Barcraft Auckland
Where - Bar named The Corporate Box in Auckland, New Zealand.
How much - 3 events held so far. MLG and GSL.
Running since - February 2012 - MLG Winter event.
Attending - Current “core” community is about 150 dedicated attendees.
Contact - Facebook
Tell us a bit about yourself.
My name is Byron, 25 years old. I’ve worked for the second largest ISP in New Zealand and I’m an account manager. I look for sponsorships and deal with stuff like that. I’ve also been a member of the NZ Counter Strike group, and we’ve been lucky enough to represent in the world cyber games. I’m pretty much involved in games, though not a natural SC2 person, a big eSports fan.
How did you start with SC2.
I saw that MLG is trying out this pay per view model, and that barcrafts are becoming serious, and thought why don't I do a barcraft myself. I wasn’t an Starcraft person, I just came up and saw who would be interested. If there would be people, then I’d organize an event. For me the reason to do a barcraft was because it looks like a really good opportunity to engage people in a social environment. It’s a good recurring event that helps gaming be more socially acceptable. The first one was organized within 4 days, and we had 150 people, so I knew this can work.
You managed to organize a barcraft with so many people in just 4 days?
Hehe, man if I showed you the chat on facebook and twitter at those times. It was the first barcraft in NZ and there was already a huge awareness of this movement. I was fortunate to get off the success of international ones. I think because NZ has a huge gaming community that I’m in contact with I made it work. I got a good relationship with some media outlets and the most popular gaming circuits - such as a gaming portal in NZ which is really dominant when it comes to market share, and they helped promote the thing.
For some numbers (based on Facebook Statistics), the first post was on the 15th of February and within a day had 57 likes, we got more and more every day so it spread pretty quickly. I don’t think it’s super engaging, but you can’t beat the viral aspect of facebook advertising. It’s how groups spread out, social circles see the same thing. That was the key to such a strong launch, the amount of people and reach we had was insane. Most people got to our event through facebook. The peak, which I don’t know what drove, was on the 26 of February leading to the second event. 1974 page views to the barcraft facebook page. That was our highest peak of viral reach.
It’s amazing how many people you can get to. If someone comments and likes your page, their friends see that. The amount of people that saw the link in 1 week, 29 of February to the 6th of March - was 26 thousand people. That’s leading to the second event. It spread massively fast. In short - there was no barcraft happening in NZ, we were the first, barcrafts was an established thing and there’s a tight community in NZ - made it all happen.
How did you find a place on such short notice?
Wasn't easy, two places that said they wanted to do it changed their minds in the last 2 days. I was just walking around the city to see where I could do it, most places just didn’t fit. It’s understandable since we’re not an eSports country. One place I’d gone to was really out of the way, The Corporate Box - it was a cool venue and it just seemed to work. So I just walked up and asked if they wanted to do it, I was lucky that the guy working there was an SC2 fan.
So how did it go? How did the bar respond to you?
I know for the first event they did really well and were very happy. They wanted us to come back basically. I was kinda naive for the first time about the financial cost and ended up losing about 800$ on the first 2 events. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to raise money for charity, bottom line - it isn’t. We raised money for Starship Foundation - an organization for children’s health. I spent 100$ on cupcakes from a local boutique cupcake maker and sold each for 2$. For 3$ you get a cupcake and a raffle ticket, and the proceeds went to the Starship Foundation. I came up with this name - Starcraft for Starship. It advertised great, but didn’t actually go that well.
For the third event we didn’t do any charity. What’s important is to make the event financially sustainable. Once we get to that point, when we’re making enough money to spend into cool things for future events, that’s the point where we can start to be creative.
I don’t have barcrafts to make money, you’re never going to make a lot of money from a "once a month" event, but you don’t wanna lose from it. I do it as an important piece of the puzzle. What I mean is, for gaming in NZ to succeed, I think barcraft is a really important social piece - it raises awareness, and it’s about socializing. It’s a good opportunity for people to meet and develop ideas that they are interested in to benefit the community.
And how are you doing with money now? Sponsors?
I was trying to negotiate 10% take of the bar, which is reasonable for me to ask, but what we ended up doing was a little different. Because drinks are expensive, and we didn’t wanna do the cupcake thing again, people would pay 3$ for a raffle ticket, or 5 for a raffle ticket plus a drinks card. The card would get you a free drink. Essentially I negotiated the venue to pay for the cost of the drinks and the rest to charity on the second event. On the third event we did the same thing but no charity. Most people got 3-4 drinks across the night so the bar made the return.
There’s just one problem, the bar doesn’t serve food, so people go outside to get food and the bar loses that revenue. On the fourth event we got a new location that will be serving hot food. That will be better but it’s on the week of D3 so I’m scared people aren’t going to come. But we’ll be fine, the new venue is a much more enclosed space, better atmosphere so even if the numbers are weaker it’ll still be good. Oh and the place is called Bluestone Room Bar.
You said you thought it’ll be easy to get sponsors because of your past job, did you get any?
We’re looking to bring Razer as a sponsor for future events. Oh a cool thing, we gave away Diablo 3 beta keys. There was this guy from the Blizzard Australian office who found out about the event on twitter. We were talking on e-mails and I just sent him one saying I was seeing all these D3 beta keys fire around and would Blizzard be interested to spare some keys to provide incentive for our next event and I linked him to facebook. He said he can sort out some keys. I showed him the whole Starcraft for Starship thing which shows we have good intention and he thought it was a great idea. I kept him up to date on the events and we got keys to give out. People walked away with nice things like a D3 beta key which has high value to it, that’s just great.
So how about growth?
What I’d like to see is growth. As a CS player I have this vision that we streamed an event such as IEM. Really open up the community and start showing other games and not just SC2. That would be our first step to growing, to move to a multi-gaming event and not just MLGs. Have a LoL event, a CS event, that’s how I envision it.
I see us growing from there. So far we haven’t had time to do an IEM event, but that’s the easiest step I think. The more we do, the better experience we can give people, the more sponsors we bring, the more proficient we’ll be. We’re going to make mistakes and it’s important that we learn from them. That’s where the real path to growing is - just experimenting, and that’s the stage we’re going through right now.
Going through concepts - we had an MLG event that happens during the day, since we’re in NZ. We’re thinking of just showing VODs at the evening since it’s the best time for these type of viewership events. That’s an idea we haven’t done yet. We really need to think about what’s more important because of these time differences. In order to do that I actually went to facebook and talked to people. I asked people - What do you care about? Do you come to watch live SC2 or is socializing more important? Or do you just come to get drunk?
And what answers did you get?
Everyone who was at the second event (held at night) agree it should be at night. People are more socially acceptable at night then in the day. The first event was about 8 hours in the bar during the entire day - live MLG. The second event was GSL - about 3.5 hours at night. The social aspect and having it at night with VODs is a better choice than having it live but during the day.
You talked about concepts, have you thought of barcraft tournaments?
Tournaments are another thing. I don’t wanna run tournaments myself. To me barcrafts is a medium to communicate what events are happening, so that people can be educated about where they can play and socialize.
We’ve been drawn to the NZ leg of the Blizzard world championship. We’re helping the "eSports Tournaments NZ" group deal with the entire thing. We have more experience and good business contacts like sponsorships so we help out with all kinds of logistics like flights and things like that. The eSports Tournaments group does the actual brackets and all that. They are just a group of guys who’s been running some LAN events and now they are helping Blizzard with the NZ qualifier for the world championships. So we help them with that but I want to keep the events separate.
What’s your thoughts about making events, got any advice?
First I would recommend being serious about doing something special, creating a brand. Figure something out and not just have a barcraft for the sake of having it. For the first 2 events I was doing everything by myself, I was stressed. Eventually I got a group of people to help me. It’s important to get people that can help in something specific and not just accept anyone who wants to help, to many people can make it problematic.
Make sure you know how to write a message properly. Make sure your formatting is good. People are going to scrutinize what you write and if you don’t think about how to deal with these things it can create problems. Don’t undersell yourself. Be prepared to negotiate. I was originally offered something from a sponsor and when it came to getting those products they came around and changed their minds. They were going to give me half of what they offered and I stood quite firmly about it. Don’t be a pushover and let them see your value, don’t bend backwards if someone breaks a promise.
Make sure you try and get your event out there as much as you can. Get people who will help you spread it, local organizations and communities and even Blizzard themselves. Use Twitter, check Reddit as well. Don’t be afraid to ask yourself questions about why you are making these decisions. Engage your users and fans, ask people what they like, try and incorporate these things in future events - that’s the simplest way to improve.
Thanks a lot! Is there anything else you wanna say?
I would like to say thanks to the crew that became a part of Barcraft New Zealand, they don’t get anything financially and I really appreciate the time they invest in making a great event. Another thank you to the attendees for coming and making it happen, thanks to the people who come out every time - that’s what it’s all about!
Run a barcraft event? Leave us a comment with a facebook link and we’ll contact you.
Previously on GosuGamers Barcraft World Tour
Mash Bar, Tel Aviv, Israel
Good Life Bar, Boston Massachusetts, USA
C-base Club, Berlin, Germany
Replugged club followed by Kringers bar, Vienna, Austria
This is a GosuGamers weekly feature by Eyal "KOKOStern" Stern, that is published every Wednesday.
