Esports and Movie Theaters Suitable and Profitable Partnership

Esports Can Gain Much Fun and Income by Partnering with Cinemas

These two branches of the modern entertainment industry got a perfect way for earning a lot of cash. They only need clients.

Super League Gaming (SLG) dares towards hosting events connected to esports in theater venues to give players the experience off spending time in a venue with their hobby friends competing on big cinema screens. Cinemas will get profits by renting their physical spaces instead of just wasting it and its time. The question appears: will gamers who are real clients for this business model wish to use this proposition?

Good news first for field businesses: looks like the answer is “possibly enough”.

What’s the Deal?

SLG (super league gaming) started a Minecraft league for six weeks last fall. The final of the league came up to the championship in December and awarded a 10-year old boy named Julien Wiltshire and his crew with a collective sum of 15 thousand dollars.

Over one thousand participants played in league competitions taking place in cinemas all over the country. Players had to visit a “certified” cinema and go in for a competition distinguished by Minecraft game modes. As SLG officials said, gamers had to show:

  • Creativity;
  • Teamwork;
  • Critical thinking skills.

Why Minecraft?

Minecraft was chosen for the competition partially because of its open-source nature: SLG were able to create special modifications to deliver the required experience for theater gamers. The event was successful enough, because another league tournament of this type was announced for a start in February. Super League Gaming monetizes the competition through visitor tickets for tournament events placed in cinemas. Theater venues get some piece of revenue from the SLG.

Brett Morris, COO of Super League Gaming said the scale is all that matters here. If to take a look at the business model itself, it can be explained through the Star Wars franchise movie example. People can watch Star Wars on more than four thousand cinema screens nowadays. The same principle works for SLG. Their level of success is to be dictated by the quantity of screens and cinemas conducting their competitive events.

The company has connections with cinemas that belong to the biggest chains like Regal, AMC and Cinemark at the moment. Connections with less serious ones (iPic Entertainment, etc.) are also available for them. There are some theaters behind iPic which seem to offer more of a luxurious experience: top-quality seats, cool menus and cafes nearby, and other things.

Some More Interesting Data

iPic CEO named Hamid Hashemi who gained more than twenty five years of cinema industry working experience thinks that SLG remains a good possibility to sell out his company’s cinema space. The competition is interesting for 9 to 14 year old children mainly, and Hashemi said this to be one of the most attractive aspects for business. Why? Because this gives cinemas the opportunity to schedule competition events for time which is usually “dead” for cinemas: afternoons.

The content of SLG Minecraft competitions was set to be some kind of alternative for cinemas and organized as if someone paid the theater space owner for any meeting organized inside it. Nevertheless, Hashemi noted that such kind of contents does not influence much on the cinema’s earnings: it takes 2 to 3% of overall revenue. Still, it is much better to have the auditorium full of people than to keep it empty at any case.

Hashemi stated that his company had been looking for opportunities to use gaming for business. Gaming is predicted to become the top-viewed sport within the nearest 5 years. So, cybersports is big.

Cinemark marketing vice president stated the company is open to organize upcoming SLG events because of being satisfied with the existing results. At this moment, almost 30 cinemas of the company are properly equipped to show SLG content.

The premiere of a Minecraft competition is considered as successful by these two theater companies and SLG as well. Super League Gaming planned to set partnerships with companies developing videogames in order to provide cinemas with new titles to rotate shows.

SLG aims towards getting every game suitable for theater shows. The most challenging and difficult thing for this business is to choose following games. This offers developers profitable income options they couldn’t really have in the past. This means, they can sell real tickets to people willing to watch cybersports events and to spend some time with their likeminders.

Minecraft is not a thing people can consider as an esports discipline. Still, implications play a much more serious role. Video game experience can be wanted by customers ready to bring real money for the opportunity to get it. Super League Gaming representatives agreed with cinema companies about their competition to be known by parents. There can be found esport titles created exactly for big cinema screens.

Nevertheless, a thousand participants is literally nothing for the scale of national levels of esport events. SLG has some far plans to set more partnering contracts leading to increase the number of interested gamers and competition participants.