In this episode (281) of Office Hours, with our host William “The Professor” Collis, we discuss Guild of Guardians teaming up with eight of the world's most recognizable esports organizations!

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of

office hours with the professor. As always, I'm your host,

William de profesor Kahless. And let's get right into this week's

news story. We're talking about eight top esports teams

partnering with guild of Guardians. Now what is guild of

Guardians you might ask? Well, it's an upcoming mobile based

blockchain game. I believe it's alpha is launching later this

year 2022. And what's happening is that these eight top teams

will be integrated into the game as essentially playable

characters that can be traded. And you might ask which teams

are involved? Well, some pretty big names. You have Team Liquid,

you have fanatic, you have cloud nine, there's actually seven

teams joining NRG, who had previously done a deal with

golden guardians last year, I've been told I should cover more

stories that I give high grades to I guess you guys like grade

inflation? I do too. So spoiler alert, I love the story. Why do

I love this story? Because I think it highlights the power of

scale activations with esports teams. And let's talk about why.

First and foremost is just more is better. Right? The fact is,

when guild of Guardians inactivation with NRG, you know,

I didn't really want to cover it on office hours, or if obviously

had been around the time probably wouldn't wanted to

cover it, right? It's just more interesting. It shows a bigger

commitment scale is its own disproportionate value here. So

that's the first thing just more is better. But the second piece

is more is better for a reason. There's real economies of scale

here. Let me give you an example. When just NRG had done

their deal with golden guardians, what could you really

do with the NRG character in the game, you could be NRG. That was

that. Now you can play NRG versus cloud nine, you can try

to collect all the eight top team playable characters. And if

you're someone who wants to represent your team in the game,

you now have more pressure to do so because there's more

allegiances to represent and so more people will also be self

representing right, there's disproportionate scale

advantages to multi team activations. But then the last

piece of this and what I think is interesting is how this is

being done as pre marketing, right. And I want to stress this

because I think there was an old school approach to marketing and

esports, which was, it's a competitive scene, we'll let see

where the game goes and let the grassroots sort of figure it out

and guide us. And that approach, I think, is really dead. The

fact is, esports is a content channel nowadays, just like

Twitch right is a channel that you have to have a marketing

plan against. And I think we're gonna see more and more

developers and publishers having really rich esports activation

plans, regardless of how competitive they think their

title is, because it is a customer channel that they need

to be reaching. So overall, I give the story and a plus I love

sort of the big risk here, that immutable game studio and Stepa

ko games where the publisher and developer here sort of have

taken you know, with this large partnership, I love that these

eight teams are working together here. And I want to stress I

think this really highlights the value of scale esports team

partnerships and esports pre marketing. So in a plus, and I

hope you join me on another episode of office hours with the