We’ve publicly communicated that the property — the game itself, not esports — has grossed more than $300 million as a property. How will you do that? Harris: We built up a lot of internal capability. Norsk. The free-to-play online multiplayer online battle arena game has thrived for more than six years, and it has generated nearly $300 million in revenues from its 30 million players. What the increased spend in the game was, what the increased playtime in the game was. It’s an interesting angle to the horizontal as far as Skillshot, esports as a service. But if we can use that data to inform the right brand sponsorships, then that adds a lot of value to the whole ecosystem. #GBSummit returns with two days of content and networking designed for industry executives. Todd Harris on Smite’s first year and the future By Chris Higgins March 31, 2015 Hi-Rez Studios’ COO on season two, global expansion and an impending Xbox One release. Posted by 5 years ago. We caught up with Hi-Rez Studios COO Todd Harris at the $10,000 SMITE tournament at PAX East 2013. Above: Smite is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game. Again, data is a lot of the way we do that. After obtaining his BS in Computer Science from the same university, Todd entered the software engineering industry, eventually managing next-generation Product Development efforts at NCR, Radiant Systems, and BlueCube Software. Hi-Rez COO Todd Harris talks to us about the growth of Smite's e-sports scene over the past year, and where it's going in 2015. Smite Interview with Todd Harris. One of the strongest ongoing partnerships has actually been in the B-to-B category, rather than B-to-C, which is maybe a little unusual. We wanted to share some of our observations from a publisher perspective, and also from a tournament organization standpoint, around Smite and the advantages of that league. But it’s not obvious that that’s the case. English. It’s also one of only three titles that are approved at the varsity high school level. [Originally posted to my PC gaming column at Examiner.com]. Deutsch. Register for the AI event of the year. There are examples of even some of the folks that won that first championship six years ago who are still playing today. GamesBeat: Did you feel there was a critical mass for esports at a certain number of users? Membership includes access to: The wonderful, educational, and fun speakers at our events, Special members-only interviews, chats, and "open office" events with GamesBeat staff, Chatting with community members, GamesBeat staff, and other guests in our Discord. Are there signs that suggest you can argue against that, that this will be around for a while? In April 2011, Global Agenda became the first free-to-play game released on the Steam platform, introducing Elite and Free Agents and an in-game cash shop featuring Agenda Points. Harris: I would say ours has been a slight increase in overall comp earned. Harris: The registered user base is over 30 million. Smite has a good demographic for its audience, and that audience has been growing in part because Smite has become an esport. They power a lot of the redundancy of our esports product – instant replays, not letting the servers go down, all those kinds of enterprise-level features that keep the product up. GamesBeat: What sort of sponsor-type companies have come forward based on where you are in the market? We sat down for a chat with Hi-Rez Studios COO Todd Harris about Smite's position in esports, and the upcoming shooter Paladins. There’s a good pipeline from new development from high school and college. Third person MOBA Smite managed to carve a significant portion of the market out for … Second, because we’re doing this panel together with Johannes from FanAI — that’s another partnership we have going back to data — where we can show potential sponsors a lot more detail about the Smite audience. Smite has a excellent demographic for its target audience, and that target audience has been rising partly as a result of Smite has develop into an esport. 9. But MOBA on mobile is particularly challenging due to current MOBA user expectations from other platforms around a longer session time, synchronous PvP with user frustration if teammates drop connection, and limitation in controls and precision compared to non-mobile platforms. Some of that is geographical, because they’re based here in our backyard, in Atlanta. What sorts of decisions did you make along the way there? Todd Harris: We try to be relatively player friendly with monetization - an example being the Ultimate God Pack in SMITE which gives you all the playable characters for one single purchase. We want to make the point that sometimes bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to esports. GamesBeat: When you think about what you’re doing or what you want to see happen to see this advance and grow bigger, what comes to mind? Smite has a good demographic for its audience, and that audience has been growing in part because Smite has become an esport. So golf is not a bad analogy, and it’s not such a bad place to be for a myth-themed game about gods and heroes in combat. Todd Harris interview: Gamers play SMITE longer on Xbox One than PC. They’re complementing other forms of income. Svenska. Dansk. But betting on esports to rise, I think, is a good one. We started supporting competitive play in the first year of beta, because we thought it was informative to the game design team around just making a good, balanced game. GamesBeat: How have you handled some of the issues around managing this as a business, managing the leagues and all that? But we intentionally migrated the investment to be more salary plus smaller prize events throughout the year, just to make it more sustainable for players. Going back to Smite, which is the first-party owned property that we have the most experience with, going into year seven—this past year will be its most successful one yet as far as revenue and the strength of the esports scene. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." GamesBeat: Do you have a guess at how many players can make a living from the game? https://smite.fandom.com/wiki/Todd_Harris?oldid=127189. We started with four. Todd Harris is the Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer. GamesBeat: What level is it at as far as how big the prizes are now? I feel like it’s a healthy title. They’re in the business of selling data servers to IT managers at gaming companies and other Fortune 500 companies. Global Agenda is an online team-based game. Todd Harris is the Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer.Todd submitted his first computer game to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of his college application, since writing games was more fun than writing essays. Our evolution—probably five years ago, five to six years ago, we had the single highest prize pool of any game outside of Dota 2 at the time, entirely crowdsourced. The two data sets we’ll share, again—one is very directly the value to the publisher for doing Smite esports. Harris: It’s scalable in terms of the esports support that makes sense for a game. “One thing we’ve recently implemented … We may not have the biggest audience, but our players spend the most money. Harris: Well, both things are true. The President of Skillshot and Co-Founder of Hi-Rez Studios discusses the recently announced all LAN leagues for SMITE and Paladins Pro Leagues alongside cross-play, any secrets, and more. The macro trends around the number of people playing games and watching games are just too strong and compelling to be denied. Harris: At this point, for what we’ll call the major league, which is titled Smite Pro League—there’s also minor league and amateur and college. We supported the Atlanta Reign of the Overwatch League with their homestand event. Join Transform 2021 this July 12-16. I talked with Todd Harris, the chief operating officer who cofounded Alpharetta, Georgia-based Hi-Rez Studios 14 years ago, about how Smite has prospered and what the company and its 450 employees — including 40 at the Skillshot division — are doing to make it into an everlasting professional esport. Todd Harris interview: Gamers play SMITE longer on Xbox One than PC. Nederlands . It’s the same sort of thing we talk about with brand sponsors. We’re pleased, because that’s super player-friendly. Building up the esports infrastructure for Smite’s esports community has been a lot of work. Again, there’s talk generically about supporting the community or driving higher engagement, but some of the data that we’ll share in Miami will be very explicit on exactly the lift that we saw in a particular controlled case around the cohort of Smite players that viewed esports, compared to another cohort that did not. This page was last edited on 19 January 2016, at 05:37. We’ll be sharing some of those insights in detail. GamesBeat: It must be gratifying that it’s gotten this far, looking back on the expectations. It could have been the case that watching means I have less disposable time, and now I’m playing less. Along the way we developed multiple titles. It was a great opportunity to talk to Todd Harris about the future of SMITE. While at PAX Australia, Stevivor had the opportunity to sit down with Todd Harris, Chief Operating Officer at Hi-Rez Studios for Smite. Our intuition, our hunch as gamers was that it was going to be good for the community. At the conference I’ll talk a lot about the Smite audience, but as a tournament organizer we serve other games as well. We sat down for a chat with Hi-Rez Studios COO Todd Harris about Smite's position in esports, and the upcoming shooter Paladins. At home, Todd enjoys playing Global Agenda and many other games with Kira, 11, and Alec, 8, occasionally passing the controller to wife Mini. As VP of Product Development at BlueCube Software, the company developed an online technology platform, and a suite of enterprise management applications installed in over 25,000 retail sites. Our coverage remains objective. Then it’s been pretty organic since then, as far as the amount of support we put behind it. We have 40 full-time people, a 16,000-square-foot production studio separate from the development studio. GamesBeat: As far as this notion—I think there’s a common criticism of esports, that the games come and go. Leo Stevenson -- 'While at PAX Australia, Stevivor had the opportunity to sit down with Todd Harris, Chief Operating Officer at Hi-Rez Studios to discuss Smite. Todd Harris: Personally, part of founding Hi-Rez Studios 14 years ago—I really had a passion for creating online games. There are three titles approved and Smite is one of those. Harris: Yeah, they haven’t, not from the publisher standpoint. The Lore of SMITE is told through several chapters in different story arcs, which are usually featured in events. "Hey, it's Bob Sagat! Todd Harris… This year there will be a million-dollar prize pool that they compete for in November. Todd has 8 jobs listed on their profile. Following a tour of the Atlanta based company’s ever expanding complex and HQ, we fired some questions at Todd to learn more about the plans for Skillshot’s growth through 2019 and beyond. If League of Legends is like the FIFA Soccer of esports, then maybe Smite is something like golf. In 2005 Todd along with Erez Goren founded Hi-Rez Studios to deliver exceptional online entertainment via computer games. We spoke with Todd Harris, co-founder and COO of Hi-Rez Studios – creators of the hit online competitive game Smite. But the value of esports, in my mind, is on digital platforms, where you have a lot of information about the audience and can segment and target. Hopefully SMITE can live up to the expectations of the team and become a new force in eSports. I’m substituting consuming that passive media for actively playing. Hi-Rez is based in the metro Atlanta region and is a leader among the burgeoning development community here. Harris: A big point for me is just getting more sophisticated as an industry around delivering value through data. The company INAP, Internap, they provide data servers and cloud services. We’re trying to continue to be on the forefront of using data to help partners understand each audience. All these things help esports grow. GamesBeat: If it’s measurable, it’s a lot more than theoretical. This weekends Hi-Rez Expo features the World Championship Smite is also fortunate to be brand-safe. ... Todd Harris: First our background as a developer is really from an online action game standpoint. They’ve been a partner for five years as a sponsor, and a vendor partner of ours for more than 10 years. From an investment standpoint, I think it is somewhat risky to bet on a particular game. I talked with Todd Harris, the chief operating officer who cofounded Alpharetta, Georgia-based Hi-Rez Studios 14 years ago, about how Smite has … Here is an edited transcript of our interview. It depends on where those 10 million live and if they’re a fit with the partner’s goals, if you’re a brand. It’s one of the few titles being played at the high school and college level right now, and that’s a positive as far as a new pipeline of players. It’s more around finding long-term partners. We’ve done CS: GO. Disclosure: The organizers of Esports BAR Miami are paying my way to the conference. One of the publications said that the prize pools for esports altogether are crossing $300 million this year, versus $160 million the year before. I'll just nip this one in the bud. GamesBeat: Did the amount of money change quite a bit, then, since maybe two years ago or five years ago? Todd Harris: Right now the best source of information is the SMITE fan page on facebook. As Todd Harris, Chief Operating Office for Hi Rez Studios, was quoted on IGN “The answer [to your question about having to repurchase content] may vary by territory. I’ll be interviewing Harris on stage next week at the Esports BAR Miami event. If we bring in sponsors that are not a fit with the audience, nobody wins. We’ve done Halo. If those 10 million are in China or Russia and your product or service isn’t available there, that’s not a great fit. Below, we discuss the the premise of Smite, eSports, Australian servers and more.' During the three-day launch tournament for Smite, Hi-Rez Studios' actiony third-person MOBA, I met Hi-Rez COO Todd Harris in the crowded halls of Atlanta's Center Stage Theater. Across PC, console, and mobile, we’re using internal capabilities around league management and ticket promotion and events and live broadcast as a service to the marketplace. That’s worked pretty well. The only thing I don’t think is true is that this is a fad, and that esports in general is going to go away. JamesBl0nde interviews Todd Harris COO of Hi-Rez Studios once again discussing the changes to Smite over the past year, its direction in esports and whats in the near future! But at least in the case of the Smite audience, we did not find that to be the case. GamesBeat: Can you talk about how you got to where you are right now with Smite, as far as esports? Yes I know, Todd Harris said he wouldn't do it due to controversy. Third person combat, hig GamesBeat: Are you getting some of this data tabulated and ready for this thing? It’s really about evolving platforms and products from mass-market to more intelligent marketing. In the coming weeks we'll be communicating additional information and opening up discussion forums for SMITE. Todd Harris: I think all game genres will yield some winners on mobile. Above: Hi-Rez Studios and Skillshot know how to put on a show. PAX AUS 2014 – Todd Harris & The Future of SMITE MOBAS are big players in the gaming world of 2014 and while a lot of critics see the genre as one that Riot and Valve have locked down between them, developer Hi-Rez has pushed SMITE to growing success. This tradition goes all the way back to Global Agenda where we offered an Elite Agent pack which was a really high value, no-brainer purchase. This weekend Hi-Rez takes to Atlanta to show off their latest games and host the SMITE world championships. It’s free to play on all those platforms. We’ve gone more the other way, in that this capability, we’re now using it to help other publishers. We’re going to overdeliver. It looks like there is quite the roadmap laid out for the Hi-Rez team post release. How has the online, … But whether they monetize and are likely to buy in a particular category is something where we use data, again, to make sure it’s going to be a long-term fit. 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