- We're looking at a different time horizon
than much of esports today, which is,
"I'm going to just buy the best player,
buy an international player, just buy what I want now".
An actual traditional athletics program in esports
that also incorporates wellness coaching,
how to play as a team, that would be exciting.
That has to be done through data, though,
to be efficient in scale today.
- Evil Geniuses has been using in-game data
to build rosters for different teams for about two years,
now, if I have that correct?
- Yes. - Since you all have started
taking this approach, what have you first learned?
- Using data and empirical measures to get even
incrementally smarter around how to not just scout players,
but also develop player talent, is critical for us
because it enables more creativity of coaches
and analysts and veterans in the space,
while also enabling efficiency of scale
with automation and decision-making,
and operationalizing how we do esports athletics.
I've with EG three years, now,
and, when I came in and asked the incumbent gaming leaders,
"Hey, how do we add to the team?
How do we replace a player,"
it was the same answer over and over:
"Ask the coach. They probably know someone".
But that's only a piece of the puzzle
and so we've been using data
and we have just as many analysts and engineers
as we do coaches, with a mixture of scouts,
to help us find the markers of what makes a good player.
Some of those might be in-game metrics.
Some of those might be bioinformatics,
like how do players' eye movement or heart rate
or breathing rate respond in situations, too,
to help with resiliency training?
And some of them are more experimental,
as we figure out what makes and what are good markers
of best-in-class champions across all different titles.
I was also really lucky, though,
and I would say a lot of our success
is based on we got the unicorn.
We have a classically trained Tesla and Google data scientist
who turned "Counterstrike" coach: Soham Chowdhury,
who, currently, he's our director of athletics
for "Counterstrike".
Who was able to be an anchor voice
and had a long-term belief, like myself, in,
"Yes, we should explore doing this differently,"
and so he's actually one of my longest-tenured employees,
since I came into EG, helped us really build our data operation
and find best-in-class engineers to follow him.
- In those two years, what lessons have you learned
in building this out for the first time?
- We overestimated the cultural willingness
of coaches and players to utilize data.
- When you're talking about whether or not coaches
and players are receptive to the findings and takeaways,
what does that look like?
Like what are the findings from the data?
- A good tactical example is for "League of Legends".
We have tools that can help simulate pick/ban probability
and how we should thus draft.
But that's not how anyone currently does pick/ban.
It's very much, what do we think the team's scrimming,
based on scrim practice,
calculated bet around what's going to happen,
and it doesn't take into account, especially in series,
as best-of-threes, best-of-fives,
doesn't take into account information from the first game
to help implement how do we strategize for the second?
Today what that means is you rely on a coach's intuition
and that's why coaches are so valuable,
in the sense of drafting:
because we are completely reliant on them to be informed,
whether subconsciously or consciously,
in making these decisions.
But adding, now, data, where,
now, our coaches get booklets of,
"Hey, here's what they played, here's scrim results,
here's what they're picking and banning,"
and we can model and overlay
that with what our players have practiced
and what they have interest in,
it gives more information for us to make an informed decision
than just one source of information.
And, while that's tough, I would say, culturally,
our coaches, it can feel like it's a slight
on someone's capabilities, right?
Of like, "Hey, here's a computer that can do some of the stuff
that you used to do,"
but we've been able to show, through results
and help make the coaches' life easier,
where, now, they're not spending 12 hours a week manually
pulling information to help make those draft decisions,
they're not having to overly lean on
like live scrambling to integrate new facts,
and we make their jobs more valuable
because we give them a stronger foundation and safety net.
The definition of who can be an esports coach also expands,
where, if in-game decision-making can be,
or positional tactics can be, more automated and standardized,
we can focus on other, far historically underlooked, areas.
Leadership skills,
like true coaches from a how to build team culture,
how to manage resiliency. It's hard to find the unicorn,
that can be all facets of a traditional sports coach:
a people leader; tactical, positional knowledge.
And now, we have more opportunity
when we've operationalized some of those functional needs,
whether it's on our culture programs,
our wellness trainings, or our benefits,
or our data and automation.
- So, just to talk at the hypotheticals there,
you're imagining a world where a coach could be watching a match
happening at a championship. They have a tablet.
And maybe one statistic, one overall statistic
that are coming in, real-time data,
is some version of a percentage likelihood
you're going to win that match, given how much
the team's progressed, given how much your opponents?
- Yes. - Yeah, got it, okay.
- Live predictive analytics.
Even in-game economies, like in first-person shooter,
it's like when you have opportunity to strategize around
how to spend for in-game items,
we can be much smarter with data access that is live and mobile.
That is completely new territory in the world of esports,
where, right now, our data is printed booklets
that our coaches bring to the stage.
Imagine if we had access to tablets or live data feeds
or be able to be mobile on the road,
to make insights on the go, even if we're not in our office
or our coaches aren't at their desk.
Today in esports, the underbelly and the bad part
is it's all kind of random,
based on who is spending the most.
But if I could create and my legacy in EG
could be you know that you're going to be trained
to be a champion, that would be exciting.