organization in the world in 2018), holding a series of meetings with fans, signing session, a show-match with tournament winners, lotteries in the team’s accounts in social networks. The exposure of publications in social networks for NaVi – more than 400,000 followers, of which about 50,000 are Ukrainians.
• Semi-PRO – support for 1-2 teams throughout the year, which participate in online tournaments with coverage of 5,000 – 10,000 viewers. In the case of the team’s successful performance – participation in international LAN-tournaments with online coverage of up to 2 million foreign viewers per 1 tournament.

Support of development of Ukrainian student and school eSports.

With an emphasis on popular disciplines among youth: 20,000 – 50,000 interested players, including participants from 12 to 18 age group. Exposure to more than 500,000 students and 1 million pupils. Types of support: educational program course, school / district / city / region competitions.

GG.UA

This is an eSports tournament organization service. What’s its status, are you developing it?

In the past year we organized over 1k tournaments. It is a lot. Approximately 20k people participated in total.

What was the largest tournament you organized through GG.UA?

CyberStar — 260 teams, NON STOP Energy League — 270 teams. There is also a unique student tournament, which we organized ourselves, without the support of brands.

What is that?

A unique thing – our student tournament was officially recognized, up to the point when the rectors put their signatures on paper. In Ukraine, there were no similar cases before. We held the tournament under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, and instead of the expected 4-8 universities, 67 universities with about 115 teams participated.

Why the official recognition of the tournament is important?

My main task in Ukraine is to train eSportsmen and lobby for eSports so that it gains ground here.

And how much did you spend on the tournament?

A lot. It is expensive. We had to offer prizes, organize everything, bring the finalists to Kyiv. There were two disciplines — Dota 2 and LoL. Winning teams got UAH 20,000 per team, and the total cost of the tournament was hundreds of thousands of hryvnias.

Were these your personal funds?

No. This was the money of contributors, i.e. people who wanted to make it happen. Figuratively speaking, each gave 100,000 hryvnias.

Who are these people?

I and my pals. As a matter of fact, the rectors of universities helped too.

Did they just pull the money out of their pockets?

Just like that, yes. Firstly, we are talking about hryvnias, not dollars. Secondly, it is all aimed at creating a new direction.

They intend to get students who want to major not in “economy of something,” but in IT and eSports.

Do you want to create eSports faculties?

And we are already doing it. The first one will appear pretty soon and the curriculum will commence on September 1 of this year.

Ukrainian Federation of Electronic Sports

You are the president…

Of the Ukrainian Federation of Electronic Sport. It is called Esports Ukraine.

Yes. You are the founder of this NGO. Why? How do you contribute to this project?

To become nationally recognized and legalize eSports. Thanks to this NGO, we can communicate with the state. The work for the federation takes up to 20 hours a month of my time, but there are several full-time employees there.

Can you hold tournaments without the federation?

This is an embryo of a federation, it must grow to a state where opinion-leaders of Ukrainian eSports (nurtured by us) will develop Ukrainian eSports not only through my own resources but also through the efforts of other people and the community. And this must be done by the federation, and not simply through the LLC. This should be a non-profit activity. This is the way things are right now.

In other words, the federation was established not to make profits, but to promote the development of eSports.

There’s also a Dnipro-based “Federation of cybersports of Ukraine”. Why has it been created?

I really want other people (the more the better) to share my vision. Whether they are going to be members of the federation or not, it does not really matter. Therefore, I am very happy when other organizations are doing good things in this direction.

Why are they your competitors?

Probably because they want to nationalize eSports in their own direction. In Dnipro, they are doing the same thing. I don’t know why; I just don’t understand their position.

Why won’t you nationalize it first?

I don’t see why do we need to do it. Moreover, how do we do it? There’s a ton of nuances.

Then someone will do it before you do.

Yes. And it is very offending. There have already been many attempts by people who have nothing to do with eSports at all. I respect the Dnipro guys, at least because they love eSports as much as we do. But there are still many competitors who do this, they say, “under the auspices of ministers” or someone else. They do it to get yet another area of influence and suck from it.

These are people who have nothing to do with eSports at all. Accordingly, if these are the guys from Dnipro, I don’t mind. We will probably even get along just fine. If it is me, we will definitely get along.

All those active people who do it for the sake of eSports will find a place for themselves. But if it is a third party, which, as I say, came “on behalf of the minister” to wrangle budget money – this, of course, will be insulting.

When will the national Federation come about? Your thought on this.

Not this year. Maybe in the next year.

Zeer.tv

What is this project?

This is a school of streamers. At least, it was originally intended as a school. And this is our own streaming channel, which we use for training, broadcasting, commenting on our eSports events, etc. As we are now trying to focus, all these projects are frozen. Zeer.tv exists, it just doesn’t work that regularly.

Previously, Zeer worked under the CyberStar Academy. Formally, it was the academy, but so far there are not enough resources to extend the project. Together with Kyivstar, we conducted an educational course for all those who want to become streamers. We taught all the participants the basics during a two-month course – similar initiatives are needed. And now we hit the freeze button on this project. Figuratively speaking, we turn it on once a month for several hours in order to stream our tournaments from GG.UA

Why is the channel in such a state? Wasn’t it profitable?

Yes, because it was never profitable, and because besides money it also needed management. The testing budget of US$10,000 has been exhausted, it lasted for about 8 months.

What’s going to happen next?

We will not disable anything. Zeer.tv should develop into an academy, it is a good educational product with outstanding potential. But you also need to invest in it – not only money but people too. That is, you need to build a team. Basically, each of these projects is not flying high yet because there is a shortage of people.

It is oftentimes easier with money: you either have it or you don’t. And with people – a person can be bad, or unable to perform, lazy or not know ins and outs of a specific topic (and the topic is really hard to comprehend).

We are doing a fairly narrow-focused thing. Therefore, in order to skyrocket it right here and right now I need a person who will come to me and say “I know the ropes and I want to make game, esports, and other broadcasts. I am ready to take it on. I will find help, resources and everything else.” This is what he must really want to do, and in this case, I will be very helpful.

Esport Charts and the federation have such people, but other projects don’t. Therefore, we have all other projects suspended. Just because of the human factor in the first place.

Fundy.us

Same question all over again: what is it and how it works?

This is a donation system for streamers. A tool to bring them money – you can display messages on the air, you can vote. There are different ways about it.

Why can’t you use native platform solutions?

There are virtually no native solutions. There are alternatives though. But they are all expensive. Secondly, they are illegal per se. Thirdly, we are unhappy with their functionality.

Concerning the high cost – we are talking about platform fee. Usually, it is 10-15%, we take 5-9%. But so far the platform works only for our projects, including Zeer.tv. The turnover from donations is quite large, several million hryvnias per year. But the project is not yet developing qualitatively, but simply working. It is frozen and does not require investments.

You have got your own donation processing, haven’t you?

Something like that. It is intended to legitimate the field. The task of the platform, besides technical innovations, is to make donations legal. We want to make sure that all Ukrainian streamers can pay taxes as FOP [Private entrepreneur] transparently and conveniently. Now all this is very inconvenient — you can literally withdraw donations through checks, like in AdSense

eSports teams

You are training a few eSports teams, aren’t you? How many?

In the world? Approximately 6,000. I have three, each with five players and a few staff members. The discipline is Dota 2, and now we are considering a few others.

How much do they earn?

Between US$300-1,500 On average, participants are 20 years old. They play 4-6 hours a day. One team does it free of charge, they really like being a team.

Where do they get money from?

They had played before, but they lived off nothing. Teams do not have strictly prescribed KPIs. They are created to find these very metrics. I want to learn how to make teams. And so far I’ve managed to accomplish it.

In other words, you bury your money just to prep?

Yes. We hope that the Federation will have normal answers to these questions: how to collect, how to prep, how to calculate success, how to set KPIs and which ones. The results are already there – recently, in just two attempts, the teams won the Open AI Five. This is a big deal.

Do you use them to run your technologies? For instance, for a bot that collects game action log?

And this, too, I train my bots on them. Teams give us a lot of feedback, and they participate in all tournaments. This is our QA, part of quality assurance.

Are there a lot of strong players in Ukraine?

Yes. Ukraine has a very good concentration of strong players by global standards. This is confirmed by statistics: many high-ranking players, a high number of Ukrainians in world teams.

The problem of eSports space now is that there is no amateur branch. And this is what I want to develop. I want an amateur to be able to join professional eSports. Apart from the technical problems that we, hypothetically, have already learned to solve with tournaments or something else, this has many practical and social implications. We also want to solve them.

For example, parents may not always recognize an esportsman in their child.