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How esports can save colleges
A few months ago, I wrote a piece about esports and the Olympics after sitting on a panel discussing whether, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, esports had an opportunity to work with the International Olympic Committee. After careful consideration and research, my conclusion was basically, “I think that the Olympics need esports a whole lot more than esports needs the Olympics.”
I was surprised by some of the data I uncovered in the course of researching the Olympics piece, specifically on audiences for international, professional and collegiate sports. I observed that while the esports model isn’t as mature as in traditional sports, esports actually garnered close to the same level of viewership, and the audience was growing astronomically. I couldn’t help but wonder how long this phenomenon would go unacknowledged by the institutions that might benefit most from it.
Enter colleges’ and universities’ flirtation with esports: There are currently more than 170 collegiate varsity gaming programs in NCAA Division I, and the number of clubs is even higher. So even as institutions investment in esports, there are still many misunderstood and overlooked aspects of the potential to drive value (and even revenue) in the collegiate esports space.
College in the 21st century
The college experience today is very different than it was 50 years ago. The pace of change outside of institutions is ever-accelerating, often leaving colleges struggling to keep up. Technology, students’ interests, evolving economies and workplaces, and changes in cultural norms have left colleges and universities in a place of less relevance than at many points in the past.
The same can be said of college sports: Outside forces have eroded a once-near-hegemonic source of collegiate pride, cultural power, recruitment, alumni engagement and, in some cases, revenue.
I did a quick review of the audience for the biggest NCAA events in the world; the Football Bowl Subdivision Bowl Championship and the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament.
Image Credits: Brandon Byrne
Image Credits: Brandon Byrne
Look at the average viewership of the big bowl games before the championship system went into effect in 2015, as well as after. Above, you see the trend line for viewership for the various big bowl viewership as well as an average. While there are certainly occasional spikes, the best case you could make here is that the product is flat — when you isolate the trend line for both, here is the result:
Image Credits: Brandon Byrne
In the aggregate, the trend seems mostly downward.
Look at the same trends in viewership for the NCAA Final Four — the early semi-final, the late semi-final and finally the championship game.
Image Credits: Brandon Byrne
They look rather similar. So, while collegiate sports still have a massive following, there are two concerning issues here. First, the audience isn’t growing at all; in fact, it appears to be slightly contracting. Secondly, the audience is aging, making collegiate sports less relevant to younger people. While an older audience is still a valuable source of alumni donations and ancillary revenue, it doesn’t exactly align with another core target demographic: potential college students.
Now despite this, there is data that suggests that schools with elite academic departments do enjoy a phenomenon known as the “Flutie effect,” named after Doug Flutie, a quarterback for Boston College whose exciting performance on the gridiron was credited with boosting BC applications. An article in Forbes breaking down an HBS study goes into the phenomenon more deeply than we can here.
Granted, much of the data is from a few years ago, when college sports were perhaps more relevant, but the point is broadly the same: Having an elite program in an activity students enjoy benefits the institutions that sponsor and promote them. But what happens when enthusiasm for those activities among the student body is waning? One idea is to explore involvement in what the students of today are interested in.
As a comparison to FBS football (maxed out at 35 million viewers) and the NCAA Final Four (maxed out at 28 million), Riot Games’ Mid-Season Invitational event for League of Legends had a total viewership of 60 million people. In second place is the Intel Extreme Masters tournament in Katowice with 46 million people. While precise demographic data isn’t readily available, it stands to reason that the latter two events skew younger than the former two.
A few caveats, as these are not precisely apples-to-apples comparisons: These esports events are broken up over a number of days and encompass a significant number of matches — comparable to March Madness, perhaps — and the content is consumed in different ways. Much of the NCAA’s content is presented on television, some of which is on paid, premium channels. Esports events are broadcast on Twitch and YouTube via streams for free.
But the thing to understand is that esports audiences are growing at a 15%-16% year-over-year clip and it commands a worldwide audience, meaning its total addressable market (TAM) is MUCH bigger. The NCAA events are not likely to draw serious audiences outside of North America.
COVID-19
In the context of the pandemic, colleges are hamstrung by students’ inability to engage in a college experience in-person, which is one of the primary reasons one goes to college. Networking, developing new friends and having new experiences are all a part of the collegiate draw, none of which work as well from students’ parents’ living rooms. Similarly, collegiate sports as we know them have essentially ceased to exist, along with their functions of institutional pride, marketing and revenue. The NCAA Tournament was canceled in March of 2020 and there is no sign that it, or any other sport, will be back anytime soon.
Esports, on the other hand, are thriving in this context, thanks mostly to their ability to offer remote competition and viewing. Esports tournaments can isolate audiences, teams and even referees to allow for safe content creation and consumption.
Esports and college
Believe it or not, esports is a better fit for college than it is for the pros. I won’t go into all of the details here, but I actually wrote a separate article about why the pro sports model is NOT a good one for esports. In this article we talk about intellectual property, who owns the league in esports and how all of the entities make money. The biggest problem is, in pro sports, the teams own the league and can then act in the best interest of all of the teams. In esports, the league is usually owned or regulated by the publisher of the video game, meaning you have hands in the monetization pie in a way that pro sports doesn’t have.
The interesting thing about this is that college athletics actually has the same problem and has found a way to mitigate that. The athletes get their scholarships, and the schools, their athletic conference, and the NCAA itself all own a piece of the pie that gets packaged and sold for distribution to the ESPNs and Fox Sports of the world.
This is a much better model for esports. It’s unlikely that any group that “owned” football IP would tell the Dallas Cowboys how to market their team, what their cut is and how it will be distributed. This process happens all the time in college, though. In fact, in order for everyone to get their seat at the table, you HAVE to work all of this out so that the schools make some money (equivalent to a team), the conference makes their money (equivalent to the league) and the NCAA makes their money (equivalent to the publisher themselves). If the chain breaks down at any point, then the whole process grinds to a halt and nobody makes money.
I mention this in my article about the Olympics. The IOC is used to having full autonomy over how the Olympic Games are broadcast, which events are part of the games, who is eligible and who isn’t, etc. There is no chance this would be the case if the Olympics took on esports. The publisher would absolutely wield an incredible amount of influence over how the games are portrayed, broadcast, judged and the like. The IOC isn’t used to that. In college, that’s just a typical Saturday afternoon.
College admission is down and not just because of COVID-19. Even before the pandemic, colleges were trying to find their footing with potential students as people reevaluate the college experience. Forbes wrote back in 2019 that college enrollments were down two million students in that decade. Add onto that the preliminary data we are getting on the effect of COVID on colleges, we could see enrollment in 2020 down anywhere from 5%-20%.
Image Credits: Brandon Byrne
The outlook
For colleges, it’s not great. Revenue is massively down, with even stalwarts like Harvard University hemorrhaging cash. With enrollment down before the pandemic, we have reached a point where colleges and universities have to adapt to survive.
The good news is, I believe that esports could be an opportunity to do just that. Colleges are diving into esports, with 115 different programs offering scholarships for esports and club programs are growing even faster. Certainly, it will help attract students, but monetization in esports is really tricky.
It’s critical that colleges and universities get expert advice on how to create an ecosystem that ultimately compensates all of the stakeholders, including the college themselves. It also will require universities to move quickly and get on board with a model that is still being formed in real time. The coronavirus pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon, but I think there will be many colleges that will. The time to move is now.
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Gaming rules the entertainment industry, so why aren’t investors showing up?
As gaming’s popularity reaches epic heights, venture investors’ activity in the industry doesn’t seem to equate with the overall size of the games market. Spurred by an unreal year where traditional entertainment has been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and consumers find unity in virtual worlds like Animal Crossing and Fortnite, gaming has never been more popular.
Late-stage investors have shown that they have a tremendous appetite for businesses in the gaming industry. They’ve been pouring capital into established gaming companies like Scopely, which on Wednesday announced a $340 million investment round at a $3.3 billion valuation. But venture capital simply hasn’t given the gaming industry and the broader synthetic market the attention it deserves given its place in the entertainment and cultural firmament.
Just ask LeBron “Bronny” James Jr., the son of the NBA’s biggest star, who became a professional athlete this week — as a gamer with one of the most popular teams in online gaming, FaZe Clan. Or look at Unity, the creator of a popular game development engine, whose stock price has nearly doubled since its public offering in mid-September. Since opening trading at $56 per share, the stock has nearly doubled in value and is now trading at $100 per share.
In the first half of the year gamers spent $36.8 billion on games through both the Android and iOS app stores, according to data from SensorTower. New game installs are also up for the year. The app analytics company said that new game installs were up to 28.4 billion over the first half of the year. Annually the 15 billion new game downloads in the second quarter represented a 45.2% year-on-year growth in gaming.
Then there’s Bitkraft, one of the only venture firms to focus on the totality of the gaming industry, which announced the close of its most recent fund, a $165 million investment vehicle. The firm, which added a former Goldman Sachs managing director earlier in the year to capitalize on the opportunity in what the firm calls “synthetic reality” investments, raised $25 million more than its $140 million target. One of these things is not like the others.
“I’ve been in the games industry for 23 years now [and] I’ve always had this huge fundamental conviction of video games not only dominating the entertainment industry but sort of taking up a big part of what society is — where video games create the digital identities that define evermore of what we understand of ourselves,” said Jens Hilgers, Bitkraft’s founding general partner. “We feel that these are times of acceleration … it’s great to see how we’re leapfrogging one or two or three years of the games industry in this crisis and it makes it more exciting to invest in these times.”
The Unity public offering, and its emphasis on markets outside of gaming, seems to prove Hilgers point and show just how much opportunity remains around the notion of synthetic reality in business and entertainment.
“Their thesis around democratizing access to gaming tools by letting hobbyists use the tools for free is smart, if you want to win the market,” said Alice Lloyd George, founder of Rogue Ventures, a new investment firm focused on frontier technologies and gaming investments.
Lloyd George compared Unity’s business to its biggest competitor, Epic Games, and noted that both have broad aspirations. “Both of them want to use their game engines beyond pure gaming,” Lloyd George said of the two big new gaming platform developers. “Unity is really well-positioned because they’re so strong on mobile. That positions them well for AR and VR. And you need onramps for the developers for AR and VR.”
Engagement and the future of entertainment
When Scopely’s co-chief executive Walter Driver talks about the attraction of gaming properties for players — and the reason investors have been willing to value his Los Angeles-based company in the billions of dollars — he talks about the connections between players. “People have found — and investors looking at the space have found also — that people value the connection they’re getting from interactive experiences. It’s not just our relationship with the players, but their relationships with each other,” Driver said. “Inside of most passively consumed media experiences, you don’t have an identity. You don’t have friends.“
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Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith is buying majority stake in the Utah Jazz for $1.6B
The Utah Jazz, an NBA basketball team based in Salt Lake City, announced today that Qualtrics CEO and co-founder Ryan Smith was buying a majority stake in the team, along with other properties. ESPN is reporting the deal is worth $1.6 billion.
Smith can afford it. He sold Qualtrics, which is based in Provo, Utah, in 2018 to SAP for $8 billion just before the startup was about to go public. Earlier this year, SAP announced plans to spin out Qualtrics as a public company.
In addition to The Jazz, he’s also getting Vivint Smart Home Arena, the National Basketball Association (NBA) G League team Salt Lake City Stars and management of the Triple-A baseball affiliate Salt Lake Bees. Smith is buying the properties from the Miller family, who have run them for more than three decades.
Smith was over the moon about being able to buy into a franchise he has supported over the years. “My wife and I are absolutely humbled and excited about the opportunity to take the team forward far into the future – especially with the greatest fans in the NBA. The Utah Jazz, the state of Utah, and its capital city are the beneficiaries of the Millers’ tremendous love, generosity and investment. We look forward to building upon their lifelong work,” he said in a statement.
The deal is pending approval of the NBA Board of Governors, but once that happens, Smith will have full decision-making authority over the franchise.
Qualtrics, which makes customer survey tools, was founded in 2002 and raised more than $400 million from firms like Accel, Insight Partners and Sequoia before selling the company two years ago to SAP.
Smith is not the first tech billionaire to buy a basketball team. He joins Mark Cuban, who bought the Dallas Mavericks in 1999 after selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion that same year, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who bought the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 for $2 billion.
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Postmates becomes the official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL
The National Football League is naming Postmates as its very first on-demand food delivery partner.
In this context, a partnership means a multiyear sponsorship, which also makes Postmates a sponsor of the Super Bowl. And as the season kicks off with the Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Houston Texans, Postmates is teaming up with the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes (through his foundation 15 and the Mahomies) and the Texans’ Deshaun Watson, with each quarterback arranging for meal delivery to frontline health workers in their opponent’s home town.
This seems like a particularly appropriate year for a food delivery partnership, since most fans will be watching games from home, rather than at a stadium or their local sports bar, as the NFL’s vice president of business development Nana-Yaw Asamoah noted in a statement.
“Fans will be watching NFL football this season from their couch more than ever before, so teaming up with Postmates as the first official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL was a perfect combination,” Asamoah said. “We’re excited for Postmates to bring an NFL experience directly to our fans’ doorsteps throughout the season and around the year.”
Postmates previously partnered with individual Major League Baseball teams, including the Dodgers and the Yankees. The food delivery company is also being acquired by Uber, in a deal that’s expected to close next year.
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Snapchat’s new Lens celebrates tomorrow’s NFL kickoff
Snap and the NFL recently announced a multi-year extension to their content partnership. Now, with the season starting tomorrow, they’re revealing more details about what kinds of content fans can expect to find on Snapchat.
For tomorrow night’s kickoff, they’ve created a special augmented reality Lens that takes fans from the Kansas City Chiefs’ locker room (the Chiefs are hosting the Houston Texans) through the tunnel and into Arrowhead Stadium, where they’ll be greeted by Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Houston’s Deshaun Watson.
The Lens will be available nationally, and as regular games begin, it will transform into an entrance into a more generic NFL stadium.
After that, the NFL will be creating a highlight show that updates each game day, plus three weekly shows — “Rankings” (which offers historic NFL facts designed to encourage fan debates), “Mic’d Up” (a behind-the-scenes look at what coaches and players say during the games) and “Predictions.” The NFL will also continue producing “Real Talk with the NFL,” a show that highlights the league’s social justice initiatives.
Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social and influence marketing, told me that all of this content is created by the league’s social lab in partnership with Snap. And while the NFL continues to see high ratings on traditional linear TV, he said Snapchat plays “a really critical role for us.”
Image Credits: Snap
“It’s always about: How do we engage new audiences, younger audiences, and do it in ways that are very authentic to the platforms?” Trombetta said. “We don’t look to do things that are just content dumps.”
Snapchat says that viewership of NFL content increased 80% during the 2019-20 season, and that 90% of viewers were under the age of 35.
Of course, it’s going to be a strange season. Like other professional sports organizations, the NFL has to test its players for COVID-19, and different teams are taking different approaches toward allowing fans in the stadiums — many games will be taking place without fans at all.
.@NFL launches @Snapchat AR portal celebrating tomorrow’s kickoff https://t.co/mOqNzfZ2wQ @TechCrunch @anthonyha pic.twitter.com/qRKWi282mD
— Russ Caditz-Peck (@RussCP) September 9, 2020
“The [NFL] organization is leaning on us more than they ever had,” Trombetta said. “We didn’t ignore the fact of what’s happening, anyone would be crazy to think we could totally shut that off. There has to be an acknowledgement of it, while also finding new ways, very seamless ways for fans to engage and celebrate rituals around games that they’ve established over years and decades.”
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Mustard raises $1.7M to improve athletic mechanics with AI
Athletic coaching is a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry. No surprise, really, given the massive revenue some top athletes are able to generate. Mustard is working to supplant — or at least augment — some of that pricey coaching with the launch of a new mobile app designed to analyze an athlete’s mechanics and offer corrective tips to help them improve.
The company was co-founded by Tom House, a former reliever whose coaching career has earned him the reputation as one of the “father[s] of modern pitching mechanics.”
“Too many kids miss out on the power of play and the many physical and mental benefits of sports—studies show that 70% of kids stop playing sports by the age of 13 due to cost and lack of access to quality coaching. Mustard offers every kid access to the same coaching programs and extensive biomechanical analysis used by the best athletes in the world, and the same personalized training protocols that I use with the Hall of Famers I see in person,” House says in a release tied to the news. “We want to make elite personalized coaching accessible to all.”
Mustard announced this week that it has raised $1.7 million to improve its tool, led by Shasta Ventures and Intersect VC, along with a number of angel investors, including David Novak and Mike Dixon, and all-star athletes Nolan Ryan and Drew Brees. Ryan, in fact, has become one of the main faces of the company, gracing its home page, along with a color scheme that appears inspired by his days with the Astros.
The name isn’t great. It’s a reference to the phrase “put some mustard on it” — which refers to the act of adding a bit of an edge to a throw.
The app is opening up for a limited, free public beta, focused solely on baseball to start. “The product will be entirely free at first,” CEO Rocky Collis tells TechCrunch. “Over time, we will add premium features for a low monthly subscription. Even when premium features are added, we plan to continue to offer a free version of the app that offers tremendous value to users.”
The system relies on the smartphone’s camera and then uses proprietary AI algorithms to monitor the player’s motion and approximate human athletic coaching. For the baseball side of things, the company has employed engineers from Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). Future sports will be added at some point down the road.
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Why the Olympics should add esports
I recently sat on a panel for gaming website Pocket Gamer that was focused on esports and the Olympics. We were debating whether esports were filling the gap in sporting events, including the Olympic games, which have been paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was an interesting conversation that started out like most esports panels. The only difference here is that instead of the typical question, “When will esports catch up to traditional sports?” it was, “Will esports become mainstream enough to make it into the Olympics?” A slightly different question, but the same sentiment: The international games are one of televised sports’ marquee events, and esports companies hope to earn a seat at the grown-up’s table.
In truth, the Olympics have been dropping in ratings relatively steadily in the U.S. for a long time. The only Olympic games that scored in the top five ratings going back to 1992 were the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, presumably because they were held in the United States. Overall, viewership has been declining in recent years and the games don’t hold the prestige they once did.
Additionally, audiences are slowly becoming worth less and less to advertisers because the age of the average viewer is rising rapidly, a trend we are seeing in almost all traditional sports.
I doubt it would surprise anyone to learn that the average age of almost all traditional sports viewership skews older than esports’ audience. Even then, I think the actual data will be quite surprising. Only one professional sport (women’s tennis) actually saw its average viewers age come down in the last decade or so. Even in that context, the average age of a Women’s Tennis Association home spectator is 55 years old.
The average age of esports viewership looks to be around 26 years old. Think about that from a marketer’s perspective. Traditional sports are just missing young people, by a wide margin.
Where are the kids?
But there are more factors at play than just a lack of interest from millennials and Gen Z driving this trend: There’s also a question of access.
The IOC made the decision in recent years to stream the Olympics (the way most younger people consume content), but it capped the ability to watch online to 30 minutes if viewers didn’t sign in with their cable company (a relationship many millennials don’t have) to continue watching.
Additionally, the IOC made the laughable decision to “ban” GIFs with the press covering the event, which qualifies as one of the more stupid things a governing body has ever tried to do. First, it won’t work. Secondly, and more to the point, it demonstrates how out of touch the IOC is with the ways in which media has evolved in the last 20 years.
However, unlike the Olympics, where no corporation owns the rights to volleyball or the pole vault, all esports companies own the IP associated with the game itself. That means, by default, the IOC would not have carte blanche when making decisions about how to represent the games, programming, licensing rights and other factors it has enjoyed for a long time.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the IOC doesn’t like the idea of “violent” games being added to the Olympic roster. It would prefer to see current sports transformed into virtual competitions. But anyone who knows anything about esports understands that this isn’t how esports works. Before a game ascends to esports royalty, it needs to be a good game. If nobody plays it, it’s unlikely anyone will want to watch it.
Secondly, it has be digestible as a viewing experience. World of Warcraft Arena is a game that draws a lot of players, but it’s almost impossible to know what is going on unless you’re an expert at the game or you have a godly shoutcaster who can translate the on-screen action. You can’t make track and field an esport and hope audiences will want to watch.
The IOC Solution
The IOC has taken steps to try and stave off declining youth viewership trends by adopting sports considered “young” in the past few years. Five sports recently added to the Olympic games include:
- Sport climbing
- Surfing
- Skateboarding
- Karate
- Baseball/softball
The baseball/softball addition notwithstanding, I think you would have to live under a rock if you thought that competitive sport climbing held a candle to Fortnite or League of Legends in terms of generating youth interest. Frankly, this seems like an idea that came from an old person trying to find a way to “get the kids back.”
To the IOC’s credit, it has begun to hold panels and conferences with esports experts and game publishers, but the deals that will come from these will look REALLY different than what they are used to. It seems to me that we have a long way to go here.
For my part of the panel, I argued that the Olympics need esports much more than esports need the Olympics. Media companies are only going to overpay for broadcasting rights for traditional sports for so long. At some point, someone is going to notice that the “inside the demo” group isn’t there and move on.
The thing that esports CAN get from the Olympics is understanding a better way to monetize its audience, something that the Olympics do well and esports doesn’t do well right now. A report from Goldman Sachs shows the audience size and monetization based on that audience, showing that esports dramatically underindex on monetization relative to their more established sports league equivalents. It is clear that esports is immature from a monetization perspective and, while the Olympics aren’t on this chart, I would assume that it punches WAY above its weight, much like MLB does, trading on its reputation more than on actual results these days.
The IOC should act fast, though. It won’t be long until esports figures this whole thing out and once they do, the Olympic games won’t have anything to offer this emerging media powerhouse.
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IoT solutions are enabling physical distancing
Tyler Cracraft
Contributor
Contributor
Tyler Cracraft is an electronic engineer turned solution architect at Advantech who has more than a decade of experience working in the electronics technology industry.
If you’re a business owner or investor and are wondering about the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the business world, you’re not alone.
Today’s business leaders have been plunged into the deep end of telecommuting with little notice, and the way we do business has been impacted at almost every level. Travel is restricted, meetings are virtual and delivery of goods and even raw materials is being delayed. While some industries that depend on large gatherings are seeing extremely difficult challenges due to the pandemic, others such as the tech industry, see the opportunity and responsibility for innovation and growth.
As many states begin phased reopening, companies are trying to determine what the workplace and business environment will look like in a post-quarantine world. The first obvious step is the integration of personal protective equipment (PPE). Sanitization and face masks will become required and nonessential face-to-face meetings will be a thing of the past, along with shaking hands.
Additionally, relationship-driven careers such as sales and recruiting will have to find new ways to connect to be successful. Physical distancing rules will have to be established, which may include employees coming in alternate days while telecommuting the other days of the week to keep offices at reduced capacity. Large offices of 10 or more may implement thermographic camera technology for fever screening or other real-time technology-based health screenings.
One thing is for sure: IoT devices that enable physical distancing will become an integral part of reopening businesses, facilitating sales connections and embracing a different way of living.
Solutions for physical distancing
There are a variety of IoT devices available that can help business leaders successfully implement physical distancing in their offices. Thermographic camera technology coupled with facial recognition can create a baseline for each employee and then assist in determining if an employee has a temperature outside of their norm. Other remote health monitoring may also take place with healthcare providers, helping employees determine on a daily basis if they are well enough to go into work.
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Statespace, the platform that trains gamers, raises $15 million
Statespace has today raised a $15 million Series A financing round led by Khosla, with partner Samir Kaul joining the board. Existing investors, such as FirstMark Capital, Lux and Expa, also participated in the round, as well as newcomer June Fund.
Statespace launched out of stealth in 2017 with a product called Aim Lab, which recreates the physics of popular FPS games to help players practice their aim and work on their weaknesses. Statespace was founded by neuroscientists from New York University, and goes beyond the mechanics of aim itself to understand and measure several parts of a player’s game, from visual acuity across the quadrants of the screen to reaction time.
Anyone from an average gamer to a professional can use Aim Lab to improve. But the company has other offerings, too. The company is working on the Academy, which will launch in Q3 of this year, and was built in partnership with MasterClass and a number of top streamers. Users can get advanced tutorials from these streamers, which include KingGeorge (Rainbox Six Siege), SypherPK (Fortnite), Valkia (Overwatch), Drift0r (CoD) and Launders (CS:GO).
Statespace has also partnered with the Pro Football Hall of Fame to develop the “Cognitive Combine.” Just like the NFL Combine measures general skills and abilities, such as speed, strength, agility, etc., the Cognitive Combine is meant to give a general assessment of a player’s skill in a game-agnostic manner.
The company also works directly with esports teams such as 100 Thieves and Philadelphia Fusion, building custom data dashboards and products so those teams can get a deeper look at their metrics and build practice regimes around their weaknesses.
Statespace is also sprinting to make its products more available to a broader user base, including launching a mobile version of Aim Lab and introducing Aim Lab on Xbox, with plans to launch PlayStation support soon. The company also plans to launch support for 400 games next month.
Interestingly, the technology behind Statespace, which lets the company measure well beyond the kill:death ratio and look at cognitive ability, can be used for many other applications. The company has applied for a grant alongside several universities to work on a commercial application for stroke rehabilitation.
Statespace will use the funding to continue growing the team, which has doubled since raising $2.5 million in August of 2019. The company has also brought on a few notable hires from bigger companies, including new VP of Engineering Scott Raymond (formerly of Gowalla, Facebook and Airbnb), Jenna Hannon as VP of Marketing (formerly of Uber, Uber Eats) and Phil Charm as VP of Growth (formerly of Checkr, Gainsight).
According to founder and CEO Wayne Mackey, Statespace has 2 million registered users and 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% from January.
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In the age of social distancing, the LA Rams turn to Snap and Madden to unveil new uniforms
As the U.S. waits for the great reopening of its hallowed national pastimes in an era of pandemic-enforced social distancing, sports teams are increasingly turning to a new wave of digital tools like social media and video games to connect with a new generation of fans.
The Los Angeles Rams are the latest team to embrace the trend, choosing to work with social media giant Snap and EA Sports’ Madden NFL franchise to unveil the new design of their uniforms ahead of the opening of the most high-tech stadium in the National Football League later this year.
The team is working with Los Angeles’ own Snap to unveil the uniforms in a custom-created Snapchat augmented reality lens, featuring the ability to trigger players into action.
The revelation of the uniform in augmented reality, a decision brought about by social distancing measures put in place in California, is a first for any NFL team. The Rams franchise also collaborated with the Madden franchise to provide a sneak peak of the uniform through in-game renders of Rams players showing off the new look.
On Instagram, social media users can see interactive content of the uniforms in their new natural habitat before the stadium opens.
“We had been chatting about how to use AR for a while. Just across the board,” said Lexi Vonderlieth, the head of partnership marketing. “We were trying to figure out ways to bring the uniform to life and showcase that a bit and create something that was a bit engaging.”
From the world lens through Snap, viewers can see Jared Goff or Aaron Donald in their apartments, living rooms or backyards. Through the selfie view Snap users can put on the new jersey and Rams helmet.
The Los Angeles-based Snap has had a longtime relationship with the Rams — in part through proximity and in part through connections in the Los Angeles business world.
The unveiling of the uniforms, which happened earlier today, marked the first time that Snap had worked with a franchise directly instead of with the National Football League broadly.
Earlier uses of the Snap filters and camera this season came during the NFL draft itself — where Snap rolled out special cams as a way for fans to celebrate and represent their own teams.
The National Football League actually plays a prominent roll in the history of Snap lenses. The famous “Gatorade dump” tradition where the coach from the winning team in the Super Bowl gets doused with Gatorade by his players was one of the first lenses that Snap developed.
“We saw this incredible connection in how AR could engage,” said Snap senior director of global creative strategy, Jeff Miller. “Snap is a platform that is built for connecting with close friends and family. Sports passion is expressed through those kinds of connections.”
Snap, in some senses, is uniquely positioned to amplify the fan experience in a socially distanced sporting world. “[The technology] gives us an ability to create amazing experiences that can replace a physical activation, enhance it or give alternatives in a sport-from-home environment.”
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