With Boomeo open for business, wrangling talent from the likes of Cloud9, compLexity, Counter Logic Gaming, G2 Esports and SK Gaming to serve up exclusive Counter-Strike: Global Offensive instructional content for the platform. Cynopsis Esports spoke with Simon Abitbol – IMG Esports, Founder of Boomeo – about the company’s new platform, how it fits into WME/IMG’s big picture and what we can expect moving forward.
Abitbol on the birth of Boomeo: As a Counter-Strike player, I was watching some free tutorials and after watching this 25-minute video, I ended up learning this one little nugget of information from a 30-second portion of it that ended up helping me win my next ten games that I played on that map. I learned so much from that little bit but I realized I didn’t need to watch that entire video to pick up that tip. That started the snowball that eventually became Boomeo, in that there had to be a better way to learn, train and warm up.
On production: We’ve partnered with some of the best teams and players in the world, not only from a scale level, but also from an ability to convey their knowledge in a way that was easily digestible. So we’ve build out a module for each map as well as one for fundamentals. For each map, we then broke down its module into each strategy, i.e. how to play a pistol round, teaching fundamentals. We then broke those down even further into six videos for each strategy so someone can jump right into all the tricks of how to play it.
On how Boomeo fits into the WME/IMG strategy: Esports fits really well with WME/IMG as a whole, which include ELeague and our other endeavors. With Boomeo, as it relates to the larger esports division, it can play a supportive role in the business, allowing us to do some things that help our other businesses as another tool in the toolbox.
On monetizing: Our main business model is obviously subscriptions but we do provide a tremendous amount of free content though on the front end through articles and free guides. Those are already driving some nice traffic. We also provide free audio versions of all of our content so you can queue them up on your favorite podcast app and listen to them in your car on the way home. Ultimately, however, there will be a tremendous amount of advertising opportunities as well but our primary focus will be on the premium content.
On Duels: We have a lot of features coming down the pike for our gameplay training mode, which allows users to go from content to gameplay very quickly and then being provided stats, etc. to show how they did. Duels was created because for 18 years now, players have been warming up on Deathmatch, which can suck because you get shot in the back half the time, or you are shooting other people in the back for the other half. It is not effective training, whereas Duels puts you in real situations in real maps to provide drilling 20 times a minute.
