 World of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today we're talking with Uzair Hassan of eSports How about mobile eSports. Welcome Uzair. Welcome. Thanks Catherine. I'm very happy to be here. Fantastic. Okay. So what is eSports How? So eSport How is an eSporting gaming consultancy. We work with businesses on a global scale to help them position themselves into the eSporting gaming space because what a lot of businesses are starting to realize is that with their current line of products and services is that they're missing the hit the younger demographic and they're also noticing this growing trend in cultures to really be involved in gaming. So a lot of these businesses are now wondering how can they get their current line of products and services into the field. So that's what my business primarily does is how work with those businesses to see if this makes sense for them and their business model and then how they can position themselves into the overall eSporting gaming scene. Okay. And we will return to talk more about that in a little bit, but we're here to talk about mobile eSports. Okay. Now mobile eSports is pretty exciting and what makes it so exciting there? Like mobile eSports in North America, most people just aren't aware of how big it really is. So when you look in the east, it's really dominated all over. Just like for any eSport game, you kind of see NA is slower and it's like Jeff Chow puts it really nicely. Mobile eSports now is what sports players used to see eSports as like fake eSports in this case. But in actuality, mobile eSports has really taken the east by storm and we're just seeing that transition into the north, especially with the revenue streams on the gaming side in the gaming industry. Mobile gaming generates more revenue for the publishers than PC, console and VR combined. So it's massive and the eSports side is reflecting that too, especially in the past three to five years where we've really started to see big titles like PUBG Mobile, Green S Free Fire and a lot of other titles really starting to build out their eSports scene. Okay. So I understand eSports is huge in Asia, huge in India. What other areas of the world it has mobile eSports really dominated? A lot of countries. So we see China for sure. China's honor of kings is massive. It's a massive cultural phenomenon. Vietnam, Brazil, there's really just anywhere outside of North America mobile eSports has really taken storm and a lot of it is a because of yes, the mobile technology is cheaper. So people that are not in the as well of a financial state as we might be in North America, they have access to mobile gaming. But it's not only that because a lot of these countries as well, they have a bunch of PC bongs and gaming arenas that they can go play in. But what really makes mobile eSports special is that it's the social aspect. So if we think back to Pokemon Go, what made Pokemon Go so big was that you knew your friend was playing it and everyone else was playing it. Pokemon Go made a few mistakes where they weren't able to keep that traction going. But we're starting to see a lot of other games, especially in different countries where like PUBG mobile, for example, is really, really big in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, where they because of the social phenomenon and the ability to make relationships with that, it just really helps it take off. And if you look at honor of king, for example, a lot of people in China make relationships from honor of kings, because you get to know the players and people really build strong relationships, not to mention that mobile eSports, unlike most other eSports segments, is predominantly female. They're more female players than male players in most mobile eSport games. And why would there be more females playing mobile eSports than possibly PC or console? Yeah, it's hard to say straight up, but one of the predominant reasons that it seems like is mobile and the way they structured their games differently than PC is that the barrier of entry is much lower. It's much easier for someone to enter the overall game. And like obviously PC early on was especially targeted towards the male demographic where we see like if you look at honor of kings and the way they built their characters and their branding, it's a lot more friendly, a lot more attractive to this female audience that PC and other game failed to tap into where these mobile titles are actually doing really well because of this low barrier and that they're just not tapped into from the other segments of the industry. I would say that's why it's not like we're seeing females starting to balance out even on the PC side is just because of how mobile was so open to everyone is that females that usually wouldn't typically play on PC are now playing mobiles on their phone instead of a computer. It's kind of mobile esports is that kind of a gateway to console or PC or is it something that would just be in itself like once you start playing mobile you'll just continue to play mobile or do you just move where would you move on? Typically you would see them sticking to the mobile title. We don't not that I'm aware of there's any real statistics showing that they're transitioning and that's because of the cultural phenomenon mobile esports actually didn't really take off until three years ago versus if you look at PC esports you know that's been going on for at least a decade now a bit more than that where mobile esports because of that social aspect because when you go around you know your friends are playing it and you want to engage with your friends and there's so many different opportunities that coming from it we don't really see like players really transitioning out of it as mobile is the inferior platform rather it because a big part of it is when you're going out for events so when you're on the on a commission you're able to just play at that point in time and we even see this at live esport events where the fans you know while they're waiting are actually playing with the people in the audience and just enjoying the game live which you can't do with PC games which makes mobile so powerful and so just like again i love the example of pokemon go because it really showed the power of mobile and the interconnectivity there so i i feel like mobile is really the direction we're going and north america's only like two steps behind like we always are is there a difference between a mobile game like for example pub g if you played it on mobile versus playing it on pc or console would there be a difference the main difference would be that the games are shorter simply because you're playing typically playing it on the go the like kind of feel the game is also different based on the actual controller using being a mobile device but um and what we're what we originally saw in mobile esports is a transition from like pc games and console games onto the mobile platform now we're starting to see publishers making dedicated games for mobile just because of how big it is from a revenue standpoint so currently it's just that transition and those games are typically shorter but now we're starting to see more dedicated games for the actual mobile console now on the the mobile games are there a lot of interruptions of commercials and ads no not on a competitive esport games though the games that make about a billion dollars the majority of them are actual competitive esport mobile games so and what we see there is a majority of that revenue is coming from micro transactions not really the advertisements like supercell does this really well with their clash royale clash of clans brawl stars their line of titles where they have a lot of good in-game purchases and they make a lot of revenue through those and we're seeing that micro transactions dominate the mobile esports scene especially and it's so easy to make that micro transaction just connect to your google play you just click a few buttons and then it's it's very seamless and that's part of the reason why it's so much easier for them to make a lot of money on mobile so are people actually viewing and playing esports mobile in mobile fashion yeah 100 um what we see even like apps like instagram these mobile streamers and players get a lot more interaction on these social platforms that are typically on your phone because these audiences are based on mobile and yeah there's a huge huge viewership if you look at free uh greenhouse free fryer if you compare their peak viewership to uh like the top games their number two right behind legal legends and i believe they also occupy the third and fifth spot according to esport charts so yeah the viewership in mobile is very very big and because it's primarily those players are playing on mobile is that now their social media is connected there the notification and they have a lot large large interactive base there as well and and you know i i do have to admit that i do have uh twitch and discord and and uh other games on my phone um that i may not have on my laptop or pc um would that be kind of a common situation yeah yeah you typically see that people use those kind of apps on the go and um especially for mobile gamers where you're you know everything's kind of on your phone uh specifically those in different countries that are leveraging their phones more so on commute and trying to get involved in the community and culture because again mobile esports dominates the culture the one powerful aspect to mobile esports is that not only are you playing it people a large party you're playing it now they're dominating the culture if you go to china and see again honor of kings is really taken over it is um phenomenal and we're very interested to see like last year call of duty mobile their downloads in north america was off the charts in 2019 i haven't checked the 2020 statistics but i'm sure it was very much high up there too and now we're waiting for really legal legends wild rift to add something um people on the mobile side are really really excited to see how that might really shift uh north america's thinking to incorporate more mobile esports you know um it seems logical that mobile would be huge and that it would have been huge earlier than than just in recent years because people around the world have mobile phones but they may not have access to laptops and pc's is that right yeah uh that is see that is a that is an aspect for sure but it's not a massive uh catalyst to mobile like it does help especially when we see countries like china uh sorry not china like india like pakistan that aren't um that don't really have that many computers but they have a bunch of pc banks and uh arenas where they could come down and play but it's a large part of it is the social aspects that allow that interconnectivity there um that is because of the accessibility in north america there is that kind of stigma towards uh pc players and console players versus uh mobile gamers and that like stigma like compared to sports and esports sports players saying esports is in a real thing we kind of see the same thing here like i mentioned before well well typical esport players and gamers comparing a mobile gamer is as not typical gamers and to to be fair in their point since 80 of the downloads from mobile games come from casual games you could make that argument about 50 of the play time or a little bit more than 50 of play time on all mobile games in general come from these competitive esport games because people are soaking hours and hours into these games trying to get as uh high of a rank as possible so you you mentioned um north america quite a bit and yeah are you including south america and central america in that or are they into mobile esports i know brazil is pretty big into the esports scene when i'm saying north america i'm specifically talking about uh like north america us canada because that's a lot where i do my own business and my research lies i haven't looked too much in south america uh and central america but i do know that like countries like brazil uh do have a pretty big mobile scene is just really this first world uh western uh you know north america we don't see mobile just taken off just yet and are there any other reasons why that you haven't mentioned of about why north america is so far behind in mobile it's it's it's interesting just because of the like the cultural differences in uh the western society and like how everything's a structuralized and obviously the fact that we kind of have uh pcs and consoles very readily and people are very interactive there i'm i honestly i'm not like 100 sure beyond the cultural reasons and the fact the the stigma between mobile and competitive that we don't see massive north america blowback besides the support from uh publishers so like we saw supercell uh enter i believe it was in 2018 and they pulled out from north america uh i think it's uh 10 cent is actually starting to push more into north america i believe they built up their partnership in 2019 or 2019 with csl to build out i know on the eastern side first but they're they're expanding throughout and it's um so there's there's potential in north america the the publishers the main catalyst aren't haven't pushed it hard especially 10 cent 10 cent has really dominated like they own shares in green uh which is free fire and they have um like arena valor they own um obviously pubg mobile honor of kings uh game of peace they really dominate the mobile scene and that's why riot games is really entering the scene because of the pressure that 10 cent is applying although they they were refusing to do that earlier like there was an interview i think it was in 2017 where an executive from riot games was saying you know they had some tension with 10 cent there and if you aren't aware 10 cent owns 100 percent of riot games and they had some tension there with their parent company just saying that we don't want legal legends on mobile because you can't recreate that experience and thanks to the new technological advancement the empowered battery life the better CPUs the better GPUs internally and the smaller platforms and especially the increased size of the platform it allows for that um like ability for publishers to do a lot more and that's why riot games is entering the mobile scene and like the the thing about mobiles is that honor of kings was one of the earlier mobiles to enter the mobile scene and the issue they kind of came in with was they started off by making a mobile 3v3 mobiles are typically 5v5 like we see with dota 2 legal legends but they try to do 3v3 it didn't work out and once the and that was because of technological restrictions and once the technology allowed them to expand they went from almost going bankrupt into an extremely billion dollar profitable uh mobile game which has done a phenomenal job for them and riot games is really looking to capitalize on that and we've seen just currently in their beta their success even from the north america side although it's not out in north america they like they've said uh so many people are using vpn to play the game because they're just so interested in seeing you know how riot worth is and they've done a phenomenal job differentiating the games and making it interesting for even pc players want to give it a try sure and we do have questions from viewers and let's go to those because i one of the questions from our viewer is something that i have as well so i'm gonna okay so the question is um okay i want to start streaming mobile games what is the best phone and that leads to my question is can you use an iphone an android both and and also can you use an ipad or a tablet yeah it would depend on the game typically though across the board it seems like iphone's are your best bat as far as streaming these mobile games um if you're especially if you're using in the way you typically would stream them is using an algado a capture or a different capture capture card you connect it directly to your computer software and then from there you're able to get that footage and the video from your computer as well to stream your gameplay there so and iphone's just seemed to do the best and when you're streaming tournaments will either using an emulator if your computer can run it that's how bigger publishers are streaming their tournaments but if you're obviously if you're just a player not using a pc emulator to stream your tournament or your game that you're playing you would just use a ipad ipads ideal just because of the uh the ratio and it depends on the game but like if we're talking about clash royale clash of clans i believe pubg mobile also streams their stuff on a um tablet of some sort so that that is usually your best bat okay and then um another question from the same viewer was how do i record myself yeah so uh like if you're using the algado capture card what you would want to do is from your same pc that the algado is or or the other or the capture card whatever capture card you're using is connected to the pc using the software you just capture an input from your um camera that's connected typically to your computer and then also your phone you you typically have a central operating system that captures it from your phone rather than having to capture it from your phone directly you can also use applications on your phone i can't remember the app right now off the top of my head but there's a good one that allows you to do that over wi-fi so you don't even need a capture card but you just generally need a system to pick up that footage and then same thing for your face is that it just all goes through your software and that streams to the platform that you want to stream on terrific and another question from a viewer is hokiman goh was popular um was a popular augmented reality ar game do you think an ar game can become a practical use sport that's that's a very interesting question i think uh pokemon goh they just lacked a lot of functionality that people were looking for when the game initially came out um so like obviously the inability to battle or interact with individuals was uh harmful to it as far as ar games we like i guess even taking it a step back vr games um we we see a growing popularity as they become more accessible that's currently their biggest weakness is that they're not accessible but a lot of these uh vr arcades what they're doing is that they're hosting tournaments there where they would typically give you a bulk amount of hours you can play so you're able to play in excessive time and then once that's done people love excuse me competitive vr games and um so as far as ar goes i would i would it would depend on how the publisher kind of set it up but there is that again optionality if the competitive nature is there and it's able to really um bring people together in a competitive light where people want to compete with each other and also the viewability is very important for any esport title if those elements are able to be brought in then there is that possibility for sure okay so you've been mentioning like um pubg and some other titles um what are the largest mobile esports titles currently um are there others besides those you've mentioned like fortnight uh fortnight fortnight is a mobile platform but it's like it's it's um cross-platform so like i don't believe i might be mistaken i'm pretty sure i'm not here where mobile fortnight isn't separate like you can play mobile fortnight and because of the cross-platform you're playing with the other players where i believe the competitive side there's no differentiation there um i i know in worlds they don't do it i don't know if they do it any other side but um like ten sense arena valor is a another platform which which it was a mobile but now they stop supporting it because of wild rift and they want to put their 100 support there because they see it uh really blowing up there is um vanguard that's fairly big there's um all the ten cent games or supercell games are fairly big so we got clash royale clash with clans brawl stars um there's mobile legends bang bang which was arguably one of the earliest mobile esport game titles um and that i that one is also a mobile but i if i'm not mistaken but there there is a handful of platforms also uh cod mobile i can't forget that one that one especially north america is really in 2019 so i'd take off there where and now we're starting to see more publishers trying to enter the scene because again every game that really makes a billion dollars within the gaming industry has been or mobile gaming industry rather has been these competitive esport titles with some exceptions like handy crush and other casual games majority of them are these competitive esport titles sir and where do you see mobile esports progressing in the next five years so mobile esports i personally and this is arguably by some like people have different opinions on this i would see mobile esports really starting to blow up in north america i think and this is again my personal opinion completely i think cobit hurts mobile esports just because of that inability to leverage it on the go and to be able to see your friends playing it and trying it out um but like i would see within the next two two to five years that mobile esports starts to really blow itself out within north america i see some unique publishers coming into the scene again what we've really seen up till now is people are publishers replicating their pc game onto mobile and mobile just has a different feel where they have to really change up the game i see new games just entirely new games coming into the actual mobile scene that really worked well with its quick pace more casual on like commuting and like when you're just waiting somewhere and those type of games i see those really coming out and a lot of different publishers competing for that market because right now 10 cent is really the one that dominates the majority uh majorly so we're just trying to see you know who else is going to come in and be a major contender but mobile esports is really going to in my opinion blow out and continue to be a massive massive source of revenue for these publishers in the next two to five years so do you think that pandemic has impacted either the popularity or the kind of necessity of doing mobile esports at all yeah i mobile esports in the areas that it's had culturally dominated haven't necessarily suffered a great deal from it i think the further ability to expand it in countries that aren't necessarily mobile dominant have probably struggled i wouldn't be able to say that from specifically the data just because i i haven't fully looked at the 2020 data as far as how how it's grown because obviously as we recently transitioned to 2021 someone that's still coming together but um the but the sides that we've seen like in eastern countries they definitely have not like mobile esports didn't suffer just because the cultural dominance that it's had and the players commitment to that specific console to play on okay so let's shift to esport how tell us more about what you do in that with that company yeah so esport how is a consultancy so we work with different businesses typically to help them position themselves into esports or see how they can leverage esports as a whole to hopefully change their line of services or products or make a new line of service and products to generate revenue for them by leveraging this growing phenomenon and like we see you can brand it like an average chair to be an esport chair and then up upmarket by a significant portion same thing for gaming drinks and different peripherals where people are looking into you know how can they enter this scene with these changes sure and i think that that's really important because there are so many people so many companies and people who have you know like i think you know it's very clear that obviously sports traditional sports have had challenges in the past year and that companies are starting to see that perhaps they should find a place with their products for their business and they notice esports is growing exponentially so do you help educate those companies and people about esports to help them understand how to enter the space yeah like 80 percent of my job is really education it was really surprising to me especially in the age group that i'm in and the you know the group that i'm in is to kind of be you know blown away by the fact of how much people really don't know about the esports scene the gaming scene i always go to networking events and like i would say that i'm an esport consultant and there's always that handful of people that say what is esports and they keep like they have no idea what's coming up and that really it hurts them to not know this growing trend because it's massive you would think that you know everyone's aware that fortnight and these different game platforms but they're not aware of how big the esports segment really is and it's my job is to educate them have have them help help them understand the cultural phenomenons the differences between different games or esports scene and what if their current line of products and services would make sense to enter that scene to best you know help them as far as their profit and how they're growing their businesses in the next three to five years to follow this growing trend in tech okay so i'm going to give you the last word is there about how how people can contact you and any last words you'd like to tell us about mobile esports yeah so if you're interested in contacting me like if you run a business or you're looking to enter the esports scene as a whole you can go to my website esporthow.com or you can email me at userews at air.hasan at esporthow.com not esportshow.com and yeah i'd be happy to help and give free consultation anytime that terrific um it's been a pleasure to have you as a guest today was there and i appreciate it we've learned i've learned a lot about mobile esports happy to hear that it was a pleasure to be on all right thank you everyone for joining us today on the think tech live stream think tech hawaii live streaming network and thank you to our viewers who sent in questions next week i'll be talking with dr ryan turow about esports psychology see you then