For decades now, competitive sports simulation has been on the cusp of mainstream, and EA Sports has been steadily building their Esports productions in order to grow their audience. This last week, they announced a multi-million dollar competitive studio, and the venue made its debut during this weekend’s EA MAJOR Madden 19 Challenge.
In stunning fashion, EA's new studio does everything right when it comes to providing viewers with a professionally designed, and high-quality broadcast. Maybe they could give Snoop Dogg a call.
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A Competitive Esports Broadcast Center
The broadcasting studio takes a lot of queues from professional, and large scale, sports broadcast centers. Being that EA Sports have played a major part in leagues like the National Football League, and FIFA soccer, it’s no surprise that they knew what they were doing when putting the new space together.
With tons of talk of late regarding multiple different Esports environments, EA's reveal and debut couldn't be better timed.
It features multiple artificial reality and virtual reality screens, an elevated and professionally lit players’ platform, an elaborate television-broadcast quality control room, and a large four-seat caster desk. “I said, ‘lets get all the toys and really push the envelope on this’” exclaimed Todd Sitrin, EA’s Senior Vice President of the Competitive Gaming.
“When you are leasing [outside venues for production] you’re beholden to the capabilities of outside production groups,” Sitrin said. “You are almost always using an environment that was not set up for competitive gaming so we were constantly sacrificing our ability to do various things in broadcast.”
The new space in Redwood Shores, California, will get a real chance to shine as the main venue for EA Sports’ competitive events like the Madden Esports circuit. EA’s Sitrin also made mention that after doing some math, the broadcast arena would pay for itself within two years since it’s replacing a very expensive previous model of event space outsourcing.
Use Cases
As EA continues to grow their Esports leagues surrounding their major sports simulation titles, there is also a whole lot of potential elsewhere in the gaming universe.
Apex Legends, the most popular first-person-shooter, and battle royale hybrid right now, is published by EA Games, and will most likely develop and birth a competitive scene in the next few months. Being that they (Respawn Entertainment) are already tangibly attached to EA Games, it makes sense to us that Apex Legends may be gifted the opportunity to use this new studio.
Most of the events hosted by EA Games and EA Sports in the past have had such a reliably high-quality broadcast experience paired with intense gameplay, and the addition of this studio with its established tools and set-up are only going to strengthen their reputation as a quality show. As the Madden Challenger Series heals and looks to grow and move on from the tragedy in Jacksonville, all of this love and attention being poured into their Esport is very pleasant to dine on.
Other notable options would be EA Games and DICE’s Battlefield series, or the Star Wars based Battlefront franchise. Aside from their published titles, there is plenty of opportunity to partner with other competitive scenes to take up time in the space for their own events.
The new EA Sports Broadcast Center is stunning in its construction and tools, and we’re excited to see how this weekend’s EA MAJOR Madden 19 Challenge goes, and whatever else may take place in Redwood Shores.
