Esports tournaments continue to tell stories of hardworking individuals rising up and facing challenges, with one team or participant being crowned the victor. The very best become etched into their esports scene’s lore.
However, much of the hard work for these tournaments, no matter the scale, happens behind the scenes. This includes handling participants, modelling and managing tournaments, as well as making the events stay true to their competitive integrity.
Online solutions providers seek to address tournament organisers’ technical and economic constraints. Some of the biggest international brands like Microsoft, Red Bull, Ubisoft, Riot Games, and PGL are partnering with solutions providers to offer the best esports experiences possible.
Tackling esports’ organisational challenges
Esports events have organisational challenges, in particular, time and budget constraints. Solutions providers handle the technicalities including registration management, tournament check-ins, player and team management, seeding, and placement — to name a few — allowing organisers to focus on storytelling and the hype that drives events.
For example, Toornament’s has partnered with the LFL (the top-flight French League of Legends tournament) and French Rainbow Six League in order to streamline the organisational challenges of these regional leagues, allowing tournament operators to focus on the overall product itself.
Toornament has also worked with publishers like Riot Games and Ubisoft where the service provider offered API access and tournament organiser software. With this, the clients were able to manage their competition results, and retrieve their data to integrate it on their own websites and in their own branding.
Premium services for bigger events
In March 2022, Toornament launched subscription plans to offer new services for its clients. The goal of the subscription service is to cut down on the lengthy and costly development process of creating exclusive websites for various events. Event organisers get access to all data securely and in a GDPR-compliant manner.
As gaming and esports continue to grow, solutions services like Toornament will become more important alongside them. With the world slowly moving back to physical events, such services allow even the smallest organisers to have a professional website that helps manage the event.
The service can aggregate match data in real-time and display results and update leaderboards for event organisers. The automated process reduces the human error factor completely and it attempts to make the experience as hassle-free as possible.
Toornament is also looking to implement unified management of competition circuits that feature multiple events, leagues, seasons, and rankings.
The company said in an interview its goal is to allow tournament organisers to create multi-game esports platforms that are designed to offer the best player experience within its brand environment. Paradis claimed that an increasing number of brands see esports as a “great means of communication” and that many want to “associate with players, teams, and competitions.”
Ubisoft was able to take advantage of Toornament’s services by implementing the solution within its regional leagues. The publisher used Toornament’s services to manage the competition per its own rulebook, integrating match results into the Rainbow Six League website. This was made possible despite the event having a large-scale competitive format and complex tie-breaker rules in place. The entire process is automated which removes the need to manually implement data.
This automated process also allows clients to directly export all event data. Custom integration of the service provider’s platform, circuit, and tournament APIs are also available which allows event organisers to leverage all of the data generated during the event.
Player websites also help esports athletes
These professional services are not just targeted toward event organisers and publishers alone. Competitors can take advantage of the player websites so participants get an overview of all events. This includes tracking what they are participating in, previous results, details of their performances, and more.
Platforms like Toornament take care of registrations and match organisation, allowing players to directly report match results. Check-ins can be supervised by event organisers to ensure maximum transparency and competitive integrity. By letting participants report results, it reduces the chances of any incorrect results being recorded. Reports can also be contested in case of disputes, allowing any discrepancies to be resolved immediately.
It’s also important to adhere to a stringent data policy that protects player information and competition data. As such Toornament’s platform features no ads or any risks of data re-use.
The inclusion of a free plan allows anyone to host events featuring up to 128 participants, allowing amateur players and communities to easily organise events for free.
Toornament believes that esports will become a core activity for some studios. As such, the company aims to accompany professionals and provide them with the tools they need to take these challenges on.
