The ECS Season 4 championship recently rounded up this past weekend, and during our time covering the tournament we managed to grab a Skype call with Faceit co-founder Michele Attisani who was at the event, and when we asked about what lies ahead, he talked about grassroots competitions and how important they are.
"We started a process a few years back which is now getting to its full potential of opening up the tools we built - for ourselves originally to organise and manage these competitions - to the community and to everyone," Attisani explained. "So we started with large organisations that were interested in getting help in organising grassroots activities and so on, mostly game publishers like Valve and all the work we've been doing with them for the qualifiers of The International. I'm talking about a lot of large tournament organisers like of the ECS and also like the DreamHack, PGL, Beyond the Summit, Epicenter - really a lot of large organisers that are currently using our platform to create grassroots competitions or qualifiers or really engage with the community at a deeper level than just having top tier tournaments."
"And now this is gradually scaling to local communities, so for example in Europe we have a lot of country-based leagues that are being developer and managed by local communities, not by ourself directly. We just basically provide them [with] tools to engage the community and create an experience that really caters to what the community wants and needs."
"All of this is key for the development of esports, because esports is not the top level competition, it's not ECS and millions and dollars of prize money," he continued. "What makes esports successful is the creation and nurturing of a competitive community, and that's very much our philosophy at Faceit, and if you see even examples in the market - the titles that are really successful esports titles are those that manage to create a strong and consistent competitive community around them, and then when they fail to retain that community you see the games are losing traction and losing relevance. So from that standpoint, being able to be a driving force in this process of building communities and growing competitive communities means being a driving force for the esport industry ultimately."
Do you like what Faceit is doing to grow grassroots competition?