Strengthening the Indian Esports Ecosystem

With interest in Esports skyrocketing these days it’s important to understand what goes into making a successful and thriving ecosystem. While the craze around Esports is driving an increased amount of investment, prompting many organizations to start hosting events; what is the best course of action to ensure healthy, sustainable development of the Esports scene within any particular region? In our case INDIA!

Esports much like traditional sports requires a similar pyramid approach; creating a wide base with opportunities; sustainable career and development options at lower tiers and a clear path to work their way up to the elite tiers of the competition. Our approach at The Esports Club? is to help ensure Indian Esports develops in a way that provides opportunities and a clear roadmap for aspiring gamers rather than just create events for the elite teams in the region. Our Esports is still an emerging space and there are only a handful of tournament organizers and event producers capable of creating large, long term and sustainable Esports properties. While most are still focused on elite teams and opportunities that don’t necessarily promote development of the Esports at the grassroots level; we adopted an approach with two unique properties that help fuel the growth of Esports - #1 TEC Pro League and #2 TEC Challenger Series. 

#1 The Esports Club Pro League

The TEC Pro League draws learnings from successful sports leagues across the world and creates its own mini ecosystem for teams to play and thrive in. Unlike more mature Esports markets that have multiple Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 event’s for multiple titles; the Indian Esports Calendar is unorganized and sporadic in nature. There is no continuity, no long term vision or goal; these factors hamper Esports development and progress as teams don’t have clarity to be able to invest their time and money in a particular game. As a result the ecosystem suffers giving us very few Top Tier teams and almost no emerging talent in India. An Esports Athlete should see a significant value and roadmap if he/she decides to invest his time, energy and stakes in a particular Game. They need a platform that constantly validates, encourage and reward them no matter what tier they are falling in.

This is where our TEC Pro League comes with it’s own ecosystem with 3 divisions, catering to very different skill levels; all divisions with their independent prize pool. This creates an opportunity for mid tier and low tier teams like never before. The multiple divisions lets them develop at their skill level while also providing some amount of full time Esports earning opportunity. The TEC Pro League then goes on to continue rewarding teams for progress and improvement with an intricate relegation and promotion system enabling teams to move from division to division in their quest for glory while enabling them to compete for higher prize pools along the way! Division 1 get’s the lion's share of the prize pool with smaller and independent prize pools for both Division 2 and 3. In addition to the prize pool we also reward individual achievers (MVPs) in each division with products in each season.

TEC Pro League is designed for long term and sustainable opportunities both for Gamers & Sponsor Brands. We have two running Pro Leagues currently that goes on for 5 Months.

We have chosen two popular FPS Esport Titles for our Pro League targeting India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka Regions.

Counter Strike : Global Offensive (CS:GO) with Dell Gaming as our Title Sponsor, Powered by Western Digital, Associate sponsored by Zotac Gaming & ACT Fibernet

•  Duration: Oct 2020 to Feb 2021 (5 Months)
• Prize Pool: INR 15L (66% Div 1, 21% Div 2, 13% Div 3)

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six? Siege with Western Digital as our Title Sponsor & ACT Fibernet as our Associate Sponsor. We have also secured direct support from the publisher UBISOFT that helps to grow the R6 community in the region

• Duration: Oct 2020 to Feb 2021 (5 Months)
• Prize Pool: INR 10L (63% Div 1, 25% Div 2, 12% Div 3)

At this point I’d also like to highlight that an Esports ecosystem, while catering to the needs of the players also needs an extensive content calendar around it in order to be commercially successful. The days of slapping on a logo on a hastily prepared livestream are long gone with spectators responding well to cleaner, well designed broadcast and content modules. Competitive video games have existed since time immemorial, however it is the content, the storylines, the presentation and showbiz around competitive gaming that have taken us from gaming to what we call ESPORTS. Our Pro Leagues continue to innovate season after season with broadcast storylines and various content modules on social media that really make the players the superstars of our league. This has proved to be invaluable in driving up engagement and excitement with each passing matchday!

#2 The Esports Club Challenger Series

The TEC Challenger Series adopts a different approach by reducing the long term commitment from players, teams and brands while sticking to a format to reward as many teams as possible and in our case Top 8. These Top teams will be receiving a payout during the monthly elimination style tournaments.

The Challenger Series is targeted more towards new and upcoming titles that may not have an existing base of Pro players. For our first Challenger series we have chosen the most popular title -

Valorant with LG Ultragear as our Title Sponsor, powered by AMD and Lenovo, while ACT Fibernet being our Associate sponsor. 

• Duration: Aug 2020 to Dec 2020
• Prize Pool: INR 9L (Top 8 Teams)

Over the period a Challenger series title can scale to a Pro League. The response to our Valorant TEC Challenger series has been phenomenal and we look forward to expanding to a Valorant Pro League in the future.

Our formats help create long term opportunities across CS:GO, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and Valorant within the South Asian region across all tiers of competition; Professional, Semi Professional and Amateur. However opportunity isn’t alone in itself, we had to ensure sufficient prize pools across our IP’s to be able to adequately split them to trickle down to all tiers. We put together a massive prize pool of INR 34 Lakhs(Approximately $50K USD) to ensure our platform provided enough incentive to aspiring athletes. 

The Esports Club (TEC) is committed to building a strong Esports ecosystem that caters to the needs of our Players and Sponsors alike.

Vamsi Krishna

Founder - The Esports Club