eSports #RoadtoYANA tournament

Very pleased with our latest FIFA20 esports tournament, all remotely managed over the weekend for LDNUTD.

The #RoadtoYANA FIFA20 Tournament in aid of the CALM Charity, The Campaign Against Living Miserably, a leading a movement against suicide, the single biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK, was designed to find a budding new amateur gaming star.

This is Oliver Weingarten’s eSports team who we have been assisting since its start up almost 2 years ago., and the concept for LDNUTD is fabulous, a grassroots esports organisation designed to get youngsters into the team and help change their lives, and has created wonderful opportunities for gamers to prepare for going pro into the potentially lucrative esports arena. This latest event offered the winner a place in the forthcoming YANA e-tournament against many of the top pros in the country. Entry was open to all and managed by Battelfy who have  been powering esports for many years, and who coordinated and ran the tournament superbly with the gamers.

As a ‘no-budget’, for charity production, it meant simultaneously coordinating 21 people online with their live streams  and ensuing back-channel comms, including the final 8 players who had never been involved in an event of this type, 2 casters, and a presenter, so the production coordination in running the event live, for almost 4 hours was significant! As  host broadcaster, 1080 Media TV brought in long time IT partners Northcote Internet to manage the bandwidth and tech required with their Wowza servers and fibre lines, given that the whole event was reliant on these amateur gamers (very variable!) home internet connections. This meant compromises had to be made – no gamer-cams due to bandwidth, but the casters John Pritchard and Southampton eSports star ‘Venny’, managed the commentary superbly, while Presenter Amy (@thatsportspice) linked the show throughout on cue, interviewing winners of each game live.

Streaming to the Twitch homepage, the show achieved over 70,000 unique viewers and 250,000 total views over the 7 matches, and with a decisive 11-3 goal aggregate win in the 2-leg final, Dennis Green (aged 16 from Dorset) now moves on to represent LDNUTD and face the pros in the main event next week. He said, ‘’I enjoyed it but I haven’t really processed it yet! It’s brilliant that I’ve won it, definitely didn’t think that would happen, it’s just amazing’’. We wish him the best of luck…

Thanks to the supporting companies – G-Science, Low Cost Glasses, eSwap Pro controller & Thrustmaster.