World Gaming Federation: The future of Video Games comes from Europe

Project Information

Video Games Europe

Grant agreement ID: 709674

DOI

10.3030/709674

Project closed

EC signature date 11 December 2015

Start date 1 January 2016

End date 30 June 2016

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

WORLD GAMING FEDERATION
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Video Games Europe (World Gaming Federation: The future of Video Games comes from Europe)

Reporting period: 2016-01-01 to 2016-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

A lot of specialists say that E-sport will be the next billion dollars market. Today, gaming is the first usage on mobile phones and the first entertainment above Music & Cinema. World Gaming Federation, through the Video Games Europe project aims to level up the video games market in Europe by giving an added value to all kinds of actors: Players, brands, video games' publishers & developers, media and event organisers.

We had 3 core objectives:
- Build an international platform with the best experience and services
- Beta test the platform during a major event in Europe
- Build a consistent user base of casual and professional players

In six months, we built a powerful platform to the Beta stage with an international community (15,000 users from 120 countries) and one of the biggest E-sport tournament ever: the Official UEFA EURO 2016 Virtual Tournament.
Our platform allows players all over the world to browse game's pages, watch videos from different websites, register to tournaments and much more coming very soon.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In 6 months, we developed from zero an international platform with high technical requirements. This website is technically stable and ready to welcome millions of users from all over the world (including Europe).
Beside this website, our focus was to develop the video games industry in Europe by managing European tournaments for European players. Our first tournament -Virtual EURO 2016- was a real success for all actors: EURO 2016 sponsors involved, video games' publisher Konami, E-sport local partners and video games players.

This first event was an incredible first beta test for our team and very useful for the future to understand users’ needs and improve our next tools. Through this event, some of the biggest brands (Orange, Coca-Cola, Adidas…) in the world joined WGF to organize tournaments on the UEFA EURO 2016 official video game. From the beginning of June 2016 to July 2016, we have reached 150K pages views and more than 3K registrations to our tournaments.

It was a great opportunity for WGF to sensitize these brands to a powerful tool to reach young and gaming audiences. Through our website and this major event, we strongly believe that we bring to the European community of gamers a strong added value that all gamers were missing. The gaming ecosystem (and E-sport) needs new tools to reach sports’ requirements to be recognized as a real economy and increase its metrics.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Gaming can have great impacts but it has to be global and do not exclude anyone. Our first objective was to develop a website with full performances for European gamers.
In terms of fluidity, the results are as good as the world best websites such as Facebook, Amazon or Netflix. Fluidity is a matter because it allows players in Europe with bad connection to benefit from the platform with a very low latency. Our focus is to reach a maximum of people in Europe with an easy and fast experience.

On the other side, we had incredible feedbacks from the community thanks to the Virtual EURO. The best way to promote gaming and E-sport and reach the highest visibility is to link a major sport tournament (EURO 2016) to an E-sport tournament (Virtual EURO 2016).
This kind of tournament, which is involving communities all accross Europe is easy to understand for the public and shows to the world a new way to play video games. Accross Europe all our tournaments, for free more than 1400 active competitors online and offline. Also more than 75 K players played the game for free in UEFA EURO 2016 fanzones in 5 cities (usually every tournament has a fee to register and participate).
Free and easy to access, multi cultural and cross-generations, those are the values pushed by our events which intends to increase the videogame market's knowledge and impact.

VIRTUAL EURO WINNER

VIRTUAL EURO DRAW CEREMONY

VIRTUAL EURO PLAYERS

VIRTUAL EURO AMBASSADOR