NewTek™ Saves eGaming Producer LocalGames From COVID Disaster
By Adam Noyes
eSports and eGaming have become more in more popular in the past few years, and are now one major use case for live streaming technology. Recently, eGaming Producer: LocalGames found themselves depending on NewTek to help them navigate the Covid-19 pandemic.
NewTek released a great article on this workflow. Take a look at some highlights from this article, below.
ESPORTS: AN INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS STORY
In the U.S. alone, esports revenue was expected to top a billion dollars in 2020 before the pandemic hit. But since 2012, worldwide esports revenue has increased tenfold. With top team prizes for the most prestigious tournaments topping the million-dollar mark, there’s big money in esports, and LocalGames is well positioned to ride the wave of success.
“This is an audience with a high income,” says Pizurnia. “To participate in eGaming, whether you’re a professional gamer or not, requires topquality hardware. It takes a good computer, a good graphics card. Unlike traditional sports like soccer, where all you need is a ball, esports requires a certain financial commitment. So, our audience is generally upscale. Our viewers are about 90% male, and they range in age from 12 to 50.”
According to Pizurnia, more older viewers, who started with their 80’s game consoles, are becoming committed fans of the sport. The audience for LocalGames’ productions are technologically savvy, and unlike traditional sporting events, they are not tied to mainstream media. Esports viewers tend to watch on their computers and mobile devices.
“The big difference between esports production and regular TV sports production is that we broadcast without any commercial interruptions and our broadcasts normally go to platforms like Twitch or YouTube or even direct link,” Pizurnia told me. “The stability of the network and workflow has to be very precise. The tournaments we cover routinely go for four or five hours straight with no breaks. It’s one match after another. We’ve gone as long as seven hours at a stretch. It makes for a long day for the crew.”
DELIVERING THE GOODS
Producing content from anywhere in Latin America can present a challenge, especially when productions stream to a variety of sites. “Distribution all depends on the clients,” Pizurnia says. “Transmission is always going to be streaming on the official channel of the client. If it’s Riot Games, the program is going to go to Riot Games LATAM and tomorrow, for Garena, it will be on the Gaia Gaming Channels. So, we always work as an intermediary producer. We send the content where they tell us to.” To help distribute that content more efficiently, LocalGames built their own CDN on Amazon, a network that blankets Latin America.
ENTER NEWTEK; THE ULTIMATE STREAMING SOLUTION
To accomplish their post-pandemic goals, LocalGames purchased a TriCaster® Mini 4K. The unit is easy to transport wherever needed and powerful enough to handle even complex productions. For LocalGames, purchasing their TriCaster was more than just a workflow efficiency decision. It also made financial sense. “We are competing against traditional production companies with traditional workflows for these production jobs,” Pizurnia says. “With their old technology, their end-product is very expensive compared to ours, and ours is much more versatile because the workflow is already designed to stream. That’s one reason we’re as successful as we are.”
MAKING THE TRANSITION TO TRICASTER
Many staff members at LocalGames came from that legacy world of broadcast production, but as LocalGames’ broadcast engineer and Chief TriCaster Operator, Rodrigo Cotiart told me, “I found the TriCaster to be very easy to learn. And I’m not the sort of person who likes to read manuals. I’m much more of a doer. That’s the way I learn. So, I just got in there, sat down at the TriCaster, and got my hands dirty. I found it to be very intuitive. That’s how I learned to record macros, create camera pre-sets, modify the Multiview, and build buffer animations. I can’t stress enough how important it is to get your hands dirty. I still haven’t read the manual.”
3PLAY MAKES REPLAYS EASY
Just like any other sports broadcaster, replays are an important production tool in LocalGames’ production arsenal, and the company has made use of NewTek’s 3Play® to produce replays for their eGaming programs. It was their first NewTek device, purchased before COVID. The reliability and versatility of the 3Play was one of the reasons LocalGames felt so comfortable turning to NewTek when the pandemic hit.
“I was used to using EVS or K2 for replays back in my broadcast days,” Cotiart says. “The transition to using 3Play was extremely simple. The only thing that changed was the location of the buttons. And honestly, I find the 3Play to be much more versatile and dynamic than those other machines, and all at a much smaller price point. Our experience with the 3Play has been nothing but positive.”
In the world of eGaming production, replays play an important role, unique to eGaming. They are used to hold audience in the brief lulls between matches during a tournament.
“Between matches we can lose up to 60% of our audience,” Bernabe Pizurnia says, “So it’s a challenge to come up with unique, fun content for the audience to enjoy in those few minutes between matches. That’s the time when we can use our 3Play to do replays. Our audience is like a community and between matches we try to engage them, encourage participation, and allow them to become part of the show. In that way, we hope to extend their viewership and expose them to the client’s message for longer periods of time.”