Welcome back to another Tuesday Telecast from Des Moines Gaming Club. Last week we were talking about our first two corporate sponsors, Atlantic Bottling Co. and 21st Century Rehab and how thankful we were for them coming on board, and then on Wednesday we announced our third corporate sponsor Dymin Systems. They are a PC company based in Urbandale and after many conversations with them, it is CLEAR that they are all systems go when it comes to the esports community. Dymin will be providing top tier accessory equipment like keyboards and mice, a massive gift basket for our opening weekend, and will eventually be hosting some build-a-pc events where they bring tools and experts and DMGC members can learn and maybe even build or upgrade their PCs. This is certainly an exciting partnership and our gratitude goes out to Danielle and everyone else at Dymin Systems for coming on board with us.
Speaking of opening weekend. We still have some things to set up but we are good to go to open it up to the public so people can at the very least, come check it out, test out some of the equipment, and take part in some of our opening weekend giveaways/sales. Masks will be required for those people who have not been vaccinated, but it is great to see that the CDC has stated vaccinated people can go without masks if they so choose. Seeing things opening up again is a sight for sore eyes for a lot of folks including us. It’s been hard to put DMGC on hold but we are so happy and excited to be opening it up soon.
I was travelling this past weekend and thus was unable to run the online locals so I want to give a massive shout out to our two Founding Members Jeff and Riley for really helping us out and running those events while I was away. I will be back and running the online locals this week FYI! Soon of course we will transition away from these regularly online locals to in-person locals which is extremely exciting. We will certainly still have online events every now and then as well. Be on the lookout for the official announcement and details for the grand opening weekend soon on our social media platforms and website.
Now, for a bit of esports industry news. The Valorant Masters in Iceland wrapped last week and it is North America’s own Sentinels that won the whole event without dropping a single map so GGs to them. Fnatic from Europe made a very good loser’s bracket run all the way to the Grand Finals but got shut down by Sentinels. This event had huge viewership across all platforms so it is a validation of sorts for Riot Games who has put a lot of time, effort, and money into making Valorant a big esport.
Epic Games just yesterday announced that they are not allowing any of their games to be used for in-person events until 2022. This came as a little bit of a shock to many in the esports world as conditions here in the US are getting better and other esports are making plans to host in-person LAN events. But of course it is quite understandable from Epic’s perspective, they have to look at it from a global view, and many countries aren’t as in good of a position as the US. Not to mention, at the end of the day, safety is of the utmost importance. The Midwest Open Circuit which was being held at the new LevelUp Arena in Kansas City and being run by Iowa’s own Iowa Esports had to be cancelled which is unfortunate to see as it was gearing up to be quite the event. We at DMGC will of course respect Epic’s policy and will not carry their games until they allow us to do so.
Finally, big-time Brazilian twitch streamer Gaules has secured the rights to co-stream the NBA playoffs. Co-streaming is when content creators stream themselves watching an event such as an esport event or now traditional sporting events. This is of course massive in spreading the audience of said event to new areas of the internet and world. The Valorant Masters which I mentioned earlier allowed quite a bit of co-streaming and that helped lead them to new massive viewership numbers. This is a growing trend across many different industries and points back to how popular some of these content creators are. Fans of these creators prefer to watch events through the eyes of their favorite creators.
That does it for today’s telecast, thank you so much for watching and we’ll see you next week.