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29 Comments

LinkedIN for Esports

The Problem:
Esports is a saturated market, every 16 year old wants to be a pro-gamer. How do the legitimate super stars stand out? In soccer, there are scouts that go to games and find raw talent. If you are the raw talent, how do you stand out? How do you get that big break?

The Solution:
LinkedIn for esports. For the user/gamer:

  • aggregate your stats / tournament results
  • show off your best clips
  • look for similar-skilled players

For an e-sports org:

  • find up and coming players by tournament results
  • find types of players: entry fraggers, support players, in-game leaders
  • view tournament highlights
  • engage with your community of supporters

For the community:

  • push the amateur / semi-pro scene by having one place to aggregate the results from smaller tournaments
  • have a clearer career path of how to go from amateur to semi-pro to pro
  • rather than everyone watching Summit1G and Shroud, showcase streamers that are one "division" above you, watch people that are close to your level.

Thoughts?

  1. 3

    Building a Marketplace is hard, because you have 2 problems:

    • Attracting players
    • Attractinc sponsors or whatever.

    Maybe https://dreamteam.gg/ is doing what you want?

    1. 1

      Yeh marketplace is hard because you have 2 user bases to keep happy but the flip side is that the more players you have, the more sponsors which means more users and so on.

      DreamTeam looks pretty good to be honest. Their perspective seems to be from a player trying to find a team or manage their teams but they have some interesting features.

      I was thinking of something similar but more from a build your career / CV type perspective.

    2. 1

      Came here to say exactly this. dreamteam is the one place which mostly looks like they're trying to build a network for players to link up!

      1. 1

        Yeh I'd agree, looks quite similar. I'd need to think about what they do well vs what I think they're missing. It's got a pretty solid UI/UX as well which is rare for this type of game platforms.

  2. 2

    Hey @pagey, nice catch on the problem.

    Here in Brazil, we have something very similar to what you describe.
    Gamersclub (https://gamersclub.com.br/) is a game matchmaking platform for CSGO where they promote a lot of tournaments in all kinds of levels, and every player that plays on Gamers Club have your profile with very detailed stats. Each level has its ranking, with the best players on top displaying their stats on the platform. (Ranking
    of players by level https://prnt.sc/suzt80) (Player profile with stats https://gamersclub.com.br/jogador/7564).

    Basically in Brazil, every new team or player is coming from GamersClub, a good example is "Detona Gaming" that starts playing in 2017 the low-level tournaments in GamersClub and last year they were playing at the ESL Pro League Season 10 Americas, against teams like ENVY that have some tier 1 pro players. Since them, they already earn ~$86,188 playing as professionals.

    Gamersclub even has a guide for you to play the championships. It's called "Road to Pro." https://gamersclub.com.br/campeonatos, where you start playing in some kind of "Open League" until you get to the "Pro League" that's sponsored by brands like DELL and RAZER.

    One of the owners of the Gamersclub is "Fallen" (https://www.hltv.org/player/2023/FalleN), a tier 1 CSGO player that basically introduces the idea of playing CSGO professionally in Brazil.

    Also, Gamersclub was acquired last year by Immortals, after they raise $30 million for esports expansion (https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/immortals-raises-30-million-for-esports-expansion-acquires-brazils-gamers-club/#:~:text=Global esports organization Immortals has,raised %2419 million in funding.)

    But yeah, Gamersclub is totally focused on CSGO and maybe still have a lack between recruiters and players, because it is more focused on the side of the players, not sure about the structure to recruiters to filter for players and etc.

    Anyway, I think that we may have something here to explore more on the side of the recruiters and the eSports organizations.

    So feel free to send me a message on twitter (@nthanssauro), I see that you are a software engineer and I am a product designer, passionate about the eSports sector, so maybe we can bring something good from all this.

    1. 1

      Wow this is epic, yeh this looks like a similar idea to what I was thinking. It would be a cool tool for a recruiter to find and recognise up and coming CSGO players.

      If we could bring this to the rest of the world with a less CSGO-centric perspective that would be cool.

      Also messaged you on twitter :)

  3. 2

    Hi!

    Same as Tiskified, I know nothing about esport but your idea sounds like it's solving a problem!

    You should probalby contact esport companies/teams & pro-gamers to discuss that idea.

    1. 1

      Yeh I'd need some feedback from the orgs on how they find and sign players

      1. 1

        From my limited (or vast, depending on perspectives) experience:

        • Teams who "hire" players will have a scouting person who will look at candidates or run open trials where given certain requirements you will be allowed to take part
        • smaller teams also have scouting but MOSTLY rely on open-trials

        The world of esports requires a lot of folks to be passionate and educated about this, for esports to explode in popularity (they're already on a hypergrowth path) that means that it's not only players that you will need on your platform, but also analysts, coaches, community managers, graphic experts...and LinkedIn's job marketplace looks like is slowly getting more and more esport job-openings!

        1. 1

          So are you saying a more esports focussed LinkedIn-type platform is a good thing?

          I think LinkediN is still valid for traditional "office jobs" but my idea would be around building your own gaming CV. For casual players it would be a list of achievements/ranks to show off the their friends. For more serious players, a place to showcase their amatuer tournament results, gaming clips and streams (twitch/mixer).

          1. 1

            I was saying that 99% of the jobs in esports aren't pro-gamers type of jobs but rather traditional jobs applied to esports i.e.

            sports coach -> esports coach
            sports analyst -> esports analyst
            social media coordinator -> esports social media coordinator

            hope this example is clearer

            1. 1

              Oh right yeh that makes sense, thanks!

  4. 1

    Saw this today. An org owner asking people to DM clips to be considered for their new Valorant team. What of this guy could do his own analysis and pick out players rather than limit it to who saw this tweet?

  5. 1

    Great idea but will be hard to execute as an indie. This one probably requires either a solid rotting in the esports community or a lot of $

    1. 1

      yeh i think for it to grow quickly then you could pump a lot of $ into marketing. As an indiehacker, I think the MVP would be building the best user page possible.

      As a gamer that plays multiple games, it would be cool to have a page I could share with friends that had:

      • my ranks + stats for each game
      • my top 3 favourite youtube clips of my gameplay
      • links to all my accounts on various platforms (steam, discord, battle.net)

      It would serve as a landing page for anyone that wanted to know what type of gamer I am, and could quickly evolve to showing tournament results, twitch streams, team I play for etc.

  6. 1

    Hey man

    Saw a start-up pitch this idea at Schulich School of Business and they won the competition. Check them out on LinkedIn.

    1. 1

      Cool, do you remember their name?

  7. 1

    I know a little about ESports and I think that a platform, if it doesn't exist, would be helpful. Teams recruit heavily on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch, obviously watching the player and them having a following is a factor. I'd say you would be looking at a platform for players to post clips and rankings from local and competitive tournaments.

    I'd say a place for players to interact, share clips, recruit for teams, find tournaments and have a platform for various games would be a good idea.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the feedback. I think that sums it up, there doesn't seem to be one place to show off your accomplishments as a player. On the other side, I don't think there's one place for orgs to scout talent (especially in games they aren't familiar with).

      I also think that YT or Twitch views isn't indicative of finding the "best" players.

  8. 1

    If you're serious about building this, let me know! Im the co-founder of Esports One - we have Millions of SoloQ player stats, 10 years of historical stats on amateur and pro-players across all major game titles, team of data science experts (our head of esports data science is Tim, founder of Oracles Elixir), ex coaches and analysts, community access (we own esportspedia.com and esportscalendar.com) and more that can help you bring this to life if you'd like to partner up!

    I agree, the existing competitors in this space arent doing it right :)

    1. 1

      Yeh it would be great to have a chat about this, I think there is potential for it to go in a lot of directions. @sharon what's the best way to reach out?

      I think there is some really interesting data science work to be done to identify types of players. I think it's easy in games like WoW or LoL where there is an infinite amount of data, I think the real challenge is in FPS games where the data is more limited and so how do you assess players?!

  9. 1

    Great idea man! Great market (e-sports)! Do it!

    1. 1

      Thanks! I still need to think around competitor research and MVP but wanted peoples feedback on the idea. The market is definitely a growing one!

  10. 1

    I have to say I like the community aspect of it. Specially the last point sounds interesting. So does finding players by tournament results, but maybe would even be more interesting getting just tournament stats, and then extracting also that information.

    Please prove me wrong, but I'm going to try to make some counter arguments so you can work on them.

    First it sounds like a very small market, even if you span across all e-sport worthy game, the amount of people that go pro is VERY small. That's why you don't see professional sport players, or any other kind of competitions on LinkedIn. The way they market themselves is through the community channel (Reddit, Twitch, YouTube...)

    Then why an organization would use your "premium" version? What is the value preposition for them? Why not discover the players and go directly into contact with them rather than talk through you?

    1. 1

      Thanks for taking the time to think about this.

      Regarding the small market, I think that's one of the problems that could be solved. Esports is HUGE but the pro division is a tiny fraction of gamers, it would be cool to build something that brings in pro, semi-pro, amateur divisions that aspiring pros can climb through.

      Let's say you're an esports org but you want to build an "academy", how would you find players to invest time into?

      The value prop to an organisation is essentially the same as a recruiter for "normal" jobs. It takes a lot of time to find good candidates, so we could help with the search. These are the top "support" players that 1) speak your teams language 2) have tournament experience and 3) have the right attitude.

  11. 1

    Sounds like a great idea! Though I know nothing of ESports, I can easily see how this could scale. How do you intend to validate this? And what is your revenue model?

    1. 1

      It would be a marketplace model, so both gamers and esports orgs would need to find this useful. For aspiring esports gamers, I feel like it's a "nice-to-have" but by no means essential unless there are esports orgs using it, and vice-versa.

      I guess I would need to ask esports orgs how they currently recruit talent. If they have considered taking on unknown players that show raw potential. I have a feeling that esports is a very who-you-know business.

      Monetisation: long-term it could be a finders fee to the esports orgs as a % of the gamers salary. Basically very similar to recruiters on LinkedIN.

      1. 1

        I think it's a great space to be in and you could do well.
        Why not start with just one side of the marketplace, the players?
        A maybe not call it linkedin for esports it can be confusing.
        There're many ways you could make money with this, not necessarily the way Linkedin does it.
        You're on to something, that's for sure.
        Keep us posted 🙂

        1. 1

          Yep I think this is where I would start. Creating a cool product for users to showcase their achievements.

          LinkedIn for Esports was just a title for this post 😁

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