Activision Blizzard has announced Kellogg Company as a new multi-year partner of its esports Overwatch League (OWL).
The deal will last through 2021 and includes co-marketing initiatives with the company’s Pringles and Cheez-It brands, which will be the presenting sponsors of the halftime show and the highlights segments during this year’s OWL finals.
Analysis and Comments
The deal is a further sign of the growth on eSports monetisation, showcasing the rapidly increasing number of non-endemic brands that are willing to put marketing dollars into eSports.
eSports, while still under-monetised, continues to be one the most high profile platforms for games companies to advertise and broaden their audiences, enabling key beneficiaries such as Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA etc. to increase engagement and publicity for their games.
Given recent structural changes within high-profile eSports such as League of Legends and Overwatch (franchising, home and away games, regular season play etc.), we think we could see eSports becoming a profit generator for the games developers (rather than just a marketing tool) sooner than expected.
Notably, MTG Esports, one of the largest US based businesses, recently reported huge growth in its eSports league (ESL). Over the course of the first seven months of 2019, ESL’s data shows that unique users (+90%), hours watched (+190%) and video views (+55%) all significantly increased as a result of fans tuning into properties such as ESL One, Intel Extreme Masters and ESL Pro League tournaments, shattering the numbers recorded in 2018.
It is possible that we could see an professional (multi-game) eSports teams/organisations become sufficiently profitable that they could look to go public, which could materially change industry dynamics.
A House of Commons committee has advised that loot boxes should be regulatedas gamblingand banned for children.
The recommendation features as part of the DCMSreport on immersive and addictive technologies and states that games featuring loot boxes that are paid for with real money (as opposed to earned as in-game rewards) should be marked as containing gambling and age-rated accordingly.
The report also touched on the concerning rise of deepfake videos, urging the government to include them as part of the duty of care principles for social media firms laid out in the online harms white paper.
Analysis and Comments
The most obviously impacted franchise would be EA’s FIFA, as Ultimate Team would presumably be captured by this proposal.
While not a helpful line for the broader industry, the regulatory overhang regarding loot boxes is not really news. Loot boxes are already banned in Belgium, which has resulted in several games being pulled from the market (as the only alternative would have been to obtain a gambling license).
In this case, the effectiveness of the measures will presumably be determined by their enforcement, as the rules could be easily flouted if parents or other adults allow their bank details to be used for under 18 year olds to purchase these type of features.
The country’s gaming trade body (UK Interactive Entertainment) said they would review the recommendations and “consult with the industry on how we demonstrate further our commitment to player safety – especially concerning minors and vulnerable people”. The government said it “will consider the committee’s report carefully before responding”.
After entering a deal in April 2018, Activision Blizzard and Nielsen have now released viewership figures (average-minute-audience) on the Overwatch League (OWL) for the first time.
The data compares digital streams last year vs. digital streams and linear broadcast this year, showing that the OWL averaged 313k viewers globally and 95k in the US, an annual increase of 18% and 34% increase, respectively.
Notably, the median age of OWL is 24, which according to Nielsen data is far younger than the other leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, the PGA Tour, and college football and basketball) which underscores the reach/impact esports have with younger demographics.
Analysis and Comments
The viewership figures are the most important metric when assessing an esport’s success; however, because companies and the media often provide different types of viewership figures with poor context, it is often unclear what thesenumbers actually mean.
As a result, streaming viewership is still often difficult to compare with traditional TV ratings, and previous attempts to do so have inflated the success of esports in problematic ways.
Activision Blizzard’s partnership with Nielsen is a big step in the right direction in establishing more usable and consistent metrics that will help better inform investors’ decisions (and will give them more confidence in the data).
Nielsen has been steadily growing its presence in the space and signed a deal with Riot Games earlier this year to measure League of Legends’ esports viewership – something we view as an exciting development as League is the world’s largest esport and has recently started introducing the franchise model to its national leagues as well.
According to Twitter, more than500m gaming-related tweets were sent in H1 2019, a 20% increase yoy. In 2018, gaming topics topped 1bn tweets for the first time.
While the US seems to be tweeting the most about gaming, Japan hastaken the top spot in the past year as the topic is becoming more global.
Following last week’s mass shootings and President Trump’s condemning remarks about video games, several supportive hashtags such as #VideoGamesAreNottoBlame and #GamersAreGood started trending on the platform.
Analysis and Comments
Given the recent series of high-profile gaming-related news (the political debate, but also a number of milestones and records achieved across esports events such as the Fortnite and Dota 2 World Championships), the uptick in tweets does not seem surprising.
In a way, it is yet another sign that playing video gaming and watching esports is becoming more socially accepted/”mainstream”.
With the steady increase in esports viewership numbers and the continued strong demand for video games, we expect this trend to continue.
On a side note, Chinese video gaming giant Tencent and Chinese livestreaming platform Huya reported Q2 figures this week, both showing continued growth in mobile revenues and mobile users, respectively.
Rocket League, a highly successful live-service video game (PC/console) debuted in 2015 is still very popular, ranking in the top 10 most played games on gaming distribution platform Steam.
Its developer, Psyonix, was recently acquired by Epic Gamesand is now dropping the lootbox-style crate system it used to generate revenues from its player base.
Psyonix has already shifted the main focus of its monetisation strategy over to premium progression passes (so-called Battle Passes), which have been very lucrative for Epic Games.
Analysis and Comments
Lootboxes and micro transactions have long been popular monetisation techniques in mobile games, but it is only more recently that the big-budget games from AAA studios have been introducing them as well.
The main reason we are highlighting this story is because it showcases the subsequent shift away from monetisation techniques based on randomized item rewards (in premium games), as they have received a lot of attention and criticism in the near past – and come with a looming regularity overhang.
Battle Passes, on the other hand, are a tried and proven method to generate revenue from a game’s player base (and importantly not hated by gamers, unlike the “surprise mechanics” of lootboxes).
There are many successful examples of companies using this technique (including Epic Games & Riot), with perhaps one of the best ones being Valve’s annual Battle Pass sale for the esports World Championship of its game Dota 2: the game’s prize pool is almost entirely crowdfunded via the Battle Passes, and while only 25% of the in-game sales actually go towards the prize pool, the total prize pool currently amounts to more than US$32m, with 18 days left until the crowdfunding ends.
Notably, the Battle Pass-funded prize pool has consistently broken its own recordevery year, with this year’sofficially being the largest single-event prize pool in esports history.
Tencent’s Share price (majority shareholder of EPIC Games)
Thanks to ALL of you, Steemmonsters (aka Splinterlands) is growing, it does not care about bear/bull markets and is ready for the next Bull Run !
SteemMonsters reached 247k visits in July 2019!
There is an important difference between total visitors to a site and unique ones. In this case the 247k include the multiple times a person visited the website.
Therefore, as a good Steemian you probably connect everyday which will make you count for a total of 30 visits.
Therefore, how many “unique users” does SteemMonsters has?
This is a very important question that I will try to answer later on. According to the Beta Analysis from the website I use to compile these datas, it is c.30,6k in July (compared to an average of c.20k over the past 18 months) !
One quick word about the Methodology
Datas can come from multiple sources listed in the end of this post
These sources get their raw datas from companies working with them and sharing their datas in order to get access to competitor’s ones, browsers add-ons, in-app softwares which allow the Big Data to have a very large panel of users (north of 20mn) in order to statistically have the number of users/visits…
I use these raw datas to make excels tables, graphs…
I] Traffic
Daily SteemMonsters Traffic
SteemMonsters Daily Traffic kept on improving since the launch to reach close to 10k daily visits in July 2019.
If we compare to Steemit.com, we can see that there is a lower % of mobile traffic, let’s hope the future app will fix these issues.
Steemmonsters website is ranked 133,146 worldwide.
We can also see that the rank is improving daily.
Google Trends
Google Trend is an Indice based on 100, which means that 100 represents the week when most people searched for “Steem monsters and steemmonsters” on Google.
Google Trends are still very low but there is hope as Bitcoin Google Trend is increasing slowly again, maybe more crypto users joining decentralized platforms?
Bitcoin Google Trend Graph
SteemMonsters Traffic share by country
In the Top 5, the strongest traffic increase came from Germany with +154% visits!
Mobile Traffic is low compared as it represents only 21.19% of the total
78.81% of players on Desktop, probably as it is more convenient.
Be Careful with the Number of Visits
Also, remember that if you connect from a different device (home/work computer, mobile phone, tablet) you will count as a “new visitor” on each of these devices.
So as an example, let’s say you connected at home, at work and in the subway. You would represent 3 visits out of these 1mn+ Daily Visits.
II] Marketing Mix
Organic Search is once again improving and represents 67,3% of the incoming Traffic.
Organic search is when people research on Google. As the number of quality bloggers on Steemit increase, our content has a higher probability of being listed in Google’s Top results.
Different Channels:
Direct: When you type in you Web browser www.steemit.com Mail: When you connect to steemit.com through an e-mail link Referrals: When you connect to steemit.com through a link found on another website (github…) Social: When you connect to Steemit through a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… page or link Organic Search: When you type a search term like “Crypto” on Google and you click on one of the following steemit link proposed to you
Traffic Share Evolution since inception of this analysis
You can see the continous improvment of the direct line. This is showing active players and commited ones. You can interpret this growth as the ability for @steemmonsters to grow its number of players and keep them addicted to the game. Congrats !
As a player myself, I can understand why people stick around :D.
Referring Social Pages
Youtube represented 53,4% of all the social platform incoming traffic. Reddit is also a strong source of new visits on the Steemit Platform.
5 most searched terms on Google that lead to Steemmonsters.com
To be honest, I don’t really get how some of these requests lead you to Steem but… it does.
What are Steemians main interests?
Gender Demographics
Age Distribution
III] Steemit website metrics
You feel a bit confused about these 3 metrics? Let me explain.
Bounce Rate is the % of people that leave the Website after just navigating on a single Webpage. The lower, the Better
Daily Pageviews per Visitor is the average number of pages a visitor opens. The Higher, the Better
Daily Time on Site is the full time a visitor spend on the website before closing the internet Webpage. The Higher the Better
Bounce rate is particularly low which is probably linked to the fact that most traffic is direct, meaning loyal users mak the biggest chunk of the traffic and they come to do their daily quest / tournament.
My assumptions for July 2019
Total visits to SteemMonsters.com: 247k
Assumption of Total unique visitors in July: 25-30k
Total Daily visitors: 7.5-10k
Assumption of Total Daily Unique visitors: 4-6k
This is a collective achievement and I would like to congratulate all of us! We need to continue helping @yabapmatt to grow this platform
If you would like more data: Check this post from @steemmonsters: https://steemit.com/steemmonsters/@steemmonsters/guilds-well-that-escalated-quickly
This monthly report makes me very optimistic about @steemmonsters future !
Next BigData Analysis coming on @drugwars, different social Steem apps and other cool projects !
Valve’s ‘The International 2019’ (TI19 – the world championship for its game Dota 2) has officially raised the largest single-event prize pool in esports history.
Currently, the total prize pool amounts to $30.4m, thereby surpassing the previously highest single-event prize pool of $30m (provided by Epic Games for its Fortnite Word Cup).
The tournament will be held in China for the first time in 2019, hosted by the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai from August 15th-25th.
Analysis and Comments
This is a significant development for a number of reasons:
Dota’s ‘The International’ prize pool is almost entirely crowdfunded via an in-game sale of a so-called ‘Battle Pass’,
only 25% of the in-game sales actually go towards the prize pool,
there are still more than 30 days left before cowdfunding stops, and
since the inception of crowdfunding the TI prize pool, the event has consistently broken its own record every year.
In summary, this is an all-time high in prize pool money for any esports event, showcasing both strong and growing support from the gaming community as well as from developers themselves: Last year, Epic Games announced it would support its Fortnite esports scene by providing a total of $100m for the 2018-2019 season, with the game’s World Cup featuring a $30m prize pool. This is the most any publisher has ever committed.
Esports serve a number of purposes, the main being extending the lifeof a game by encouraging and supporting an active gaming community. This is more important now than ever, as developers/publishers are moving away from the one-time up-front payment model towards in-game monetisation via downloadable content (DLCs) over the life of the game.
As most Drugwars players are aware, there has been a few updates to the game, I will try to guide you through them in this post, if you have any question, feel free to comment and I will do my best to answer your questions.
I think everybody figured out a way to settle their Primary base in order to continue playing.
The easiest way was to click under your avatar to find a spot to settle.
Map and Base system
With this new update, we understood that we will be playing from now on on a DW “World Map”.
Once you decided to settle in a territory, you could access this view where you can see other people’s bases. Gang name has been added when you click on a specific base
You can only develop 5 new bases with this new “Occupation Troop”. In the future, you might be able to have some more (around 5) but you will need to pay to have them
As the game is today, nobody can steal your base
New Occupation Troop
This is the troop you will need to train in order to settle and create a new base
New troop “moves”
Occupy: To colonise a new base. You will start from scratch with this new one
Transport: To transport ressources from one base to another, useful to give a boost to your new settlements
Station: As it is called, it is to station your troops at another base. Your troops WILL participate at any fight against this base. Useful information: When a fight happens, the owner of the base will have priority over troop losses
Storage Capacity
The storage system changed. Until July, 25th it will stay the same except if you increased your storage capacities
The new system is going to be 15% of the total capacity compared to 25% before, nevertheless the total capacity of your storage building has been multiplied by 3-4x meaning that the new Safe is 2.5*3x higher than previously
Buildings
HQ is specific to the base as the Training Facility and all production storage buildings
The level of trainings you researched are common for all your troops even the one hired in a different base than the Primary
Pantheon level is also common to the account and not to a specific base
You all have probably heard of @drugwars game. It launched and was one of the Top 5 CryptoGame played worldwide. Here is the address to sign-up.
It used to pay rewards in Steem before it stopped and then a lot of us left the game as they saw no more interest.
At first, updates were very frequent and it slowed down during the past month. Nevertheless, a few news get me very excited.
Drugwars Dollars will be implemented on Steem Engine, therefore we will soon be able to monetize some of the progress in the game. Link: https://steemit.com/drugwars/@drugwars/drugwars-dollars-on-steem-engine
Drugwars communicated that a big update is coming ! We will soon be able to hold a gang territory, this will bring new missions (and rewards) as well as a new phase to the game: GangWars.
This is great because in order to get players involved and increase the value of the token, you need ot have a competitive landscape where you are willing to buy this token in order to be stronger to fight other players. It is a kind of risky investment where you invest for a future reward if you succeed.
If you didn’t join the platform yet, use my referral link and I will send you 100k of each ressource (Drugs, weapons and alcohol)
Believe me this will help you to kickstart and progress quite rapidly
This game has the potential to increase the overall value of Steem as Steemmonsters was able to do so.
If you use my referral link, just comment below and I will send you the ressources to get you started as well as a FREE Upvote.
Every now and then i like to write a few words about Steem Monsters. I might be the biased since i did invest quite a bit (for my standards) into the game but i still will say in a honest tone that the game outperformed my expectations.
Smart addition, one after another and at the proper pace and moment.
If i were to sum up this latest update into a sentence id say that they just added a whole new reason to stay logged in and play the game. Before all i did was the daily (maybe a tournament or two) and now i find myself doubling the time i spend ingame..
Its very different from the experience ive had on Next Colony or Drug Wars. A chore i dont enjoy doing everyday but i still do it because i fear missing out on something down the line. The first i still grind through a bit every day when i see my resources fill up and Drug Wars i completely gave up on. (Still hoping my 20k Future tokens will sell some day on obyte)
SM is starting to get a significant amount of polish as well. You can clearly see a new aesthetic take shape. Tie that in with the depth the game is starting to show and you end up with a enjoyable time for the player.
Just a few thoughts while i wait for my promo cards. 🙂
