Riot's New FPS

Live Streaming Report

2019 was a very important year for the live-streaming of gaming. The top competitors in North America are Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Facebook Gaming, and Mixer. This week, the streaming analytics company, Stream Hatchet, released their 2019 Streaming Insights report.

The report showcased some interesting trends such as Facebook becoming the mobile gaming platform of choice, the streaming wars not showing immediate benefit for Mixer and YouTube, Fortnite is the casual game of choice while League of Legends dominates the professional scene.

We were thrilled to contribute to this report via our takeaways below. Other contributors to this report included Doug Watson (Esports Analytics at Riot Games), Mike Lee (Esports agent at United Talent Agency), and Darren Cox (CEO at Torque Esports).

Riot Games: new FPS game (“Valorant”)

Riot Games, the publisher and developer of wildly popular MOBA League of Legends, is releasing a new character-based first-person shooter (FPS), Valorant. Valorant is looking to compete with two very different games within the esports FPS space; Overwatch and CS:GO.

As this game launches in the summer of 2020, we will see if Riot Games can successfully launch a new title in a completely new genre. They are directly competing with and looking to displace two popular esports (CSGO and Overwatch) that have significant investment behind them. Here’s a great video that showcases the gameplay of Valorant.

HBO: creating a TV series based on a video game

Craig Mazin, the creator of the limited series Chernobyl, is reteaming with HBO to adapt The Last of Us, the massive Sony PlayStation video game franchise. The Last of Us won numerous “game of the year” awards and went on to sell more than 17 million copies across both its original release on the PlayStation 3 and a remastered version on PlayStation 4. The writer and creative director of the game, Neil Druckmann, is also involved and will work with Mazin to pen and executive produce what is intended to be a series.

This follows the launch of The Witcher, a series on Netflix, which was also a video game that was made into a TV series. Now HBO is doing the same thing with “The Last of Us” on their streaming platform. I expect this trend to continue as gaming continues to have a strong influence on culture.

‍FLASHPOINT: adds another franchise to its CSGO league

North American organization Envy Gaming has bought into FLASHPOINT, the upcoming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive league operated by FACEIT. Team Envy will be the seventh founding team of the league, with a buy-in cost of $2 million.

Team Envy joins Immortals Gaming Club, OverActive Media, Cloud9, Gen.G, Dignitas, and c0ntact Gaming as a founding partner of the team-owned league. FLASHPOINT is a CS:GO league that is partially owned by the teams, the first of its kind. All matches will be played offline in a live studio environment with two seasons per year.