Top 5 problems of esports & gaming industry: how to solve b2b networking challenges

The digital gaming industry has always attracted me. Probably since I played Super Mario Bros, Battle Toads, and TMNT for the first time when I was 5 years old. Through time I discovered such competitive games as Warcraft and Counter-Strike and started to follow all the conferences, events, and news in the gaming area. That’s one of the reasons why I have had a special magnetism for the gamification in IT products. However, during my 11+ years in IT, I never got to fulfill my dream and dive into the video game business universe. But not so long time ago I became a Chief Technical & Product Officer in a startup together with a C-Level team of esports & gaming veterans, my friends Sergey Bidzan and Vitaliy Semenyuk. And finally, I got the chance to put all my experience and potential into releasing a comprehensive product with real prospects to bring the business side of the video gaming industry to the next level of evolution.

Here is the first early access version of TEN.gg, the business platform with unique tools for the video gaming industry. You can be one of the first to try out our new product and help us improve TEN just by using it and participating in a product questionnaire. We make sure that you get free benefits on the platform for supporting the product in its early access state. You just need to register on the platform, create your business profile, and write to the in-platform chat with the founders.

Before describing the platform features, let me share with you my personal vision of the evolution of video gaming and esports in particular. More specifically, I want to discuss the problems that have been the catalysts of b2b market stagnation for more than a decade.

Everyone has probably heard of esports. Fun fact: you also could have heard about it as “eSports, e-sports, ESPORTS”, which are little misspellings but annoyed the whole industry over decades. Esports is a specific list of gaming disciplines in which professional gamers compete. Every year the list is updated with new titles, and state authorities and the global community expand the support for virtual sports. However, it isn’t regulated as classic sports directions, which is causing many problems and inconsistencies all over the industry. Nevertheless, that’s not something we are fixing or even trying to solve with TEN.gg.

Only a few people know that esports is, first of all, the business, and only after that, the entertainment and competitions. 

The key component of the esports business is marketing. Advertising, sometimes a bit intrusive, appears during streams and competitions. Sometimes even the players themselves advertise peripherals, accessories, and clothing, but it is officially referred to as sponsorship. From here follows the first problem of the gaming business – access to affiliate programs.

Just as an example. If you’re an esports team participating in international competitions, some advertisers will definitely find you themselves. However, are you sure that you have the best terms & conditions on the market with them or not? With TEN you can get in touch with many potential sponsors and conclude the best deal for your team.

Another case. If you are the newbie esports team and want to monetize your brand you’d probably want to partner with a few sponsors. To do so your team has to do the following to become an ambassador of certain merch:

• Increase the popularity of your brand.
• Attract more viewers/subscribers/fans.
• Create a gaming image.
• Contact a potential sponsor brand representative.
• Prove your benefit to a sponsor.

The last 2 points are most often impossible for the new player in the industry or outsider because the contacts of advertisers are not so easy to find, they are even not collected and structured anywhere. Except for TEN.gg when we finish the work on fulfilling our catalog you can do a single mailout to the whole market segment or the entire industry.

If you’re looking for a business related to the gaming industry, you’re more likely to stumble upon a single “Entertainment” tag. It usually includes offerings not only from the gaming industry but also from television, streaming, cinemas, shopping malls, and even iGaming. The problem is that all the items are placed into the same category. Moreover, this mess is never appropriately structured!

Our platform aims to streamline the gaming industry’s business offers and provide everyone with access to them. The resource has convenient catalogs with filters, which can help you quickly find the necessary position out of thousands of options. The list consists of profiles, pages of companies, and freelancers of all kinds. It allows you to find a specialist, service, or partnership in minutes.

The video game industry is so large that it is sometimes not easy to reach representatives of the right company. This goes for marketing, development, and esports. Even raising investment is sometimes difficult because the startup owner or entrepreneur simply doesn’t know who and how much is interested in digital gaming.

Exemplary-case. If you are an indie developer and you are trying to reach publishers to release and promote your game through the big distribution channels on a market. However, you are struggling with:

• Lack of open information and direct contacts of decision makers in game publishing companies
• Ignore & ghosting from the publishers
• Unfair and unfavorable terms & conditions in contracts

One more case. You are an external business that wants to enter the market. You want to cooperate with the video gaming industry companies. You have a great deal to offer to all the esports teams from Ukraine. You can manufacture branded sportswear for them with a 50% discount. With TEN b2b market-wide promotion tools you can inform the entire industry or a certain set of companies just in a couple of minutes.

On the TEN platform, our goal is to gather 100% of representatives of B2B gaming in a single catalog by logically structuring it and providing you the ability to reach out to one company or to the whole industry.

Very often, esports businesses have trouble making connections. Finding contractors, partners, or influencers on the Internet is very difficult. To be exact, it’s easy to find, but it’s difficult to contact them. We want to eliminate the intermediation of managers by implementing a single database of contacts on the platform. 

Those who want to apply for a job or recruitment, provide one-time services, or promote b2b offers can simply create an account on our resource and start looking for a partnership.

A real-life example: my friend dreamed of creating a small indie game. Looking for partners, he went around all the freelance websites and thematic forums but was left with nothing. Only after some time, when his project attracted the attention of enthusiasts, he managed to gather a team of like-minded people and bring the idea to reality. 

We strive to speed up finding partners by implementing a topical directory of companies, services, and offers on our platform.

Many businesses have difficulty finding project contractors. Their number is growing daily, but the cost and quality of services vary greatly. Furthermore, their direct comparison is not always possible. On the TEN platform, we are going to implement a convenient service marketplace and search for esports specialists, game developers, designers, artists, streamers, server architects, project managers, and all IT professionals in the game industry.

In this way, we give everybody an excellent opportunity to hire necessary specialists on a project or full-time basis. or just earn money by providing relevant services to companies.

The main goals of the TEN platform are:

1. To gather all the B2B gaming representatives in one comprehensive industry business catalog.

2. To provide a highly specialized esports and video gaming service marketplace with the transparent competition.

3. To combine the #1 and #2 points and offer the jobs and candidates matchmaking server with the recruiting platform for both companies and job seekers.

TEN –  is not a solution for everything, rather it is the path that is yet to be passed.

Just imagine for a moment a world where…

• A textile manufacturer who has never done business with esports can enter the platform and in a few minutes offer merchandise production to thousands of teams through a single mailout.
• Game developers no longer need to guess on the coffee grounds whether they found a good tournament organizer and for a fair price. They see reviews and recommendations in the company profile and get competitive pricing through a market-wide tender.
• Your company expands into new territories but you don’t struggle with finding new partnerships in that market. You already have all of them just a few clicks away.
• You need on-camera talent for your stream or a show? You don’t need to search for the contacts, check their availability, or negotiate. You just set up the contest and pick from the proposals.
• You don’t struggle to find a reliable lawyer or a content writer that is specialized in esports. You just select one from the service list based on the reviews and get that job done.
• You use services of individual freelancers but you don’t care about excessive legal and payment burdens. You just process the payments through the platform with standard service agreements.
• You directly access service providers and cut the commission of agencies that re-sell their services.
• Small but promising teams may not collapse in a couple of months due to lack of money, because now they can even find a local company to which they can sell sponsorship.
• As a new gaming startup founder, you don’t need to spend days searching for investment funds, grant schemes, and proper contacts but just clicks “request a chat”.
• Anyone who wants to post a press release about an important event will not need to write to different websites, it will be enough to create a request and receive proposals.
• When hiring staff to provide a short-term service, it will no longer be necessary to bother with payments with accounting, contracts, and documents on the transfer of rights with lawyers, it will be enough just to carry this project through the platform.