Yeah, my only other concern is the names Hi-Rez come up with. Cause names like Ghost, Obey, PK, Rival are really f**king good names and iconic. I don't have a ton of faith that they names they come up will be as good as org names.
Yeah, my only other concern is the names Hi-Rez come up with. Cause names like Ghost, Obey, PK, Rival are really f**king good names and iconic. I don't have a ton of faith that they names they come up will be as good as org names.
*slowly crumples note that says The Hug Bugs* >.>
This is my biggest concern as well. They will hopefully have an independent review board that helps eliminate previous bias so they can make the most fair decisions for the competitiveness of the league. The potential risk is that some of the more personable pros may be able to play far past their prime simply due to being friends with some of the HiRez employees making these competitive decisions. I have to assume they see this potential conflict of interest and will do something to address it. I'll remain positive, but it will be interesting to see who gets picked up next season.
Competitive performance/stats will be heavily considered when looking at players/rosters.
If I were an org, why in the hell would I ever want to sponsor a SMITE team, a game who's esports scene is already next to non-existent and completely irrelevant, when the team isn't even allowed to play under my name? Like, what possible benefit would there be for me?
This is a good thing for the players, since they will be getting more money, and everything is streamlined for them, but if you though SMITE esports was irrelevant before, just wait what happens when there are no orgs advertising the games at all.
We had a few orgs that really went out there and brought more eyeballs to SMITE, but that wasn't the case for all of them. The resources invested in those orgs did not consistently see strong returns in terms of exposure for the SPL brand, so it makes more sense for us to re-invest those funds into scaling up our own marketing efforts for the league and improving QoL/long-term career viability for our players.
I can definitely see that, especislly if you were losing money, but I would just like to know how you guys plan on reaching out to an audience outside of SMITE, when there aren't orgs bringing in their own dedicated fans? Cause we both know that SMITE esports is not really bringing in huge numbers to start with, and this is only gonna make it worse. So do you have a solution for this, or are we just gonna accept that this is how the things are gonna be until the eventual end of the SPL?
Damn, Snufflebox is always out here asking the real questions.
Before I answer this, I want to clarify that what I'm about to say is applicable to SMITE and its esport scene -- I can't speak to how true it is for other esports, since every game/competitive scene has its own nuances and unique sets of user behavior.
But based on what we've seen in SMITE, it's *very* rare for someone who doesn't currently play SMITE to notice our esports scene, start watching competitive, and then start playing the game because they developed an interest in our competitive leagues. I know a small subset of people who came into SMITE that way (esp. in the early days of the esport), but generally speaking that isn't where most of our audience comes from.
For us, what really works more effectively is targeting our existing casual playerbase and making efforts to convert them into regular esports viewers. That's something we've focused on heavily this year and it's seen a lot of success, especially compared to Seasons 5 & 6.
In theory, a big org name *could* bring in a lot of new fans. But in practice that hasn't turned out to be true for SMITE specifically. So we have to take a different approach -- and what we've seen the most success with is finding ways to engage existing players who normally wouldn't take an interest in competitive. And with the general playerbase growth we've seen in Season 7, which I fully expect to continue in Season 8, we have a fantastic opportunity to bring in new esports fans as well. The key to doing that will be stepping up our in-game integrations and creating more ways for both new and old fans to support the teams/players they love to watch.
Damn, Snufflebox is always out here asking the real questions.
I question it, cause I care ;)
But alright, I'll take your word for it. After all, you got all the data, and I only got my own deductions. I'm just wondering if the small size of SMITE esports is really worth all the resources poured into it then. Wouldn't it make more sense to just bring the SPL to a respectful end in the next year or two, and reroute the esports budget to further improve the development of the game, since SMITE's bread and butter has always been it's casual audience?
The scene may be small, but our fanbase is super engaged and super dedicated. And it's grown a lot this year which has been really cool to see! We expected to see some growth after moving back to Twitch, but the growth we experienced really went above and beyond expectation. SPL has proven to be a powerful user engagement tool that is well worth the investment for the forseeable future -- it's a great way to keep people engaged with SMITE even when they aren't actively playing it! And just generally speaking there's a lot of interesting data out there about the long-term investment in a game title from its esports fans vs casual fans.
Sorry for finding a comment to reply to out of context.
But Auvey can you pretty please consider how the team are going to plan the team logos.
The current SOC SCC pantheon logos suit a purpose, but it wouldn’t be appropriate for the SPL.
I don’t need to tell you that Hirez has the best art team in the gaming business, please design team logos in house that make the teams feel unique. Perhaps a play on the team name even.
The biggest negative from today is having the org names/logos being dropped. If you can mitigate that with awesome hirez names/logos it’d be super positive.
SPL won't be using pantheon logos like SCC/SOC. We're investing a lot in branding for next year's teams and want to put our best foot forward with logo design!
Have you considered letting people vote on the team names? Maybe you could solicit name ideas from the community/SPL players and then pick out like a top 20 that you guys like and meet your standards and then let people vote on which to include?
We did consider that, but creating team brands is a multi-step process that takes several months to complete. Even if we started a voting process right now, we likely wouldn't reach finalized team brands until potentially early April, which is much later than we'd like to start the pro league season.
Regarding the orgs, I think there is no way removing them could be a good thing besides for saving money. The orgs at least posted about smite on socials, giving Smite and the SPL needed exposure. Without this, how is anyone going to find let alone care about anything SPL related.
A reason I see that they did this is so they can make more skins since the teams/names will be consistent across seasons, letting skins have more longevity. Money
The majority of Smite's fanbase doesn't care about SPL (just look at the upvotes on this post compared to the daily skin posts), so removing orgs is just privatizing SPL and drastically reducing exposure to basically just Smite players who buy skins.
I addressed a similar concern in this thread, give it a read! TL;DR: while in theory orgs have the potential to bring a ton of outside fans to the league, that hasn't proven to be the most effective tactic in practice and we'd be better served to scale up in-house marketing efforts to accomplish the same goal.