Authors Note: This is going to be a long one, but the length justifies the depth of the topic and its importance on how the competitive Sim Racing eSports world could shape up. Take your time, read well, make up your mind on the topic and please share your views down in the comments!
Quite often in interviews, one question always seems to find its way in, whether the subject is an international icon or a freshman seeking a job: ‘How do you define success?’
For sporting leagues, a more PR friendly answer would be ‘when all the stakeholders of the league are satisfied and there is steady growth’. This loops us on to another key question, ‘What is growth for any sports league and what is the most important metric?’
How do you define success?
Conventionally, broadcast numbers have been the go-to index to track; in a world where top sporting leagues are being paid 9 to 10 figure sums for their TV rights, there’s no denying that this metric, if positive, can have the largest possible contribution to the bottom line and elevate the league a step above the rest. One only has to look at the financial superiority of all Premier League teams in relation to those in other countries. The root of it? High broadcast numbers (especially in key demographics), which leads to broadcasters being willing to pay higher for TV rights, which means more distributed to the teams and a higher profit for the league, which can help attract the best players and the cycle carries on.
Live broadcast numbers have often been the major commercial driving force for sporting leagues
What’s interesting about physical sports is their approach of a centralised broadcast, albeit one where they don’t have any choice. For instance, should you want to watch a Formula One race, even if it is only to watch your favourite driver, you can only watch the standardised TV feed. Sounds a bit odd to mark it out as something different when all of us have witnessed this for all our lives, right?
eSports Leagues and the Streamer Conundrum
Where it truly becomes interesting is when compared to the world of eSports. Here, viewers have a choice: you can either watch the overall broadcast to focus on the entire match or instead, you can watch the first person viewpoint of your favourite player via their streams on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. To someone new to the world of eSports, it may come as a huge surprise to note that more often than not, the individual streamers rack up way more views than the centralised broadcast!
Streamers like Jimmy Broadbent have a great influence over the wider sim racing audience
Why, you ask? Succinctly put, sports has always relied on superstar attractions to draw viewers to the broadcast. In eSports, you can log in and spectate the event exclusively from their point of view in real time, giving you the choice to focus only on who you are here for. The digital age has been all about creating niches and diving deeper into them: player streaming is a classic example of just that.
The VCO ProSim Series: Can you call it a success or not?
For instance, let’s look at 2020’s VCO ProSim Series, the most ambitious Sim Racing league of the year which saw top real world drivers like Max Verstappen, Romain Grosjean, Antonio Felix Da Costa and the likes being teamed up with the best of the Sim Racing world in an 8 round, frantic F3 series that I had the privilege to commentate on in the global broadcast.
Jimmy Broadbent, one of the most iconic sim racing streamers in the world today, was a cornerstone of VCO’s marketing push for the historic first season of the ProSim Series. His streams for the VCO ProSim Series rounds consistently racked up over 100,000 viewers, sometimes even doubling that while the live broadcast could only hit that milestone for the opening event. Later, only one race broke the 50,000 total viewers mark and that was the second round with a total of 55,000 viewers.
This left me confused: from a numbers standpoint, was the VCO ProSim Series a success or not? The centralised broadcast’s numbers as a standalone in relation to all other Sim Racing leagues look extremely mouth watering but even with thousands of dollars invested into it, the streamers are able to attract relatively very strong live numbers, which takes a lot away from the central broadcast, the number that potential sponsors would be most likely to check!
Florian Haasper: How does the VCO boss measure success?
My next step was clear, I had to speak to the charismatic head of VCO, Florian Haasper (click on this link to read my feature about him and what makes him so special) and ask him what success could truly be defined as for an eSports league. Here’s his take, in full:
“It’s a part of a learning process and I’m still in it; I think I have to change my KPIs! Is it likes or viewers on streams that matters? Is this the currency where you can define this is a successful thing or this isn’t?
Look at what Porsche does with their All-Star races with influencers before the Super Cup. They have cool viewers with 2,000-3,000 live viewers but is that much? Is this number much better than a 1,500? It is not the currency to be honest.
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If you then start and add all the views the streamers have, let’s say Jimmy and the likes, then you might look and say, ‘okay, this is cool!’ It was some 15,000 people who watched Jimmy live, let’s say 1,000 watching Emily Jones and then it could get interesting.
My conclusion is, and this is the problem for Sim Racing, you can’t compare it to real world motorsport and to linear television. For me, it’s a matter of content creation. To me, a race creates content and storylines for providing to the participants; let’s say 8,000 people are competing in an iRacing special event and 50 % are live streaming and let’s say everyone has 10 viewers, then you are in a range where you can call it a very relevant live audience!
What is it, if not live viewers for VCO?
Media Credits: VCO
“Unfortunately, it is very hard to calculate all this accurately. My takeaway is that you cannot measure the full reach and impact of Sim Racing which is a big thing I am convinced of. We rather define it as a content creation thing and for that, someone needs to provide the content and give a platform for it. I’m convinced that there’s so much more potential for leagues and teams if the content creation is nurtured to a different level.
One thing we have to learn from the real world marketing side is that ‘I don’t care about live views. If we do the Monday night VCO Studio, I don’t care if it is 12 viewers or 11. I need to make sure that I run a campaign afterwards with the content and then show it to the target groups who I want to show my content to and I have to put money into it. With most videos on our channel, the big views that we see on there always come from the campaigns afterwards and I have no problem with it! If I want to make people see my content, I really have to take it to them and run campaigns about it.”
Author’s Thoughts
I find this to be a very interesting approach to look at an eSports league. To me, having streamers amplify the reach of the series has always felt like historic acts of bringing in a group of specialised fighters from outside the kingdom: they may not be directly under your control as a league or a kingdom, but they are incredibly astute professionals at getting their exact job done: in the early ages, conducting raids or defending the region and now, something a lot more accepted and peaceful, pushing the league to a much wider audience.
The ripple effect is real: it would make little sense not to tap upon the large potential of streamers to promote a league and what really interests me is Florian’s emphasis on content creation and running campaigns, something which he has done extensively with BS+COMPETITION (read more about what makes their marketing so special) and VCO.
It may seem like a cliche but honestly, only time will tell. For now eSports Level Sim Racing is pretty nascent in relation to platforms like DOTA, Counter Strike and the likes, but if their approach of content creation can be used effectively, I can only wonder how far the Sim Racing wave can stretch out to!
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