“Somebody is going to create an eSports experience on touchscreen that is in the order of five times bigger than Counter-Strike or League of Legends is today.”

Kristian Segerstrale, as you may have guessed, works for a company trying to do exactly that: Super Evil Megacorp, which has just struck a deal with eSports firm ESL to run a tournament based on its Vainglory mobile game.

However, Segerstrale’s background shows he tends to make money where his mouth is. He founded a publisher called Playfish in the early days of social gaming on Facebook then sold it to Electronic Arts for $300m, then invested early in developer Supercell before it struck mobile gold with its Clash of Clans game.

These days, he’s chief operating officer at Super Evil Megacorp, which is trying to prove that Vainglory can not just become the first hit hardcore mobile “MOBA” (multiplayer online battle arena) game, but can also draw large online audiences to watch it played competitively.

“It is incredibly early days for touchscreen eSports. PC eSports has been around for quite some time, and people there are still figuring out how to make it truly mass-market. We can learn from that,” he says.

“But in three years’ time, there will still only be 600m or 700m home PCs capable of running the highest-spec PC games, yet there will be 2.5bn or 3bn devices capable of running Vainglory. That’s why the touchscreen eSports opportunity will be maybe five times larger than the PC eSports opportunity today.”

(A quick primer if you’ve landed on this article with no prior knowledge of this area: eSports refers to video games played competitively for an audience – millions of people online on sites like Twitch, and/or tens of thousands of fans in real-world arenas. There are professional teams in this world, and increasingly-big prizes as sponsors pile in to the market.

But it’s a world still under the radar of the media industry, even with Amazon buying Twitch for $970m and ESPN experimenting with broadcasting eSports on its TV channels. And eSports is an increasingly broad church, taking in PC games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike, console franchises like Call of Duty and FIFA, with mobile games getting into this space too.)

Anyway, back to Vainglory: unveiled in September 2014 on-stage during an Apple keynote, then launched for iOS devices in November, with an Android version currently in closed beta.

Like League of Legends, Vainglory is a MOBA, where two teams of individual players battle it out for control of a level with gameplay blending action and strategy in equal measure. Segerstrale says its players are currently averaging 75 minutes a day in the game, although that rises to 110 minutes in Japan.

One of Super Evil Megacorp’s first official streams of a Vainglory match.

“Our dream from the start was to create a gaming experience that was equally fun with friends at home around the table or at the very highest competitive levels to be played at a world championship level and watched in a stadium,” says Segerstrale.

“The dream is to get to the status where football is today: where you can play with friends casually or watch the stars at the highest level, and where both are really fun. But we always knew it would be pretentious to say ‘we are aiming to be an eSport’. We had to focus on making a game that our community would want to be an eSport.”

The company appears to have succeeded. In February, streams of people playing Vainglory generated around 500k views on Twitch, according to Segerstrale. By April, that monthly views figure had more than doubled. “We’ve gone from nothing to having well over a million Twitch views a month,” he says.

Players have also been setting up their own tournaments and streaming them online, starting with small audiences and cash prizes, and growing from there.

Super Evil Megacorp, meanwhile, has been adding features to Vainglory to respond – for example a spectator mode to help people keep playing three-on-three matches while an extra person on each team handles the “spectator” view for streaming to a wider audience.

The company also experimented with streaming matches on Twitch from the PAX East show in March, attracting more than 80,000 viewers. Now that’s led to the deal with ESL, which will run a Vainglory Cup Series tournament in Europe – its first mobile-only MOBA contest – with matches to be streamed on Twitch.

Segerstrale is enthusiastic about the potential. “The emotions of watching these things are very similar to watching sports: that heart-pounding feeling of supporting one team and feeling those ebbs and flows of a game,” he says.

“What’s been happening too is that eSports production companies are learning to create narrative, through the seasons, the teams and players, and the drama of the matches. They’ll even have slow-motion videos and music in the build-up, like a Rocky montage, to build up the tension!”

A promotional image of Vainglory.

Segerstrale admits there is some scepticism within the eSports world over whether mobile games – even a hardcore MOBA like Vainglory – can make as compelling eSports viewing as games like League of Legends.

At the same time, he points to players like Lanai Gara (aka Ms Vixen) who made her name as one of the world’s best Counter-Strike and Call of Duty players, but now also streams Vainglory sessions on her Twitch channel.

“We don’t pay her to do that: she’s just found this to be a great medium to play with her friends. It’s just as legitimate as the more well-known eSports games,” says Segerstrale.

He admits, though, that there is plenty of work to be done before a mobile game like Vainglory is attracting similar audiences to the big guns of the eSports world.

“We are starting with the very first baby step of a professionally produced series, and we expect months and quarters ahead of experimentation and learning, as well as more big eSports partnerships being announced in the future for us,” says Segerstrale.

“It’s all focused on learning and building towards doing a real ‘Season One’. If you look at League of Legends, they’re in season five, and the production values have just kept getting better and better.

We’re not even anywhere near launching season one yet, but we are excited by how many people are already watching this game on Twitch today; and by how many tournaments are already being organised by the community, with a competitive scene despite the fact that we haven’t really had the in-game features to support that.”

Super Evil Megacorp is certainly ambitious, which is where Segerstrale comes back to his view that mobile games will eventually be much bigger draws as eSports than the PC games that built the category in the first place.

“We want to create the mass-market, digital equivalent of basketball or football,” he says. And this does not necessarily involve taking eSports to traditional TV channels, despite ESPN’s recent experiments airing tournaments for League of Legends and Dota 2 on its ESPN3 channel in the US.

An example of Vainglory being played as an eSport.

Segerstrale notes that in South Korea, where eSports is already mainstream viewing fare, there are dedicated TV channels for it. He wonders whether that will be necessary in the west though.

“Twitch is the place I would go to watch it, and more likely on my tablet or my smartphone rather than my TV. And the demographic of eSports viewers is exactly the cable-cutting demographic too,” he says.

“It’s unclear to me whether trying to shove eSports down the throats of an ageing TV-watching population is the right way to make it in the west, rather than building a bigger business around the eSports ecosystem that we already have.”

How? More advertising and sponsorship for starters. Segerstrale points to the League of Legends North America league, which attracts big audiences on Twitch.

“It airs almost every weekend during the season, on Saturday and Sunday for four hours or so. The average viewership on Twitch is maybe 300,000 or 400,000 simultaneous viewers throughout the whole thing, so my guess is at least high single-digit millions watching it every weekend,” he says.

“And yet still it feels like the business infrastructure around that – the sponsorships and commercial opportunities – has such a long way to evolve. If you watch the whole 3-4 hour broadcast, you might see five ads. This is such an important, trendsetting audience, yet the business structure is so nascent still.”

For now, Super Evil Megacorp is trying to build Vainglory’s community and get involved in eSports in a sustainable way.

He also thinks that “core” games like Vainglory are currently undervalued within a mobile games industry obsessed with games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans that hog the upper reaches of the app store top-grossing charts.

“Throughout its history, the industry has underestimated each new trend by judging it on the metrics of the previous one. When we started Playfish, people would say ‘why would you make Facebook games? Flash games don’t make any money, pay-per-download is the model’,” he says.

“Then on tablets, it’s been ‘why would you make midcore games because clearly these are only very casual experiences like match-three games?’ But in lots of ways, what we and companies like us are building – core gaming on touchscreens – feels far more robust than any of these previous waves of games.”

How so? Segerstrale says the community around Vainglory reminds him of the PC gaming community in the late 1990s and early 2000s when games like StarCraft and World of Warcraft emerged.

“They’re franchises that truly lasted for decades. And in terms of the level of passion and community engagement, we are much more akin to what happened then,” he says.

“We are already one of the most-streamed touchscreen games on Twitch, despite having an audience that’s a fraction of the biggest touchscreen games in the world. That tells you a big story in terms of how engaged, long-lasting and robust the experience around eSports and core gaming on touchscreens will be.

He continues: “There is massive scepticism from inside the industry about what we’re doing: ‘Oh, core gaming will never work, why is nobody there in the top-grossing charts?’” he says.

“Nobody’s comparing us using the PC [gaming] metrics: they’re just looking at this compared to midcore on mobile. But we think we and the companies like us are onto something: this phenomenon will be built over years and years, not months.”