Why We Invested In Nerd Street
The current professional esports landscape has struggled to gain meaningful traction in the US for a multitude of reasons, including cultural perception, business models, and relationships with publishers. We believe that expanding access to gaming venues for everyday gamers can help tackle these challenges by broadening access to competitive gaming, increasing both player participation and viewership, and laying a foundation for widespread adoption.
Traditional esports venues have been highly capital-intensive and have struggled to maintain consistent user engagement. Colleges and universities, with their constant supply of eager players, offer an ideal opportunity, but they often lack the expertise and resources to implement these venues in a cost-effective way. This gap has created an opportunity for Nerd Street to step in and work with these entities to establish a national network of gaming venues.
Nerd Street not only helps universities build these venues but also manages events, tournaments, and sponsorships. This allows schools to sidestep the complexity of building a venue while benefiting from coordinated tournaments, summer camps, and after-school programs that benefit their students and communities.
These venues serve as vital hubs that connect students, universities, and the broader community, fostering competition at the youth, collegiate, and even professional levels.
- Student benefits: Students gain access to high-quality gaming infrastructure, enabling and enhancing their competitive experience and creating a physical community for those who share a passion for gaming.
- University benefits: University’s leverage these venues as a powerful recruitment tool and gain access to advanced computers for non-gaming applications like CAD or AI. Additionally, these facilities open the door to more meaningful community engagement.
In addition to the immediate benefits schools and students receive, we believe that as more schools adopt Nerd Street and their venue management software, more competitions will be held, more sponsorship dollars will flow into the ecosystem, and publishers will be more inclined to participate in the ecosystem. Not only will Nerd Street act as a social gaming hub for the school, it has the potential to act as a central gaming hub for all of competitive gaming.
Dedicated gaming venues will help elevate, normalize, and legitimize esports as a serious pursuit for the youth in this country. Placing gaming facilities in universities opens the door for new audiences to be exposed to competitive gaming, improving monetization, and driving publishers to the ecosystem.
Our team at Konvoy is excited to support Nerd Street and its CEO John Fazio. Their commitment to exposing new players and viewers to the world of competitive gaming is driving the future of the industry, and we are excited to be part of this transformative journey.
