Counter Logic Gaming, the esports company in which Madison Square Garden owns a majority stake, has inked a hardware and content-creation partnership with OMEN by HP that will see esports players consulting on new gaming technologies and creating content for social media and Twitch.
As part of the deal, OMEN will be the official PC and monitor partner of Counter Logic Gaming (CLG), providing hardware for practice and competition. Its logo will be on all official CLG team jerseys.
In exchange, the gaming company will create content for OMEN’s Twitch channel, which will include player live streams, and contribute player content across all of OMEN’s social channels.
OMEN will host monthly streams with current CLG players or icons that will include a new streaming series that feature pros giving lessons from top esports titles, including League of Legends, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Super Smash Bros., H1ZI and Rainbow6. The CLG has teams across all of those esports titles.
“We’ve already got some awesome plans underway with CLG,” Chin Wu, HP’s AMS PC Gaming Marketing Manager, said in a statement.
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Throughout the partnership, OMEN and CLG will work together to provide players and coaches with resources to further their development, while CLG players will consult with HP product engineers as they develop gaming hardware.
“We are always searching for opportunities to enhance CLG’s player performance, and that makes OMEN by HP a perfect partner as the leader in gaming PCs across the world,” CLG COO Nick Allen said in a statement. “We’re excited to advance CLG’s position in esports alongside OMEN by HP and create amazing content for the best fans in esports.”
SportTechie Takeaway:
Major technology companies, notably Intel and HP, have been expanding their presence in esports, just as traditional sports owner are doing the same. In November, Intel and OMEN announced what they believed was the largest consumer brand sponsorship of any esports property with a major multiyear financial and marketing investment in Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch League, a new esports league that’s mirroring conventional sports with city-based franchises. Twitch paid a reported $90 million for the rights to stream the first two seasons of the Overwatch League.
A major incentive for both Silicon Valley and traditional sports owners is the access esports gives them to streaming technology and younger demographics. For both of those reasons, the Golden State Warriors joined the North America League of Legends Championship Series this year (in which CLG also plays) with their new team the Golden Guardians. In an interview with SportTechie in November, Golden State Warriors assistant general manager Kirk Lacob said the basketball franchise, which also has an NBA 2K League team, wanted to learn from esports as the world “shifts the way it consumes.”