ATLANTA — Turner Sports and WME/IMG kicked off Season 2 of the ELEAGUE on Friday night in Atlanta with 16 qualifying teams and a condensed tournament format around the game, Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
On Friday nights over the next two months, matches will be broadcast on Twitch followed by live event coverage on TBS at 10 pm EST. Saturdays will see teams compete solely on the digital streaming platform.
ELEAGUE, which hopes to build off Season 1 from earlier this summer, attracted more than 3.4 million new viewers on TBS in addition to 25 million-plus video streams on Twitch for live event coverage. Across the 10-week season, ELEAGUE also garnered nearly 60 million social impressions on Twitter and Facebook, too.
SportTechie recently sat down with Vice President/General Manager Christina Alejandre to discuss learnings from Season 1, eSports content as as whole, how the production of ELEAGUE differs from traditional Turner programming and her thoughts on NBA players and team owners entering the gaming world.
On what ELEAGUE and Turner Sports learned from Season 1 earlier this Spring: I think one of the biggest learnings overall from Turner Sports is the space is a lot more fluid than traditional stick and ball sports. You have a lot of team members that might be changing teams during the season, and there might not be a lot of regulation around that. You have a lot of different organizations running leagues at the same time, so it’s a really crowded space. From a scheduling perspective, that can get really challenging because what we don’t want to do — and ultimately any of the organizations I think — is put teams in a position where they have to choose what competition they participate in. For the community, there can be a lot of fatigue. There’s only so much Counter-Strike content you can absorb at once…We have regular conversations with other tournament organizers so we’re not stepping on each other’s toes, and if we are, it’s not on purpose, and we’re giving them a heads up about what’s going on.
On what has changed from a programming standpoint: Last season, we started on Tuesday and had content Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and everything culminated on Friday. It was anywhere from 20-30 hours of content. There’s a lot of fatigue on both sides of the camera, so to speak: teams, players and audience. The matches didn’t matter as much. What we wanted to do for Season 2 was make the format much more concise…We wanted to make it so that every single match you’re watching really truly matters and drives the outcome of that Group stage.
On eSports and gaming fans clamoring for more content: There’s a need for good, quality content. We don’t want to create content for the sake of creating content because we want to fill the space. We want to create meaningful content, whether that is the shoulder content we develop for our tournament or the game play itself. When we refer to eSports, I think a lot of people think, ‘It’s everything.’ But you really have to look at all of the individual games under eSports as separate sports underneath that umbrella. … For us with Counter-Strike in particular, it’s a fairly crowded space. There are a lot of different tournaments running it. You look at other games where the publisher might control that a little more tightly. For Riot and League of Legends, their championship series LCS, there’s one LCS and that is where everyone is competing.
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On how the ELEAGUE compares from a production perspective to other content housed within Turner Sports/Studios: When I started here at Turner Sports, one of my big concerns was that eSports would be treated not at the same level that any of the other sports are. The great thing is you can look here and see that ELEAGUE is treated with the same care and attention as the NBA stuff that we do, the NCAA that we do. When we first started, we had Emmy Award-winning directors and producers working on it. From that respect, when you compare it to other things that Turner Sports is working on, it’s not treated any differently. When it comes to platforms — Twitch, linear on TBS — we really treat our broadcast as platform agnostic. We don’t treat a Twitch broadcast any differently than we would a TBS broadcast. The same level of production is going on at the 6 o’clock on Twitch on Friday night and then on TBS at 10 p.m. There’s no difference between the two broadcasts. From a technical perspective, there’s a lot more technology under the hood that’s going on for eSports than there is for the NBA…With us, we have practice rooms that are all 100 percent wired so players can play and practice. On our stage, we have 10 computers, and you have to make sure those computers are cool enough to be playing. You have the mice, the keyboard, making sure the software is up to date. You have to make sure you’re keeping track of the correct software and the correct builds of the game. From that perspective, it’s a much bigger undertaking but Turner has adapted to it very well.
On her day-to-day role with ELEAGUE: I don’t truly have a day-to-day. I wake up different every morning and something different happens. So whether it’s working with our partners, WME/IMG, trying to create product. Looking at new games that we might potentially want to focus on. Whether it’s marketing or social media. Maybe there’s production issues. It literally depends on the day. It might be speaking on a panel about eSports because we at ELEAGUE have a firm belief that what is good for eSports is good for us. So, it’s going out there on behalf of ELEAGUE and making sure we have a say in this “new” sport in society and having a say in helping influence that.
On current and former athletes and sports team owners entering eSports in 2016 and what it has done for ELEAGUE and gaming: It’s all great. eSports has been around for a long time, and it really has not received the exposure that it deserves. I wouldn’t credit it to ELEAGUE or anything like that. We’re here to give it this framework and exposure. Having these large organizations and companies throw their hat in the ring and be involved I think is great. It gives it additional exposure and additional validity in the sports space. It’s something that I firmly believe will start to be…treated like traditional stick and ball sports.