Winners League Season 2 gathers nearly 300 teams in over 1,400 matches

WIN is an eSports company with three primary product offerings. One of them is Winners League, a product run through the FaceIT platform. It has recently finished its second season of play featuring some of the largest and most respected organizations in the industry. For this season, the brand expanded out League efforts from Europe to include North America and are further building both subscriber and viewer numbers. Nick Gorbunov, Product Manager, shared with Yogonet his overall view on Season 2 outcomes.

What are the final numbers and your overall assessment of WINNERS League Season 2, especially regarding your debut in North America? Have you met your expectations? What room has it left there to improve for next season? 

We always try to set the bar high for ourselves. We benchmark where we are at and plan accordingly. We had close to 300 teams participate in Season 2, and they played over 1,400 matches across three months of competition. We’re really happy with the quality of the games we had in the league, the diversity of the teams, and the support we provided to the players throughout the season. We considered critical feedback from our first season of play and acted on it during Season 2, and the response to the changes we made was very positive. There are more improvements in store for our next season of play as we’re always looking to provide a better experience to our players, but we’re very happy with Season 2 overall.

What novelties, technology innovations, learnings and feedback could you share with us about the tournament’s divisions and formats? Could you spot further differences as compared to Season 1, for instance, in terms of U.S. vs. European league? Have you found new demands or opportunities among the teams and possibly the audiences?

We really want to put on a good show for the viewers, so we’re experimenting with new and different additions to our broadcasts. A good example of that was our having a live DJ perform during breaks between matches. We’re constantly working to innovate, but most importantly for us, we want to make sure that players are enjoying the event and have a reason to come back for next season and to recommend that their friends join them. I think that we’re doing really well in listening to player feedback and continuing to better shape the league season to season. We adjusted the format for the Starter Division to be more suitable to a larger number of teams, while we stuck with the previous round-robin format for Invite. That’s an example of figuring out what works best for our different sets of players and acting on it. There are definitely some differences comparing audiences and teams between Europe and North America. The European region has smaller domestic scenes, where each region kind of develops their own style, and there are more local LAN events that are accessible to a larger number of teams. The North American region typically shares one broader fanbase and its focus is more towards the top teams. LAN events are more scarce and the environment for up-and-coming players can be volatile. If you just look at the number of roster changes for our North American and European teams, NA leads across all divisions. EU fans are also often bettors, while most NA fans do not have much betting options available to them, that may make the lower level matches less engaging for those fans. Building out a very solid middle base of teams is crucial in continuing to develop the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive scene in North America, and we’re doing our best to take part in that effort.

What resources and leverage does FaceIT platform provide? How have you worked on it to make improvements on the software, and why could this make WINNERS stand out among the competition? What other complementary features do you offer in order to achieve a comprehensive entertainment experience? 

There are many benefits to working with a partner like FaceIT. They have a huge existing player base, they are constantly looking for ways to improve their user experience and to integrate with new games. They’re always developing new experiences, like hubs, the Faceit Pro League, and more. They’re really looking to take these eSports competitions to new heights and were among the first to treat top performing players like the stars that they are. We’re really glad to have approached FaceIT when we did, as they were looking to get into team leagues at the time. We’ve already done a lot of great work together, our communication is good and is constantly improving. We’re helping them with league and player feedback and in return they’re working to enable our vision for Winners League. We’ve crafted collectible souvenirs for the league champions, Winners League swag items, things like that. I feel that we’ve only scratched the surface here, as we still have a lot of new ideas that we would like to implement in upcoming seasons to raise the value of participation for the players and the entertainment value for the viewers.

How do you approach amateur and semi-professional eSports communities; what tools do you provide them with for progress and growth as competitors? What specific criteria would you adopt in this sense for US teams and potential players? 

This is a big question. We encourage the development of the teams through our league competition. First and foremost, they are here to compete. An example of our enabling that competition positively is how our league admins are very hands-on when it comes to match scheduling. We’ve avoided many potential match forfeitures simply through the administrative team encouraging good sportsmanship between the competing teams, leading to cooperative rescheduling and a better overall experience for everyone involved. We also had the top female teams compete in North America and we’re looking at getting some of the top European female teams involved for next season. CLG RED had an overtime win over a really good team in VARIANCE in the group stage, who had just begun their journey in MDL, and we think the women have a lot of potential given the right environment. We hope to provide that. We currently have a tier system featuring three divisions: Starter, Main, and Invite. This allows competitors to play opponents closer to their own level of skill and experience, and to progress through divisions as they improve. The Season 1 Starter Division champions ended up in the same group as Virtus.pro when they got promoted to Invite, and they told us that playing a team like Virtus.pro and the other top teams at that level was a tremendously valuable experience. We’re happy to showcase and provide a platform for these talented players and help them to grow. We’re excited to see where our champions will be one year from now as they use these platforms we’ve built to spring forward.