Credits: Beyond The Summit
Advertorial – this article is sponsored by Beyond The Summit to promote the Summit of Time, which kicks off on May 10th live on Twitch.
The esports industry has largely graduated from school gyms and church halls of old. Grassroots, volunteer-driven tournaments have given way to sold-out convention centers and arenas full of lights, smoke, and music. While many tournament organizers have moved towards a professional presentation that recalls traditional sports, Beyond The Summit has chosen to take things in a different direction.
Like the Overwatch League or a Counter-Strike Major, BTS events pit some of the best teams in the world against one another. However, instead of competing in a stadium with thousands of spectators, the players are in a house and commentary is broadcast from a couch in the basement.
However, this doesn’t mean that BTS events don’t maintain a high level of production quality. The company has invested in creating a professional broadcast experience with lighting, audio, graphics, and more. To watch a BTS tournament is to stand at the intersection of the modern era of esports professionalism and the industry’s grassroots origins.
“We found our niche in the esports ecosystem,” explains Beyond The Summit founder and COO David “Godz” Parker, “which was making events more directly for fans, creating some unique viewer experience that was more player and personality-driven as opposed to trying to create those big one-off ‘wow’ moments…”
Parker and his partner David “LD” Gorman are prominent professional commentators in the Dota 2 scene. Both have previously worked as commentators on the main English-language broadcast of the game’s most prestigious annual event, The International. When the pair decided to launch their own organization, they looked outside of Dota 2’s infrastructure for inspiration.
“Back in 2012-2013, we definitely looked at some of what other more established esports were doing, specifically Starcraft II was kind of the big game at the time. Starcraft II had an event called Homestory Cup that was a very community-driven event that fans loved. So that in some ways helped spawn the idea of what we wanted to do with Summit…I think it was very much a focus from the start.”
The term “community-driven” hearkens back to a time before developer-run, franchised leagues, when a game’s community would develop its entire esports ecosystem from tournaments to rulesets to prizing. This is the atmosphere Parker and Gorman look to recreate with their events. Players participate in comedy skits which reference inside jokes and game-specific terms. Commentators are encouraged to adopt a more casual speech pattern and joke around more than would be seen on a typical modern esports broadcast.
VP of Marketing and Sales Michelle Cheng said that while this approach means that BTS is not considered “PG” to some brands, maintaining that atmosphere which she describes as “the essence of BTS” provides a unique channel of communication that makes a brand’s message more likely to be heard.
“We tell our partners ‘if you truly want to get your message across, you have to communicate in a way that your audience can relate to and understand.’ Otherwise, as brutal as it sounds, you’d just be having a conversation with yourself. In order to honor and maintain this level of trust and authenticity we have with our fans, we first and foremost prioritize their enjoyment during our events and that in turn enables our sponsors to be perceived more positively as co-hosts throwing these great gaming parties with BTS.”
BTS maintains this level of authenticity with its game communities by ensuring that each event is driven by members of its team that are passionate about that game. Parker and Gorman’s history with Valve titles made Dota 2 and Counter-Strike natural starting points, but the company’s next expansion was a major departure from these games: Super Smash Bros. Melee. The pair were entirely unfamiliar with the scene, but other members of their team were passionate about the game and its community, and pushed to give it its own Summit.
Today, the Smash Summit is not only one of the most anticipated events on the Smash tournament calendar; it has also awarded some of the largest prize pools in the game’s history.
Last year, passionate members of the BTS team again encouraged the company to expand further into fighting games by creating an event for Dragon Ball FighterZ. The event was well-received by the DBFZ community and sparked an online discussion about which fighting game community should receive its own Summit next.
This weekend, BTS will answer that question with the debut of the Summit of Time – an event focused on the newly-released Mortal Kombat 11. As with previous Summits, BTS has invited several of the top Mortal Kombat players to compete, with other slots filled in by a unique community voting system known as “the compendium.”
The compendium serves as not only a voting tool, but also funds the event’s prize pool and serves as an additional revenue source for BTS. After an initial round of nominations, fans can vote for their favorite players by purchasing merchandise from an online store. Money spent translates into a pool of votes. This system allows communities to band together and vote in players who may not otherwise have the opportunity to compete with the best players in the world, and allows BTS to provide a large prize pool for games like MK and Smash which generally do not receive prize support on the level of CS:GO or Dota 2.
As many of the biggest esports have moved to restrict the grassroots, community-driven events for their games in favor of their own leagues and circuits, Parker said that BTS’ model shows the advantages and importance of providing fun, personality-driven events for a game’s community. The company has begun to explore ways to work with developers – finding ways to continue to seek that balance between professionalism and an authentic community-driven experience.
Tune in this weekend for the full BTS experience as top Mortal Kombat players compete for a prize pool of over $28K USD. You can also follow the action on Twitter.
