(Gunshots)
- [Jim] Gaming is becoming much
more of a collaborative pastime.
You know, it's not just you alone in your basement anymore.
You're playing with and against other people.
The thing that really separates esports
from other types of games is competition.
You don't play an esports game, generally, for exploration.
Like I'm not really running around a map
trying to count the trees, right?
I'm out there trying to shoot the other dude in the face.
And the reason you're doing that
is for the satisfaction of victory, right?
People play to win in competitive
games, and we help them win more.
And so we fit into that space,
because people play these games
and they want to improve their skills.
And that infrastructure, until us, really hadn't existed.
And so we kinda closed that gap,
and let people get better at their favorite games.
We're a coaching platform, we have coaches on one side.
And students use our search tools
and proprietary technology to find the right coach
who can help them get better at their favorite games.
Every other kind of sport or high-skill activity
has coaches, and tutors, and teachers.
But esports really haven't, but at the pro level they do.
All the pro teams have coaches,
but the amateur teams usually don't,
and amateur individuals usually don't.
So it would be like saying, I want to get good at tennis,
but you can't get a coach until you get to Wimbledon.
That just wouldn't work, right?
Esports is sitting there right now,
and so we helped kinda close that gap.
So you go to gamersensei.com,
we support 15 of the most popular esports titles right now.
You find the game you want to work on,
you look for a coach who has great abilities,
in the areas you want to improve.
And then you can book time with that coach,
you schedule your lessons, and you join each other,
either in game, or through our sensei-connect
lesson software and you conduct your lessons there.
We have students in 65 countries,
got coaches all over the world.
Some of the most popular titles on the platform are
League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, Overwatch,
those are all really big on the platform.
Fortnite, obviously, the most popular
title in the world right now.
We launched Fortnite for coaching on our platform
and it really took off quickly.
I think it's a testament to just the broad appeal
and the joy of playing Fortnite.
Most esports titles, it feels great when you win.
It feels terrible when you lose.
I think with Fortnite, it doesn't really hurt
that much when you lose, you still have a good time.
- [Troy] My name is Troy Hanson,
I'm currently a Fortnite coach for Gamer Sensei.
I've been playing Fornite since season two.
I've tried a couple different things,
like going semi-professional, professional,
and I came across coaching now.
- [Video Troy] You want to, actually right now,
you want to place some walls, okay?
So you want to press Z, and then want to hold left click,
and do that one by one thing, that giant tower. Perfect.
- [Troy] Basically, what I start off,
when coaching a student, I will initially mess with their
settings and make sure they maximize their settings.
So that way they can press keystrokes,
and certain keys faster than maybe other keys.
I also make sure that the performance of the computer itself
can handle a game like Fortnite,
by turning their settings a little bit lower,
to make sure that they're maximizing
that amount of frames per second, FPS, that they have.
And then from there, I go and assess some of their different
mechanics, of the game specifically,
where I start off with aiming,
because aiming is a very large
portion of the game specifically.
Kind of assess what they do to aim.
How they aim, what they utilize when they're aiming.
Then I move onto their building mechanics,
which is again, probably one of the biggest,
or the biggest, thing in Fornite,
is where you need to help build, and out edit your opponent.
So that way, you can protect yourself.
Then, if we still have the time to do so,
I usually bring them into an actual game itself,
and assess their actual ability to fight real-life people,
and see what they're doing wrong,
see if they're getting nervous,
see if they're not taking engagements correctly.
Maybe they're rotating around the map incorrectly.
- [Video Troy] Keep breaking furniture.
Keep looting houses, right? Open as many ammo
crates as you can. Stuff like that as well, right?
- [Troy] I think video game coaching,
specifically, is a very new concept, right?
I think it would be, it's just as normal
as any coaching in anything else, in a normal traditional sport.
Maybe baseball, football, basketball, et cetera.
Same concept applies where the coach is then trying to get
whoever the student is, better,
or the player is, better at the game.
I do think it kind of blew up
specifically here with Fortnite.
Fornite has changed the gaming scene as a whole.
From so many different aspects,
from a streamer's standpoint, YouTuber's, stuff like that
all the way to the player's standpoint.
I just see coaching as just another
form of what was already there.
Just now it's branching over to gaming specifically.
And now that there's obviously million-dollar
tournaments on the line, I think
coaching is a new time thing.
- [Jim] We only accept about five percent of the applicants
who want to become coaches on the platform.
And what we're looking for is not
just people who are great gamers.
There are many millions of really
high-skill players out there.
We're looking for people who are great teachers.
They're patient, but more important than that,
they also need to be able to watch somebody
play in real time, and understand,
critically but constructively,
how that player can get better.
We solved this problem, you know...
organically.
And then realized there's probably other people out there
who wanna get better at their favorite games,
and we can help bring the pros and the students together
to make that happen.