Game.tv has raised $25 Million for its AI-powered esports tournament platform for mobile games that embraces audience of social media platforms Discord (which has 250 million users), Twitter, and Facebook. Tourney enables mobile gaming tournaments that may be directly set up and operated through the popular social media apps.
Intel Capital led the round providing investment for Game.tv. Founded in 2018 by Rosen Sharma, the CEO of BlueStacks (developer of the popular BlueStacks app player for running Android apps on computers), Game.tv is now a spinoff independent company in Campbell, California.
“When Game.tv’s platform crossed 10,000 tournaments in a short period of time, we sensed something big was going on here. As a big supporter of both esports and emerging technologies, Intel is always looking for ways to accelerate adoption of esports. We believe that Game.tv has a unique vision and technology and with this funding, they can gain a big piece of the esports market segment.”
Arun Chetty, Managing director of Intel Capital
The investment will help scale the development of Game.tv’s core product, Tourney, which currently runs around 300 tournaments per day and is growing by large percentages every week, according to the company. Game.tv will also grow its mobile gaming communities through tournament sponsorships and additional plugins thanks to the new funding, Discord bot, and web app.
“We saw a huge latent demand for competition in esports as we grew our communities. So we created a separate company. We are focusing on global esports and growing a real foundation for amateur and community esports — something that we feel is incredibly underserved.”
“Right now, the focus for esports is the top 0.1%, or the (superstars) who are getting into Dota 2’s The Invitational (a prominent global tournament with millions of dollars in prizes). No one really thinks about how those players got to those high ranks, and we’re trying to build that pathway. We are removing the barriers.”
“We look at how people want to communicate. We’ve built Tourney, our bot, to run on top of other platforms. As you’re having a conversation with your teammates or other people, you can interact with the bot. We can put you on a team or join you with other people on a server and it takes care of the matchmaking. It does it all automatically.”
“The infrastructure needed to run tournaments at scale doesn’t exist yet at this level of competition. We are empowering the communities to run themselves.”
Yuriy Yarovoy, Game.tv vice president of growth marketing
Game.tv believes that community-based esports is fundamental to a healthy esports ecosystem, that currently focuses only on professionals.
Tourney adds on top of gaming communities that already exist. As an example, Animal Tower Battle, a game with a strong community on Discord in Japan, integrates Tourney to run weekly tournaments exactly where players are engaged most of their time.
“We use Discord the way people use the basketball court at the playground,” said Yuriy Yarovoy.
The AI behind Discord is learning about the community and adapting to it. Currently, hundreds of streamers and content creators with Discord servers have adopted Tourney to run thousands of tournaments directly in their communities. Likewise, communities on Twitter and Facebook can run tournaments natively using the Game.tv web app with deep links into both platforms.
Game.tv is aiming at attracting more players by rolling out an incentive program with a reward system for hosts to create more engaging tournaments and content. Tourney is strongly present in North America and a number of countries in Asia, and is expected to grow with mobile gaming with more big games to appear and with expansion of 5G networks.
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