We’re halfway through 2023 which means it’s time to share what we've cooked and served during Q2 of this year! Some of our major highlights for this quarter included 2 live events in San Antonio and Germany for our partners at Air Force Gaming, the launch of our Owned and Operated Tournament Series featuring Marvel Snap  and a brand new partnership with Twitch and Turo for the North American Challengers League 2023 Summer Season!

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DAF Esports Invitational 2023 - Overwatch 2

At the end of May, we traveled to San Antonio, Texas to host the inaugural DAF Esports 2023 Invitational alongside our awesome partners at Air Force Gaming. The event was a remarkable two-day cross-branch military esports in-person competition featuring the best Overwatch 2 players from Air Force Gaming, US Army Esports, US Navy, and US Coast Guard! The vicinity of the venue to the Air Force Gaming headquarters allowed for local military leadership to watch the action live as well as experience first-hand 

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Allied Forces Esports Invitational 

Continuing on our live event journey, our team flew to Ramstein Air Base, Germany in June to host the Allied Forces Esports Invitational, our first international LAN! In partnership with Air Force Gaming, we brought together their best players and invited out United Kingdom’s three military branches including the RAF Esports, British Army Esports and Royal Navy Esports to compete in a 2-day Rocket League friendly competition. For the event, we organized an in-house broadcast production studio which featured stage lighting, an on-site host and seating arrangements for local attendees to watch the action! 

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Rally Cry Open

At the start of June, we launched our owned and operated tournament series called the Rally Cry Open. The goals of the Rally Cry Open are aimed towards building our own Rally Cry userbase and reputation in the overall gaming and esports community outside of our white-label products. We hosted 2 Marvel SNAP tournaments across June and July which had over 400 players register to compete for a $500 prize pool for each tournament.

Along with partnering with Elite Creative, we also started our Fortnite Creative initiative where we work with individual creators on building tournaments based on maps & modes they create.

We have a lot more Rally Cry Open tournaments featuring various games planned for Q3 so stay tuned for more details on that!

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NACL Partnerships

In June, we joined forces with Twitch’s sponsorship sales team to introduce advertiser support for the North American Challengers League (NACL). Together, we signed a partnership with Turo, the renowned car-sharing marketplace to become the presenting sponsor of the North American Challengers League 2023 season! Throughout the 2023 Summer Season, our NACL and NACL Qualifiers broadcasts will feature uniquely content pieces with the Turo brand that will help elevate the audience experience of the show. Moving into Q3 and beyond, our team will be working closely with Twitch to bring aboard more brands to the NACL show to support the ever-growing League of Legends path-to-pro ecosystem. 

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Platform Updates

This quarter, we’ve made a lot of improvements on the player and team experience during our competitions. We’ve added a new way for teams to sign their roster up to compete in multiple competitions! Captains and coaches will be able to toggle which of their players will actively participate in each competition. Each individual team will be able to track their ongoing and historical performance records as well as be showcased on their respective community page. Whether it's your Varsity Valorant Team for your School Community or a casual Call of Duty squad, we hope this fosters communities both large and small!

One of the many problems during our competitions we’ve noted is that some players do not create an account in time for the matches to begin or they simply do not want to register for another gaming platform. Soon, team captains and community moderators will be able to add placeholder members to quickly fill their rosters. These placeholders can be activated at a later date and maintain their achievements, or they can remain as placeholders to make signing up for competitions even easier! However, some competitions can optionally be set to only allow full users, as there may be prizing or travel considerations to take into account.

With the many different competition formats available, our platform provides a flexible system for easily splitting the competition into multiple bracket stages, a single stage into multiple bracket groups, and more. One new feature added this quarter which provides even more flexibility is the League Format by Challonge. With this feature, we can create a bracket where every round of matches is custom assigned by admins. This is particularly useful for league or sports formats where matchups may be determined by broadcast schedules or physical locations.

In conclusion, we hope that these platform updates will continue to enhance the competition experience for both players and organizers. These are just the most significant updates of many this quarter and we are excited to continue iterating and improving on these new features.

That’s all for this quarter’s recap! We hope everyone is having an amazing half of 2023 so far. Stay tuned for our next recap in September as Q3 wraps up. 

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