Charting
New Terrain
In early 2020, Prindiville and the Dignitas team joined forces with Verizon to launch the first 5G esports training facility in the U.S., a state-of-the-art space designed primarily for Dignitas’s League of Legends teams. The facility serves as a testing ground for 5G use cases in esports, as well as providing the teams, coaches and staff a dedicated in-person location for training and competing.
Prindiville pointed to an example from this summer, when the Dignitas team started off with a string of losses while playing separately from their homes in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. But when they were able to return to the training facility — while following strict safety protocols — and play together, they experienced a notable winning streak.
New training facilities are especially helpful when a profusion of high-powered hardware is required to compete at the top level, like with Dignitas’s teams. A fully equipped hub allows the players to focus on performance, communication and teamwork, rather than logistical issues. In a similar way, 5G could allow millions of aspiring gamers who don’t own or use fancy gaming rigs to participate.
CHAPTER 2
Stronger Communities
A large part of esports growth in the decade was due to the explosion of broadcasts, or streams, of gamers playing their favorite titles, Prindiville says. Twitch and other video streaming and sharing platforms allow anyone the chance to build an audience. There’s also plenty of opportunity for crossover between sectors and professional athletes and other celebrities are often seen on the platform competing virtually too.
CHAPTER 3
5G promises to change all that. Much of a PC’s cost is due to state-of-the-art processing and graphics, but with 5G, you can offload the processing burden to the cloud and then seamlessly connect a local machine, regardless of its built-in compute power.
“From a graphics and processing perspective, gameplay overall will ultimately become even across the board,” says Vitolo.
“In the next two-to-three years, this technology will start to roll out, become ubiquitous and disrupt even the indie filmmaker,” Shamlin says. “You're going to see cameras that are 5G-enabled, where you'll record straight to the cloud. You're going to edit in the cloud. You'll do distributed visual effects in the cloud. All through 5G connections. Independent filmmakers will be able to tap into technologies that even the big guys are using.”
Expanded Access
Dignitas's 5G esports training facility features a 20-person “stage” for competitions, tournaments and other esports events.
Though streaming has opened up a myriad of opportunities, serious restrictions still exist that prevent gaming from becoming truly democratized. The new generation of consoles are the most powerful yet, but the latest and greatest is also the most expensive. PCs — how most esports competitions are played — are even more expensive. Buying a PC for competition-level gameplay requires several thousand dollars, quickly making it cost prohibitive for many.
With multimillion-dollar tournament prize pools and tens of thousands of competitors vying for the top ranks, esports competitors and coaches are doing whatever they can to sharpen their skills. And with Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband the tools to do so are only getting better, along with the environments in which to train.
Creating New And Improved Gaming Experiences
Giving Audiences A New Perspective
Democratizing High-End Computing
Courtesy of Dignitas
CHAPTER 1
For competitors like the Dignitas players, streaming plays a central role in their lives. Most top-flight players have contractual obligations to stream a certain number of hours, and even if it’s optional, they will often take advantage of the opportunity to build their personal brands and connect with fans. But with packed schedules and constant travel between event sites, maintaining that connection gets difficult.
“Our players travel a lot — especially in a non-COVID world — and they try to stream in airports off their phones,” Prindiville says. “With 5G technology, we can provide seamless streams between our players and their communities so they can stay in touch on the go, any time of the day.”
Democratization of high-end gaming is the equivalent to opening up a new sports training facility in every neighborhood, and can open doors for communities that otherwise would be locked out. For esports organizations like Dignitas, it could provide a huge boon to recruitment, as a larger and more diverse player base rises to the top, regardless of equipment. And for millions of young people across the globe, new opportunities could open up to compete, spectate, learn and even develop the next top seller.
“It's a game changer for esports,” Prindiville says. “And it's a game changer for the world.”
“All these great features that are on a smartphone now, coupled with [5G] power, allow developers, gamers and content producers to think about how they can use these things in new and different ways,” says T.J. Vitolo, head of Verizon’s XR Lab, which is responsible for finding innovative applications for 5G technology. “You're really able to build entirely new classes of gaming experiences.”
The new opportunities in mobile gaming have resulted in new mobile game titles, more users and a diminished barrier to entry. One mobile game recently announced surpassing 100M daily active users, and Verizon sponsored a competition on Twitch on October 22 for a new mobile version of the massively popular League of Legends, called Wild Rift.
Many of the top esports competitions are currently played on PCs, but mobile-based esports, in which gamers compete on mobile phones, is a rapidly growing sub-industry. Until recently, the idea of competing at a high level on a device that can fit into your hand seemed absurd. Fortunately, 5G is accelerating the ability of mobile devices to deliver high-quality gaming experiences.
With Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband available in more and more places, brands such as Dignitas will also be able to create new streaming experiences for fans, from pre- and post-match interviews, to tailgating events outside competition venues. “All this will allow us to engage with our audience basically in near real time and give them the access to the players that they desire so badly,” Prindiville says.
Courtesy of Dignitas
Scenes from the competitive esports circuit, featuring Dignitas's female CS:GO team.
FAST FORWARD
TO 5G
The
Future of Gaming
With more and more mobile competitions, the idea that you have to invest thousands of dollars into a top-line gaming rig to participate in esports should increasingly give way to a more democratized future.
“5G will really blur the line between what is a mobile device and what is a high-powered computer or a high-powered gaming console,” Vitolo says.
Courtesy of Verizon 5G Lab
A member of the Verizon 5G Lab team demonstrates an augmented reality execution using 5G Ultra Wideband.
It might be hard to believe, but it was only as recently as 10 years ago that most people still thought of the term “esports” as a new category for playing video games. But in 2010, gaming was about to explode into mainstream culture and establish itself as a formidable and competitive sector of the entertainment industry.
INTRO
For those paying attention, the merging of popular culture and video games has been happening at a rapid clip. “The progress of esports over the last five-to-ten years has been nothing short of stunning,” says Michael Prindiville, CEO of New Meta Entertainment (NME), a digital sports and entertainment company and the owner of Dignitas, a global esports team which Prindiville also leads. “Gaming used to have a little bit of a stigma against it, but now it’s not just accepted, it’s cool.”
The gaming industry now includes not just specialized gamers but devoted spectators and fans as well. Gaming earned approximately $145 billion in global revenue in 2019, and hours watched on Twitch doubled in the second quarter of 2020 as compared to the year prior, according to Twitch. Whether or not this was influenced by COVID-19, the overall trend will continue for years to come.
As more eyeballs — and revenue — permeate the industry, the need to gain a competitive edge has only grown. Teams, players, streamers and analysts all look to the latest tools to get ahead. With increasing adoption of 5G, the new network capabilities won’t only help improve player performance and the quality of streaming, but it is likely to further democratize gaming so that more people than ever before have a chance to participate on an even playing field.
Director
& Head
of AR/VR
Verizon 5G Lab
T.J.
Vitolo
Here, T.J. Vitolo and Michael Prindiville, who work every day at the intersection of technology and esports, explore how Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband could advance the flourishing industry.
CEO
New Meta Entertainment
Michael Prindiville
For competitors like the Dignitas players, streaming plays a central role in their lives. Most top-flight players have contractual obligations to stream a certain number of hours, and even if it’s optional, they will often take advantage of the opportunity to build their personal brands and connect with fans. But with packed schedules and constant travel between event sites, maintaining that connection gets difficult.
“Our players travel a lot — especially in a non-COVID world — and they try to stream in airports off their phones,” Prindiville says. “With 5G technology, we can provide seamless streams between our players and their communities so they can stay in touch on the go, any time of the day.”
With Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband available in more and more places, brands such as Dignitas will also be able to create new streaming experiences for fans, from pre- and post-match interviews, to tailgating events outside competition venues. “All this will allow us to engage with our audience basically in near real time and give them the access to the players that they desire so badly,” Prindiville says.
FAST FORWARD
TO 5G
