"Coaching in esports stinks." That's what my eternally frustrated friend Nick always tells me, and he has a point.
Esports is still a new competitive category, and while it has existed in some form since nearly the start of the video game era -- see the 1980 Space Invaders Tournament or the 1990 Nintendo World Championships -- it has been only in recent years that it exploded. Both audiences and jackpots are massive; there just hasn't been the same amount of time to develop the support infrastructure that traditional sports have over decades.
One organization hopes to change that.
Boston-based startup Gamer Sensei has jumped into this field, seeking to change the way players find coaches that meet their needs. It doesn't matter it it's a professional esports organization looking to upgrade their coaching staff, or the gamer at home who wants to improve.
Like a lot of businesses, Gamer Sensei started when someone had a simple need and found themselves unable to find a simple solution to meet that need - to find some coaching. It started when co-founder William Collis, a lifelong gamer, was playing Blizzard Entertainment's extremely popular online card game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. Collis' tale isn't that of a young card-game phenom blasting to the top of the ladder.
"I was just playing Hearthstone with a bunch of buddies and I was basically kicked out of the group because I was so bad at Hearthstone," Collis said. "I was using all the resources available to me at the time, Twitch streams, deck guides, and nothing was working."
Collis' quest to become a better Hearthstone player led him to seek help from other players, with decidedly mixed results. One such experience, being coached by another Hearthstone player who appeared to have a little more expertise with the popular Face Hunter deck than Collis did, led to arguments and a mid-game hangup.
From these types of frustrating experiences, an idea emerged. If finding personalized help is this difficult, perhaps helping players finding solutions is a business that needs to exist? Connecting with his other co-founders, Rohan Gopaldas, a classmate and friend from Harvard Business School, and Jiapeng Ji, a Boston-based software engineer with experience in athletic coaching infrastructure, Gamer Sensei was born. After a successful seed round in which $2.3 million in funding from area venture investment firms was raised, an idea became a business.
Gamer Sensei's core business model isn't all that different from Uber, but instead of matching people who need rides to drivers, they seek to match gamers to coaches. The service would only be as good as the help that they sign up, so they needed to figure out how to make sure the coaches they bring on-board are competent. And since this is 2016, analytics are involved.
While the Gamer Sensei gang was understandably reluctant to leak all the secret sauce of their algorithms, we did discuss some of the factors that they use in finding coaching talent. In Hearthstone, for example, a player's ladder finishes and Hearthstone Championship Tour points play a factor in ascertaining their experience playing at high levels. But like in a sport such as baseball, in which many of the best coaches were less-than-elite talent on the field, coaching is more than subject matter competence. Rohan Gopaldas described to me their company's organizational philosophy when it comes to choosing coaches, or sensei as they refer to them.
"Community manager Dan Yoo and I come from customer service backgrounds, so we really try to bring out that element because, at the end of the day, this is a service that we're providing. So we're really choosy in terms of how we pick our sensei. At the end of the day, our sensei also need to be great teachers." One such upcoming teacher is Cong 'Strifecro' Shu, known as one of the top Hearthstone players in the scene today.
Will Gamer Sensei's methods be successful? At least one esports organization is betting that it will be. NRG eSports, a group that competes across a wide field of popular games, is a partner of Gamer Sensei in curriculum development and coaching. But they've taken that relationship one step forward.
NRG, in the process of expanding the number of Esports in which they compete -- they also recently added Nairoby "Nairo" Quezada to bring Super Smash Bros. into their stable -- is now seeking to field their own Hearthstone team. And rather than simply scour the free agent lists for whoever happens available, NRG has turned to Gamer Sensei for staffing, with the new players hired being exclusively from the Gamer Sensei ranks.
That esports now has startups such as Gamer Sensei tells us, almost as much as the size of the prize pools, that the field is maturing and putting together the structures that will help esports thrive in the coming years and decades. Football in the United States started out as an experimental game staged between two college teams in the 19th century. Basketball began when a PhysEd professor threw a soccer ball into a peach basket. From humble beginnings to millions of fans, the maturation of esports as an industry is a great thing to be able to witness firsthand.