The incredible journey Novos is on has been an inspiring one since the beginning and it came with some incredible lessons, learned along the way. Our mission at NOVOS is to give aspiring gamers the opportunity they deserve in improving and taking their skills to the next level. Through developing a start-up business in this industry, we have come to understand and discover some truly beautiful aspects to it. In the following paragraphs, we’ll give you a look at the most valuable things we’ve learned during the journey into this world;
It’s all about the community, seriously.
The gaming community, both huge in its population yet so unique in its style is one of the most fascinating ecosystems in modern entertainment. For young kids, being good at Fortnite will define how much respect will be earned from classmates, For a League of Legends player, when meeting another player of the game, their shared interest in the game will make them friends almost automatically. Gamers are a type of person, not just people who play video games and they embrace it whole-heartedly, creating an incredible sub-culture of talented and passionate people that possess shared interest. To be a gamer means to be part of an incredible pop-culture, a world so far beyond the game itself.
The gaming community is simply different, and in being so it defines the direction that eSports and the gaming industry are moving towards. Gamers are proud, unique and self-defined, and this is what makes the gaming community stand out. With a vast variety of games, each with its own style and theme, passionate gaming fans have many options for discovering themselves within this world and doing so is a big part of the culture.
Gamers want to be treated like gamers — they deserve it.
In recent years, gamers came to the realization that they are a huge audience that can expect products\companies to serve their unique needs. If ten years ago, gamers used products that were created for other needs (such as Skype, messenger etc’) gamers today demand tools that will be tailored-made for their needs.
A prime example of this is Discord. Discord is an all-in-one voice and text chat designed especially for gamers that’s free. Discord took a pre-existing concept, made it specific to gamers and marketed it this way. Today, most of the gamers do not want to use Skype or TeamSpeak anymore as Discord offers more features that are well designed for gamers (in addition to amazing messaging strategy). Discord is not alone, we see more and more products that are made especially for gamers, even services that have been around for years.
This is a community of unique individuals — deal with that!
Gamers want to preserve their identity both online and offline, from the software they use to the magazines they read. The gaming culture that was considered weird in the past has gained popularity and can even be considered mainstream today. It’s impossible to overlook this incredible entry to the mainstream when one out of 5 kids in the USA plays Fortnite, a game that is less than a year old (referring to the battle royal of course).
Another great company in pop-culture, Marvel, understood this and decided to create a new comic on League of Legends. Marvel realized the size and influence of LoL within the gaming community and, understanding the passion of gamers towards this culture, partnered with Riot Games to create a comic that will expand the storyline and entire universe of League of Legends.
And the most important lesson we need to remember — eSports started from bottom to top:
When we were young, we all played video games, it was me vs the computer. For me, it was “Heros of might and magic III” that took my breath away, with so many possibilities, tactics, strategies and spells. I had to invest an endless amount of hours just to beat the computer on the hardest level. Then something fascinating happened, the broadband got better and you could play against your friends. For me, it was a game changer. “Counter-strike ” was the first multiplayer game that hooked me as I played for days with my friends, some of them were friends from home and some were friends from the game, I call them friends now — almost 20 years later we are still friends.
It grows slowly, starting from five gamers connecting their computer to a router in some basement and it slowly grows, real slowly. I remember seven years ago the first “big” LAN party I participated in was In Tel-Aviv and it hosted about 1000 gamers! This was an incredible amount of people at the time. A few months back I visited the DreamHack Winter and it was the same concept but bigger, much bigger. It was actually 50 times bigger! 50,000 gamers from all around the world connected to the endless amount of routers playing against each other.
In my point of view, this is the story of eSports in a nutshell. Gamers did what they love and scaled it over time. eSports didn’t just pop up one day out of the blue, it has been around for years, it’s just now that the non-gamers are starting to pay attention to it.
What next? Well, Stay tuned 🙂
