How to Plan & Execute a Great eSports Tournament

Part Five: Planning and Goals

Every great sports bar event starts with a plan and running an eSports tournament is no exception. This post will help you form the foundation of your event and keep you on track for the duration of your commitment to eSports. It’s important to understand what you’re looking to accomplish and how to reach your ultimate goal — bring eSports fans through your doors and to entice them to return.

Running an eSports tournament requires a great deal of coordination and teamwork, so let’s get started on how to get there.

Planning – Does Your Sports Bar Have Everything You Need?

To effectively pull off a successful eSport tournament, you are going to need banks of computers or consoles with multiple gaming setups. How many screens and controls depends on what game you’ve selected as well as how many players are competing at once. Depending on the game, many successful local tournaments have found value in creating time slots for scheduled matches against the players that sign up.

Getting started requires the basics (many of which you likely already have):

• Dedicated area with a row of TVs
• Game console or computers (type depends on which game you feature)
• Game controls (enough for how many players can play at once)
• Strong network/internet connection that can support WiFi-based games

Audio & visual (AV) is a vital component in eSporting tournaments. All of the equipment must be working in sync to ensure systems doesn’t lag, creating an unfair advantage to one team or player. Additionally, it is important to ensure that all of your TVs are running on the same settings. Even the slightest shift can change the game and give advantages to players. It’s also important to have game and equipment backups; be prepared with extra keyboards, cords, and controllers (if necessary).

All told, a kitted-out gaming machine plus accessories could run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000, depending on the level of proficiency you’re looking to host. If you don’t have enough capital to field a whole tourney, we suggest teaming up with your local video game store for gear discounts or rentals, or even poke game developers to help you set up events of their games.

Timeline – When to Host Your eSports Tournament

Depending on when you receive approval for your selected game, your timeline can vary based on your team and resources. We recommend beginning the planning stages roughly six months prior to when you want to host your tournament to ensure that you have an adequate amount of time to for research, to find proper resources, and to market to local gamers and fans.

When selecting a date, watch out for public holidays, university exam times, and big public events (especially gaming ones, including cons, expos, and other tournaments); those will interfere and limit how many gamers will register for your tournament.

The magnitude of the event is completely up to you. You could go big and look for additional sponsors and gamer celebrity guests, or you could go smaller scale and host a test tournament to see how your guests react.

Overall, you have complete control over the size and scope of the event given the amount of space and your determination of your team.

Operations – Make your eSports Promotion Work Through Solid Operational Execution

We can never forget that your goal of attracting new customers requires you actually serve those new folks. That’s where your operation becomes crucial to the success of your eSports promotion. It just won’t due if a player can’t place an order before their match or your kitchen can’t keep up with “unexpected” volume. That’s why your eSports planning must include a schedule analysis to ensure you have the right staffing and a “gameday” preview so that your whole team knows what to expect.

The good news is that operations is already a skill you have, so you won’t need to learn or research a thing to get this right. Treat your eSports event like every other event you have hosted and prepare your schedule, order product correctly, and inform your team of what to expect. This will give your event the footing it needs to incorporate eSports into your process seamlessly and without bumming out guests or staff along the way.

Goals – What Do You Want the eSports Tournament to Accomplish?

Before you embark on a journey into eSports, you have to clearly determine what you are trying to achieve. You have plenty of good reasons, but you should enumerate them all. These goals will inform how you approach your effort, where you focus your attention, and, ultimately, deciding if the event was a success or not.

Here are a few we think that at least merit your consideration.

Increase Revenue. A laudable goal and should be a pillar in any promotion. It doesn’t mean it’s the only reason, but certainly should be an underlying motivation.

Attract New Guests. If you’ve been reading our series, you would already know we believe this to be the goal of embracing eSports events as a promotion. It’s a big project and it better deliver that Holy Grail of marketing results, new and engaged guests.

Stay Relevant. We have alluded (ok, babbled on and on) about the value of attracting these younger patrons. Millennial and Gen Z folks are less likely than any other generation before them to visit a bar; don’t be the one that gives them zero reason to stop by. In fact, this could likely be the only way you can entice these generations if they have other choices.

Build Your Brand beit-mirkahat.com. You’ll also want to make it clear to your staff and guests that the event isn’t just for eSports players. You should be encouraging spectators to come to the event, too, as they’ll help boost your bottom line.

Of course, you’ll only know if you have succeeded by measuring. Depending on your goals, you may have different paths to measuring that success. Consequently, we will discuss ROI more in-depth in our next post and will share tactics which set you up for success.

Organizing and planning your event is crucial to its success and sustainability. Organizing your platform choice (what game and system you will employ), setting a timeline, getting the required permissions, and defining your goals are the steps you need to be prepared and to shape your eSports event. Choose them each wisely and you are that much closer to owning the eSports market in your community.