Gaming Makes History

July 24, 2024

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

  • An Update On Olympic Esports 🥇

  • OpTic Win It All At COD Champs 🏆

  • Discord & SpongeBob Team Up For 25th Anniversary 🎮

  • Fortnite Collabs With Tesla’s Cybertruck & Fall Guys 👀

  • Spotify’s Creator-led Tentpole Event ⚽

📱 Avoid The Noise Better Than Ever

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🥇 An Update On Olympic Esports

We covered this last week and now history was made! The International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted in favor of the Olympic Esports Games. The first edition will be held in 2025 in Saudi Arabia.

🏆 OpTic Win It All At COD Champs

source: OpTic Gaming

The Call Of Duty League 2024 season ended this past weekend with their annual “Call of Duty Champs”. The event has been crowning champions with massive million-dollar prize pools every year since 2013.

One thing that made this Champs weekend different is that it was hosted by OpTic Gaming — typically the event has been hosted by Activision, the league organizers. However, Corey Dunn & the OpTic events team did not disappoint.

🫂 Showing The Sponsors Love

OpTic has an all-star lineup of sponsors, with names like CashApp, Wingstop, PrizePicks, and more supporting the organization. In the venue, a couple of their sponsors had on-site activations. PrizePicks had their booth showcasing their daily fantasy & lines for the matches coming up. Scuf had a shop showing off their controllers, but also hosted signings with talent & players, and also had beanbags set out for fans to catch the matches.

One of my favorite on-site activations was with Melt Ice Cream  — a DFW-based ice cream brand that partnered with OpTic to give away free ice cream from the Melt Ice Cream Truck to the first 100 fans at the venue. I love this because fans will get to the venue early to secure a good seat, and with how hot it is in Texas waiting outside for hours can’t be enjoyable. 🥴

OpTic even found ways to highlight their partners that weren’t able to do on-site activations, such as WingStop. Wingstop ads were shown off to the crowd throughout the venue with massive ads highlighting their new flavor. Additionally, WingStop rewarded select ticket holders with a chance to hangout and watch games from the WingStop Suite, a special surprise for fans.

📊 Viewership — By The Numbers

OpTic’s Scump brought in 3.11 Million views compared to 3.85 Million views on the official CDL stream as OpTic won Call of Duty Champs for the first time since 2017.

A massive weekend for OpTic and Scump helped elevate this years Champs to the third most viewed Call of Duty tournament in history, 2024 CDL Champs viewership peaking at 283,184 viewers, according to Esports Charts, only behind 2023 Champs and 2020 Champs. The power of the OpTic and Scump's fanbase was on display in a big way this weekend, not just in the sold out Allen Event Center but online as well.

Previous Champs numbers (includes watch parties): 

  • 2018: 324,086

  • 2019: 189,217

  • 2020: 331,558 

  • 2021: 238,794 

  • 2022: 275,244

  • 2023: 294,178 

  • 2024: 283,184


👀 Our POV

Overall this years Call of Duty Champs was a huge success. As someone who attended the event, I loved the layout and activations. The sponsor integrations felt natural and weren’t forced to check a deliverable.

Viewership-wise — the decline is a slight concern, especially considering how well OpTic did winning the whole event. I think having the event on YouTube over Twitch plays a big part in that when it comes to viewership but it’s not the only issue. Following the last major of the event, COD League socials went silent for 5 days. Not a single post highlighting Champs being the next event. I feel like it was a missed opportunity to capitalize on the tight battles between the 5th-10th seeded teams fighting for a spot at COD Champs.

Usually, COD Champs will feature some sort of preview of the upcoming game to help bring in the casual viewer who is excited about the next game. Even at older events fans could even play test builds of the new COD to get a sneak peek of the next COD coming out. However, there was nothing showcasing Black Ops 6. The only thing was you could win a chance at getting a beta code by watching & linking your account, but multiple people were having issues getting that set up.

- Justin Palacios (Private Lobby)

🎮 Discord & SpongeBob Team Up For 25th Anniversary

source: Discord

July 17th, 2024, marked SpongeBob SquarePants’ 25th anniversary! To celebrate, Discord and SpongeBob teamed up to create a special SpongeBob SquarePants avatar collection, available in the Discord shop from July 18th to August 15th.

This collection includes seven exclusive avatar decorations and five profile effects inspired by SpongeBob and his friends like Patrick, Sandy, and Squidward. Nitro members get a discount on these items, as well as the rest of the Discord shop collectibles.

New decorations include options like the iconic Flower Cloud decoration and inflatable MuscleBob arms for your avatar. There are also Profile Effects featuring characters like DoodleBob and of course, Handsome Squidward. The collection is only available for a limited time, encouraging Discord users to buy their favorite items before they’re gone forever.


👀 Our POV

Spongebob is iconic in its internet presence, forever cemented in its place in the Hall of Meme Fame. A partnership with Discord, one of the largest talk-and-text online apps to date, makes perfect sense in my eyes. It’ll be really cool to have a limited-edition profile animation, even if it’s behind a paywall. I really like the fact that you get to keep it forever, as it adds novelty to discord icons — being able to say you bought the exclusive SpongeBob x Discord 25th anniversary profile effect when it first came out and now you can no longer buy it? Kind of a flex, imo.

- Trinity Nguyen (Private Lobby)

👀 Fortnite Collabs With Tesla’s Cybertruck & Fall Guys

source: Epic Games

Tesla's Cybertruck is coming to Fortnite as a drivable vehicle! Adding another collaboration to Epic's incredible portfolio, the iconic EV has potential to be one of the best selling collabs Fortnite has had to date. Whether you like the Cybertruck or not, it is undoubtedly iconic and will most definitely get players to log onto Fortnite just to drive the Cybertruck.

Honestly, I think the Cybertruck already looks like a vehicle from a video game so this seems like a perfect collaboration. It's also a mutually beneficial one.

Tesla will get the vehicle in front of a younger audience than they typically speak to with their marketing and vice versa, Epic will hope that players come back to Fortnite or download it for the first time just to check out the Cybertruck.

One key thing to note is that the Cybertruck will be drivable in-game. Players will be able to drive around and use the vehicle for combat. Some brands may be weary to put their brand in that light but I think this is a good opportunity for Tesla who already deal with worse PR. 😂

source: Epic Games

Players can now make Fall Guys obstacle courses in Fortnite! Epic Games' new crossover allows players to create Fall Guys-themed islands with UEFN and Fortnite Creative. Fans will have access to assets from both games, and outfits will automatically turn into beans similar to how LEGO Fortnite works.

All player characters will look, feel, and even move like the beans from Fall Guys. Players will be able to publish their Fall Guys islands starting August 6 in the Creator Portal. Islands created with the Fall Guys starter islands may qualify for placement in a limited-time Fall Guys row in Discover.

This is a fun addition from Epic Games. It's likely not going to move the needle very much for either Fall Guys or Fortnite/UEFN but it's a good addition that gives creators more variety to work with and players more diverse and personalized experiences to fall in love with.

One thing is clear. Fortnite has become a platform where players are able to find a wide range of games and game modes that specifically fit their tastes and what they enjoy. This collab only adds to that.

- Zach Eller (Private Lobby)

⚽ Spotify’s Creator-led Tentpole Event

source: SPORTFIVE

How can you market to your target audience and drive impact without committing to long-term partnerships? Creator-led tentpole marketing.

Spotify's recent Creator Kickoff is a great example. The event featured 13 content creators playing in an IRL Futsal competition, all live-streamed on Twitch. The event pulled in over 3.2 million total impressions and 930,000+ minutes watched, with the main broadcast peaking at over 7.2K concurrent viewers.

A key piece to the Creator Kickoff strategy, a collaboration between Spotify and SPORTFIVE, was to identify a diverse pool of talent that engaged a variety of different audiences and communities to optimize reach and traction. The event was supported with a comprehensive social calendar, with 84 total social posts from the participating creators driving viewership and engagement for Spotify.


👀 Our POV 

Spotify's Creator Kickoff is a great example of how to effectively drive engagement and brand loyalty across a diverse range of communities. The event brought in creators from many different parts of the Twitch community, had them participate in an engaging and fun activity, and did a great job of generating awareness for the event with a robust social calendar.

By combining gaming and soccer, Spotify created a unique, memorable experience that resonated with the participating creators and their communities. Fans love to see their favorite creators do things they don’t normally get to see them do and the Creator Kickoff is a good example.

The Creator Kickoff is similar to another great example of creator-led tentpole marketing, Ninja’s New Years Eve. Check out our article on Ninja’s NYE from earlier this year, HERE!

- Zach Eller (Private Lobby)

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