Gamer Sensei thinks it has found the secret sauce to building successful esports teams: the Boston startup's own coaching software.
While the startup was founded with the purpose of connecting video game players with professional coaches for one-on-one sessions, Gamer Sensei has recently begun recruiting coaches on its platform to esports teams for playing in official tournaments.
So far, the results have been promising.
At DreamHack Denver in October, Gamer Sensei's players placed in first and third place for the Hearthstone tournament, which had a prize pool of $25,000. Mark "Ike" Eichner, a college student who charges a premium price of $50 an hour for coaching sessions on Gamer Sensei, walked away with $7,500 for winning first place.
"We have a scoring model that can be predictive of esports results."
A few months later, one of Gamer Sensei's players, Linh "Seiko" Nguyen, made it into the top eight for a Hearthstone tournament at a DreamHack event in Sweden.
To William Collis, president and co-founder of Gamer Sensei, this presents the esports startup, which raised a $4 million Series A round from investors this year, with an opportunity to go beyond pairing players and coaches.
"We’re getting an incredible early opportunity to identify people who are up-and-coming in esports," Collis said. "Through coaching and information we’re able to collect, we end up having these unique and exciting data sets about aspiring and pro players. This could be a strategic advantage for us."
Collis declined to get into the specifics of Gamer Sensei's "secret sauce" for assembling esports teams, but said that it involves a scoring model that looks at quantitative and qualitative data collected by the startup's platform. The only hint he could provide is that the quantitative aspects involve ways an esports player would typically be measured — which could include things like win-to-loss ratios and more granular measures.
"We have a scoring model that can be predictive of esports results," Collis said.
Gamer Sensei has contracts with the coaches it recruits for esports teams, but Collis said he was unable to discuss any details, including whether there are revenue-sharing agreements.
The startup is currently looking to build esports teams for other games, but Collis declined to say which ones for now. As to whether the startup would open its platform to help other organizations build teams, Collis said he wasn't ready to talk about that.
"The opportunity for Gamer Sensei to 'moneyball' esports is a really cool idea."
While Gamer Sensei's ability to build successful esports teams can be a testament to the quality of its coaching platform, it also shows a way for the company to scale beyond its flagship product in a fast-growing market. According to a new report from research firm Superdata, global esports revenue is expected to reach $2.3 billion in 2022.
"The opportunity for Gamer Sensei to 'moneyball' esports is a really cool idea," Collis said, referring to the analytics-driven approach to building baseball teams that was popularized by the Oakland Athletics. "It's something we're going to explore in 2018."
He added: "There are attributes that correlate with how well a player performs that are under-appreciated or unrealized by other people, and it has significant predictive power."
