IRISH GAMING TO LEVEL UP
Lockdown presents opportunities for developers
AT THE age of seven, Ciarán Walsh dreamt of walking out on the hallowed turf of Thomond Park, donning the famous red jersey and representing Munster Rugby Club. His fondest memory of watching Munster was a 2006 league game against Leinster. While his memory of the exact score is hazy, Walsh remembers the feeling when Munster won. The avid gamer, now aged 23, wants to replicate that feeling of success as he gets set for competitive video game tournaments while representing his favourite club.
Last week, Walsh’s e-sport team, Phelan Gaming, announced it had completed a deal with Munster Rugby, which he described as “life-changing”.
The team has been renamed Munster Rugby Gaming, not only opening the door to further sponsorship and investment but also fulfilling Walsh’s childhood dream.
“It’s a dream partnership where we represent their brands,” he said. “We don the rugby gaming name, and they support us in doing what we have done before. “They get a percentage in the company itself and help us get on to sponsors, who, before everything, were reluctant. Munster has opened that up for us.”
With video gaming surging in popularity due to the Covid-19 lockdown, potential sponsors are swirling overhead, looking to swoop on new avenues to advertise companies’ wares to housebound consumers. The investment could also provide Munster with some exposure to a fresh set of eyes as the rest of Ireland’s sports clubs go into a Covid-19 enforced hibernation.
As sports fixtures remain temporarily kicked to touch, and the pubs stay closed, more Irish people are utilising new ways of staying connected. Many have made the switch to playing video games online. As the restrictions bite, friends can communicate with one another through these games and compete across various titles, such as multi-player battle game League of Legends or soccer title Fifa 2020.
As a result, spending on video games in Ireland has boomed. Statistics from Bank of Ireland show that the average spend on popular games for consoles such as Nintendo, Playstation and Xbox has surged by nearly 212pc, 115pc and 81pc, respectively.
The figures also show that spending on bigtitle games has swelled since the start of March through to April, with games like Resident Evil 3 and Final Fantasy VII performing well.
Paul Swift, head of the technology sector at Bank of Ireland, said the figures suggested Ireland was following a global trend as people both young and old switch to gaming and online gaming for entertainment during the lockdown.
“E-gaming has now replaced get-togethers for beers and coffee,” he said. “In a world where sports and competition have effectively ceased, immersive gaming offers the only form of competition that’s available right now.”
The growing interest has created the perfect opportunity for Ireland’s video gaming sector. The domestic industry has established a reputation for helping to develop quality games and also for providing the essential background services, such as coding, testing and online support, to more significant firms.
Irish talent has also helped to attract some big-name investment. In 2018, it was announced that Amazon acquired cloud gaming platform Gamesparks for a reported €10m. Last week, Vela Games raised a further $3.1m (€2.9m), led by VC firm London Venture Partners, with additional funding from Dermot Desmond’s IIU. The round took the total raised by the startup to over $6.8m.
Ireland is also home to the European operations of some of the world’s largest video game developers, including US firms such as Riot Games, EA and Activision Blizzard, bolstering the domestic sector’s influence.
As video games grow in popularity, domestically and across the globe, has Ireland’s video gaming sector shared in some of this success or has the global boom bypassed it all together?
Andrew Day, chief executive of Dublin-headquartered video game company Keywords Studios, said it could be an opportunity for Irish companies to grow. Day has noticed that parts of the sector have received a boost due to the Covid-19 enforced lockdown. He believes that with more people at home, the industry is set to benefit in both the short and long term.
“People who haven’t played games in the past, who perhaps haven’t done so of late, have turned back to playing games,” he said. “People who haven’t played them before have started playing games. Hopefully, it will enlarge the market.”
Early evidence from the Aim-listed firm suggests the services it provides for online video games, such as moderating online content and offering customers support, have been in high demand. Day said its clients had also been hungry to get more fresh online content out to demanding customers, which has been keeping some staff at Keywords busy.
“At a time like this, when you have people with a lot of time, they are getting through a lot of content quickly. It’s early days yet, but you can imagine there has been an increased pressure to get fresh content to keep them engaged and to stop them going elsewhere,” he said.
With the games industry proving to be resilient in times of global strife, Day has high hopes for the Irish sector. “There is no reason why Irish companies shouldn’t benefit,” he said. “The Irish games market may not be the busiest, but it has been doing OK. This can only help.”
Despite its small size, the Irish market’s interest in video games has been accelerating. In 2018, a report by Newzoo estimated the total market was worth €216m, up 20pc on the previous year, while a report by PwC Ireland estimated that the demand for e-sports and video gaming could grow by a further 27pc by 2023.
The growing interest here has also led to a surge in sector-specific talent, with Ireland’s status as a hub for major technology companies making it an attractive place for games developers to base themselves.
Travis George, one of the co-founders of online game developer Vela Games, said the talent on offer in Ireland meant the country had more to give to the global gaming industry.
“We’ve long had a hypothesis that the video game sector in Ireland is under-represented compared to what it could be,” he said.
“Particularly when you look at the quality and breadth of technology companies, from tech multinationals doing product development work, the startup ecosystem in fintech, and then the world-class animation studios.
“It seems strange that the video game sector is not bigger. Our hypothesis for a long time has been can we help create opportunities that highlight the advantages that are here? I’ve lived here for a while, and we are starting to see that come through. It’s primed for so much more.”
George, who hails from the US, could be considered an industry veteran. He cut his teeth with Activision Blizzard, before moving to Riot Games in Los Angeles, becoming one of the first hires the then-unknown startup made in 2008.
Riot eventually became a global brand, thanks to the phenomenal success of one of the projects George worked on, League of Legends.
In 2015, seeking a new challenge, George moved to Riot Games’ Dublin office where he took on a role building further development and player interaction teams.
The hunger for a new challenge was never fully sated, however. Leaving Riot, George, alongside some former colleagues, founded Vela Games in 2018. The aim of Vela is to develop a new format described as “multiplayer online cooperative”, which is inspired by the online battle arena genre.
With exposure to the world’s game industry, George and his fellow co-founders could have picked anywhere in the world to establish their new company. They chose Ireland.
“We wanted to pull together the best team possible, and I’d been living here for a few years, and lived in California for 15 years. We asked ourselves: ‘Where is the best place we can merge all our networks?’Ireland fitted the bill.
“Ultimately, it came down to the team and the environment. [From Ireland] we can pull from anywhere in the world, from Europe and the States. It’s far easier to pull people here than to pull them over to the States.”
Backed with investment, Vela is now well primed to achieve success. George hopes to launch its multi-player online cooperative game in the future and tap into the growing appetite for playing video games at home with friends, regardless of where players are in the world.
“We know that lots of games at the moment are at their record capacity,” said George. “It doesn’t seem to be that people are moving from one thing to another — everything is going up. More people are playing games. It seems like there is a rising tide across all boats.”
As the appetite for gaming in Ireland grows, so too does the interest of marketers. With the pause button hit on live sports, Meabh Connellan, group strategy director at Dentsu Aegis Network, said more companies were looking towards online video gaming and e-sports as a way to get the attention of house-bound consumers.
Brands are looking far and wide in the sector. One area of interest is in-game advertising for online games, such as mobile phone quizzes.
“Brands are now increasingly looking at these opportunities,” said Connellan. “If we see that eyeballs are on these mobile games, then that is where our adverts are going to run.”
Connellan added that there is talk of ad-funded gaming, similar to ad-funded programming on television. “Advertisers are noticing that certain types of games may be popular with certain demographics, like housewives with kids. Maybe as a brand, I could create that game and give it to you for free, but start advertising to you through it,” she said.
It isn’t all good news for gaming, however. Covid-19 has caused harm to certain parts of the sector. Keywords Studio’s Day said it had become increasingly difficult to source studio space for audio recording, while testing in-game translations was also challenging to do while staff work from home.
With the testing side of the business part of Keywords’ Dublin operation, the company had to make the tough decision to furlough around 100 of its 300 Ireland-based staff.
Despite this, Day and all those involved with the gaming industry here are predicting a bright future for Ireland’s video game sector — a view shared by Munster Rugby Gaming’s Walsh.
The avid gamer is hopeful that the increased number of people playing video games will translate to more of the Munster faithful supporting his efforts in e-sports competitions in the future.
With his passion for Munster and gaming high, Walsh has lofty ambitions for his project. He is plotting how he can help his team taste the same kind of success Munster Rugby sides experienced in the glory days of 2006 and 2008 — when Munster won the European Rugby Champions Cup.
“Our next tournament will be the first one under Munster, so the focus will be on doing it right so that as in the years to come, we are trying to win the equivalent of the Heineken Cup for Munster. That is our goal for the long term, but that doesn’t mean we don’t compete for it now. As you know yourself, we always compete to win.”