ESPORTS SPEARHEADING

As annotated on the graph, almost all viewership peaks throughout the history of the game are tied to esports events. What’s more, the trend clearly is that after each peak, the day-to-day average viewership outside of events also increases.

That kind of curve is the one I would have at first expected to see for most new games entering the esports space — where a successful esports strategy leads an “esports-ready” title to uninterrupted community engagement growth, at least for a couple years — but oddly enough that’s not how it’s been going, at the very least not when it comes to engagement towards Twitch viewership.

So how did R6S get there? To the contrary of almost all new esports hopefuls, Ubisoft decided to not internalize this entirely new large pipeline called “esports and community operations” to create an in-house league. Instead they elected to work with experienced actors from the already existing ecosystem: ESL.

So it turns out it’s the Germany-based company that is behind the esports peaks that have been pacing the game’s viewership growth.

Yet big successful events, no matter how needed they are, don’t tell the whole story. As the R6S esports strategy has been both unique in its kind and uniquely successful in the data, I went to talk to Sean Charles, Senior Vice President Publisher & Developer Relations at ESL, to inquire on their partnership with Ubisoft.

When did you start collaborating on R6S with Ubisoft? What is the involvement of ESL in the work around R6S esports and community?

We started working together around a year before the game was released. Ubisoft had a strong ambition and quality intents in terms of building something solid in the esports space. We are in charge of co-defining & managing esports operations on the game, from grassroots online activities to the big staged events.

How has your partnership evolved with time? It seems like you didn’t aim too high to start with but ambitions ramped up?