The recent announcement that Allied Esports and Esports Arena would be taking over a storied nightclub in Las Vegas to launch a new dedicated esports venue at Luxor Hotel and Casino cemented the city’s swelling moves into the esports industry. The new Esports Arena Las Vegas is slated to open in early 2018 and will serve as the first permanent esports venue on The Strip as well as the center of Allied Esports’ growing global network of esports properties spanning North America, Europe and China. With the company planning to announce 10-15 additional Esports Arena locations in North America over the next few years and shoring up content for media platforms, Cynopsis Esports spoke with Jud Hannigan, CEO of Allied Esports International, about the company’s recent moves and goals.
Hannigan on Allied Esports’ strategy: If you look at all of our facilities, including the Big Betty mobile esports truck and studio in Europe, they are all production studios, so it’s about us leveraging experiences and events into content. From a business standpoint, we are trying to create a unique, live experience around esports that we can own but from there, we are trying to extract content that we can leverage along the way from online and digital to traditional linear. One of our sister assets is World Poker Tour, which was a helpful model and benchmark for us to help create a new format that suddenly become sticky with a global footprint of events happening around the world. We are now looking at all sorts of content to expand on that as well, examining multiple formats to figure out what we think will work, not just for a digital first audience, but also for a linear audience looking to expand their own interst in esports.
On esports venues: If you walked into our arena in Santa Ana as a fan of esports, it is kind of a unique experience. People are gravitating toward it and we want to get this experience right. People who come into our facility are typically there for around eight hours. We have a lot of programming going on and every week it feels like there is something different happening so to that effect, we feel like we have a good theme going o there that is authentic to a wide variety of gaming communities. We are constantly changing the look and feel of the arena itself. This past weekend, we had Blizzard in there running their collegiate Hearthstone Championship. Every inch was completely covered with something new and they made the space really feel like you were sitting inside a tavern in the World of Warcraft.
On the move to Las Vegas: We look at Vegas as what we are doing now on steroids. MGM has been fantastic. We sat down with them to determine which property made the most sense and there were a number of properties we considered. When we came on to the LAX nightclub, they had the perfect layout. There as this built-in mezzanine, and while we will be renovating the facility, if you walk in, there is a sense that this was exactly the right spot for what we feel will become the top interactive entertainment experience in the world. There will be a lot of different themes. Elsewhere, these venues serve as local community hubs, but here in las Vegas, we are trying to create that experience where a traveler who comes in for three days will be able to get a chance to experience a battle between the top teams that we fly in or they want a chance to compete. Las Vegas for us will serve as our flagship.
On the importance of experiential: We don’t try to overdo it. We try to make it about the competition itself. Gamers want to go and rub shoulders with like-minded individuals and not feel alienated from society. They end up bragging about the fact that they were there. No matter what game is going on that night, that is really the goal.
