Gm and welcome to the lobby.

Palworld, layoffs, Palworld, layoffs, if your timeline has been anything like ours this probably sounds familiar — In other news, esports viewership and what it means, Twitch’s latest controversy, the New York Subliners’ launch a loyalty program, and gambling saves esports?

Before we dive in: We're excited to announce the newest member of Private Lobby: GameSquare VP of Brand Strategy, Brandon Painter! Brandon is joining the team and will be contributing to the newsletter each week.

Justin and I are stoked to have Brandon on board. Brandon’s going to play a big role in taking our content to the next level. Welcome, Brandon! - Zach

Ok, grab your coffee, ready up, and let’s drop in 🪂
Here’s what we have for you today:

• Esports viewership by the numbers and what it means 📺

• Layoffs continue with Riot & MSFT announcing significant layoffs 🌧️

• Twitch sparks controversy with changes to sub payouts 💥 

• Can gambling save esports with partnership deals? 💸

• NYSL rewarding fans with new loyalty program 🎁 

• Palworld: The first Indie darling of 2024 with record breaking sales 🐸

📺 Esports viewership by the numbers

2024 esports is here! Esports leagues have kicked off their seasons. Let’s break down how viewership is looking and explore what it means.

📊 Just The Numbers

All viewership analytics provided by Esports Charts

👀 Our POV

League of Legends - LCS 
One of the world's most popular esports seems to be struggling in North America for the fifth consecutive year. Even with changing the LCS schedule back to the weekends versus the midweek matches, the LCS saw a decrease in average viewers & hours watched. A couple ideas on what could be causing this trend…

1) One of the biggest pro personalities in the league Doublelift has hung it up (again). It seems as if the LCS will now look for its new “face of the league” personality that fans can attach to.

2) The LCS has gone from 10 teams to 8 teams - resulting in fewer matches -> less air time -> less opportunity for hours watched.
 

Call of Duty - CDL Major 1 
We can point to a couple of reasons for the rise in viewership in this major compared to Major 1 last year.
 
1) Co-streaming in full force with Scump & ZooMa assisting viewership numbers.

2) Prominent brands & teams making it deep into the tournament (OpTic Texas & Atlanta FaZe).

3) Classic maps make it easy for older COD players to pick up with maps from the original MW2 (2009) being imported into the competitive ruleset.

4) COD is still one of the most popular mainstream games. From professional athletes such as Jalen Suggs to Barstool creator Jersey Jerry, more people than you know have their eyes on COD.

I’m excited to see how the CDL can take advantage of these factors going into the rest of the season. 🦾 


Counter-Strike 2 - BLAST Premier Spring 2024 Groups 
At first glance, it might be confusing why BLAST has seen peak viewership decrease, but this is most likely due to the rise of VALORANT in North America and the cultural shift there. VALORANT has taken over North America pulling fans & organizations from Counter-Strike. However, Counter-Strike is still heavily ingrained in European esports culture.

Compared to the BLAST Spring 2023 group stage, the English stream was the only stream seeing a decrease in peak viewership this year. Streams covered in Russian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, and French all saw increases in peak viewership showing how even though Counter-Strike might be losing some NA viewership, it’s still growing in Europe.

It’ll be interesting to see how event hosts look to capture the North American audience again.


Apex Legends - NA ALGS 
Apex has become one of my personal favorite esports to watch with its “Match Point Format” during tournaments. With players streaming their point of view during matches, fans have immediate access to their POV & comms. Off of a successful string of events dating back to the 2022 championship, I’m looking forward to seeing how Apex can keep the momentum going into the 2024 year.

- Justin Palacios (Private Lobby)

🌧️ Layoffs continue with Riot & MSFT

Riot Games and Microsoft continued the 2024 trend of mass layoffs. Riot announced it was cutting 530 employees (approximately 11% of its staff). Meanwhile, Microsoft's gaming division announced it was laying off 1,900 employees (approximately 8% of its gaming division workforce), a move following its recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

The layoffs reflect the ongoing pressures on the gaming industry to adapt to market conditions, streamline their operations, and push towards profitability.

👀 Our POV

Another week of layoffs. Rough numbers show that layoff numbers in 2024 are already creeping close to the numbers in all of 2023.

A lot of incredibly talented people have been affected by these layoffs, with employees at both Riot’s League Championship Series (the LCS) and Activision Blizzard’s esports operations being let go as well.

My take: Though not a subject I’d like to talk about at all, it’s worth highlighting how Riot Games handled their announcement. Riot handled the situation quite differently than Microsoft.

Riot Games openly shared the news with its employees and the public, while Microsoft's layoffs were initially leaked to the media before the company officially addressed the situation. Riot also announced it was offering 6-months of severance pay and health benefits. I hope to see this become standard procedure for how companies take care of their employees in these situations.

It is worth noting that the reasons behind each companies’ layoffs were definitely different, with Riot Games emphasizing the need for focus and sustainability, while Microsoft's decision was made in the context of its recent acquisition and the broader tech industry's job cuts.
 
- Zach Eller (Private Lobby)

💸 Can gambling save esports?

Now that you’ve scrolled beyond the easily-debatable headline, let’s get into it. Three large esports partnerships have been announced in the gambling realm to start the year:

• NAVI and GG.BET expand partnership for 2024

• OpTic names FanDuel as Official Sportsbook Partner

• FaZe Clan partners with crypto casino, Rollbit

A key fact to acknowledge here is that each one of these partners are uniquely different in their positioning within the gaming market. GG.BET is a platform for betting on esports competition; FanDuel is one of the largest sportsbooks and daily fantasy platforms currently licensed for use in the US; and Rollbit is “Crypto’s Most Innovative Casino” that allows NFT gambling and betting on a variety of competition using BTC, ETH and other cryptocurrencies including their own Rollbit Coin (RLB).

The terms of these deals are largely undisclosed, however FaZe President Erik Anderson has been quoted saying the Rollbit deal in particular is “one of the largest sponsorship deals in the history of Counter-Strike and esports more broadly.”

👀 Our POV

While the ethics and moral crossroads of taking on partners representing some of the largest vices in our culture (gambling, alcohol, cannabis and the like) can be polarizing, there is no denying the amount of capital some of those organizations can bring in while aligning themselves with one another.

Collectively, the Private Lobby team wanted to note that we don’t believe esports “needs saving” at this juncture. While naysayers are loud and the last year has been bumpy for the industry, no category partner will be the saving grace to us all because we know the market is already correcting itself while droves of data show viewership is higher than ever– just glance at Justin’s article in this very newsletter for supporting details.

However, it will be interesting to see how the normalization of these types of platforms will ultimately impact culture. We already think that scriptwriters nestled in Vegas penthouses are determining who wins what in leagues like the NFL to satisfy stakeholders… Why would esports be any different?
 
- Brandon Painter (Private Lobby)

💥 Twitch sparks controversy

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy in a recent blog post announced major changes to the ways Twitch streamers earn money from the platform.

The Changes:
Twitch announces two updates to help larger streamers with a third that potentially crushes smaller streamers.

• The $100,000 Cap on Twitch’s partner plus revenue split is being removed. The previous split was 50/50 for sub revenue beyond $100,000. Streamers in the partner plus program will now earn 70/30 for all of their sub revenue.

  • Zach: This is great. In isolation this is nothing but a positive change and makes Twitch slightly more competitive with Kick in regards to payouts for the largest streamers.

• A new tier is being added to Twitch’s partner plus program. Previously, streamers who manage 350 paid subs for three months straight become eligible for a 70/30 split for the following 12 months, even if they dip below the 350 paid sub threshold.
  
  The new tier for sub revenue carries a 60/40 split and is made available to streamers that earn 100 plus points -- the threshold to reach the existing 70/30 split has been reduced to 300 plus points.

  • Zach: Twitch says this will mean more streamers will have access to improved revenue splits, if that holds true this is great but we will have to monitor the situation to confirm.

• Prime subs are being changed. Prime subscriptions, made available to Twitch users that have subscriptions to Amazon Prime previously paid streamers $2.50 in the US - - with the new changes, Prime subs will pay $2.25 in the US.

  • Zach: This is pretty rough for streamers and shows a clear effort by Twitch to reduce costs. A lot of streamers stick to Twitch because of Prime subs. With audiences being able to reward their streamers with something they’re already paying for is a big part of what makes streaming full-time possible for a lot of streamers. Looking at what a streamer with 1,500 Prime subs would be making as an example, previously the streamer would have made $45,000 a year with the $2.50 split from their Prime subs. With the $2.25 split, the same streamer will only be making $40,500 a year from their Prime subs.

⚡ Quick Take

Could Twitch be in trouble? YouTube and TikTok streaming are doing great and I’ve found myself personally choosing YouTube streams over Twitch streams just because I was already on YouTube. I don’t think Twitch is going anywhere, but the cracks are showing.

- Zach Eller (Private Lobby)

🎁NYSL rewarding fans

The New York Subliners recently released their “Subliner Battle Pass”, rewarding fans for doing what most fans already do! The Subliners Battle Pass gives fans “NYXP” for completing simple tasks such as setting up their profile, following NYSL on social media, and interacting with social posts posted by NYSL & their players.

NYSL has also integrated its sponsors providing fans with quests revolving around their partners for bonus XP. For example, if someone flies with United, one of their key partners, and tweets a photo they’ll be rewarded with bonus XP.

With all of this XP fans are accumulating, they can redeem it from a wide variety of rewards such as merch, gift cards, game sessions with the pros, or even a fully custom NYSL-themed PC. 

👀 Our POV

I love this program of rewarding those that support you the most. It also seems to be a win-win-win for fans, the organization, and their partners.

For the fans, you get to have a voice when it comes to making some decisions with NYSL, AND you have a wide variety of cool rewards to choose from just for supporting NYSL.

For the sponsors of NYSL, it’s another way to tap into their core audience, incentivizing fans to use your product or service.

Lastly for NYSL themselves, you could see increased engagement, but also access to more data of your audience to better fine-tune how you interact with them.
 
- Justin Palacios (Private Lobby)

🐸 Palworld: The first Indie darling of 2024

Palworld is 2024's first breakout star. That's not opinion... that's fact. It eclipsed the release of the next entry into the beloved Prince of Persia franchise from Ubisoft by ~10x.

Context: "Pokemon with guns" is a fun, meme-tastic synopsis for any title. However, many many players have discovered that the depth behind this tag is almost done a disservice by that description. Imagine Minecraft's survival building and crafting (or LEGO Fortnite, et al) paired with the timeless fun of capturing and training monsters... met with the absurdity of modern weapons (ex. introduce an assault rifle to Monster Hunter).

Per an article from our friends at Stream Hatchet, chat mentions for Palworld were almost nonexistent until about 2 weeks ago. Then everything blew up. The smaller indie team of roughly 50 have achieved:

• Becoming a title sporting the second-most concurrent players of 𝙖𝙣𝙮 game on Steam (last I saw it was 1.8MM... second only to PUBG's 3.25MM prior to shifting to an f2p model) -- beating out Counter-Strike, DOTA 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 to name a few

• Becoming just the sixth game 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 to cross 1MM concurrent players

• Selling over 8 𝙢𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙘𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙚𝙨 copies in just the first week on the market (5 milli of those in the first three days… for context, Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man sold 3.3 million in the same time span)

The team raised about $7MM in funds, and spent nearly 3 years in development, to see revenues of $100MM+ over the course of a stellar week.

A story making its rounds on the internet, quoting the CEO of the shop that has created this bugged masterpiece, hints at the fact that they started the company without knowing how to make video games and their first hire was someone in secondary school who could lead the way. Now, that’s a rags to riches situation if I’ve ever heard one.

👀 Our POV

Brand safety may be a massive question mark for Palworld in particular, but the main takeaway from this story is that you never know when a new title is going to pop. In this climate, and with a remarkable amount of new technology (featuring generative AI), the next Call of Duty or Super Mario Bros. can come from anywhere.

It’s key to build agile programs and infrastructure that allows teams/marketers to act when something new is trending. Not to mention the fact an investment in platforms that can inform when something new is bubbling to the surface could just be the competitive advantage your brand needs to become synonymous with the zeitgeist of tomorrow.
 
- Brandon Painter (Private Lobby)

🤝 Share Private Lobby

Help your colleagues, friends, and teammates stay up to date on the latest gaming & esports marketing news by sharing our link: https://privatelobby.gg/subscribe

Disclaimer: our views are ours and in no way represent those of our employers.