Barcraft Barcelona
Where - Bharma - a “Lost” themed bar; Fàbrica Moritz - a place owned by a beer company; FairPlay - a regular sports bar.
When - Whenever there’s a big tournament.
Running since - November 2011.
Attending - Varied numbers, reaching as many as 300 people on big events.
Contact - Facebook
Hey, tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m Diego, 28 years old. Most of my work is with games. Right now I work for Mediavida and for the past 6-7 years I’ve been involved with different gaming projects. I’ve worked for all kinds of companies, such as ISPs. I do a lot of things from advertising, sales, to contacts and promotions. Over the years I’ve worked for every gaming event in Spain. From world cyber games, CBL campus party and more so I really have lots of experience in doing these sort of things.
How did you start organizing barcrafts?
Well we started around the time when all the fuss about barcrafts was happening. In spring 2011 I was living in Ankara, Turkey. I wanted to go to a barcraft when I heard about it but there wasn’t anything in Ankara. When I came back to Spain in October there were people there trying to make a barcraft happen in Madrid but they had some problems. When I finally came back to Barcelona I just wanted to have a proper barcraft and I was with Mediavida so we just set out to do it and in two weeks we had the first event in Bharma. That’s how it started and the response was really really good so we wanted to do more and maybe help out the guys in Madrid.
In Bharma they watch TV series and stuff like that so they are used to events. We were just a bunch of guys wanting to come and see Starcraft and the bar had nothing special to do that day so he just gave us the TVs and said do whatever you want. It was such a success and so many people came and kept ordering stuff that the bar ran out of food. He wasn’t that excited or caring before the event but afterwards he was super into it. The second time in Bharma we were much more prepared so we wouldn’t run out. We expected the same response but it was even bigger; there were so many people the bar just ran out of food and beer again.
You mentioned several locations?
Bharma proved too small so we had to find a bigger place. There’s a local beer called Moritz and they’ve been doing lots of stuff here in Barcelona at their place called Fàbrica Moritz. Since they’ve been doing so well lately they have a lot of money to spend on marketing and advertising and we heard they wanted to do something with video games. Fàbrica is a huge place in the center of Barcelona where they have a bar and restaurant. It’s a really nice place. We got to talking to them and they said they’d love to do it. They lent us a big room and told us they’ll give one free beer to anyone who attends. Essentially everyone who signed up on Facebook got a free beer. Needless to say we had a ton of people who signed up on Facebook - more than 360, and a whole lot of people actually made it.
That event was the last time we had a big one. It was IEM so SC2 and LoL (League of Legends). With both games bringing in people we just don’t have a place to fit all those people. Moritz has an even bigger place we can use and we’ll try it next time if we have another huge event. Right now we’re doing smaller ones like the world championship series for Spain. We did it in a normal sports bar with lots of TVs and big screens called Fairplay in Barcelona.
So you also stream LoL, not just Starcraft?
We started with SC2 cause the original idea is barcraft, but for IEM there were only the SC2 finals to watch. If we show just SC2 it’ll be just a few hours and people want a longer event. The schedule was that the LoL finals were just before the SC2 ones so we thought to broadcast that. The response was crazy. We opened at 2 PM and there were 50 people waiting at the door. We thought we made a big mistake and there were so many people we had no room. LoL was a huge success - we really need to make another event with LoL. It’s cool since we all play lots of games and we like it even though it’s different crowds.
Since it did so well, we want to expand on that. We want more games - when DotA 2 comes out and has serious tournaments we’ll start with that too. Next month we’re going to have a barcraft for EVO (Evolution Championships - a fighting games tournament). We call it barfight, watch games on the big screen and also play on consoles we intend to bring.
When we do barfights we bring consoles and we do small tournaments. We do that almost every time. We wanna merge barfights and barcrafts. Just go to a bar to play fighting games and watch stuff. We got in contact with Arcadia Fighters - a Spanish fighting games community. We thought - now that we have the barcraft thing why don’t we just do something together. They bring consoles, screens and pads and people can come play freely.
We also did a thing with FIFA. We bring consols for Champions League matches. Play while watching and having fun. We love this whole thing about merging video games and bars. It just works so well. Play a game and watch the pros while grabbing a beer.
How do you deal with expenses? Do you charge at the entrance or anything like that?
So far we haven’t made money and we never charge entrance fees. Since we work for MediaVida we see barcrafts as a way for promoting the website. We devote our work time to organize these events. We bring prizes and things from MediaVida; we all work there so it’s our thing. We do the signs and posters, and MediaVida has payed for all of it. Part of our work is making these events.
We’re also in touch with a couple of hardware companies and will probably get them to be our sponsors. They’ll want to support us in the long run and allow us to do more cool stuff. Streaming our barfights and tournaments and all kinds of things.
You work at making these events but you said you don’t really earn money from it; how does that work?
If we look at it from a company perspective, it’s not really that worth it. Most of the people already know MediaVida and think it’s cool we do these events. It’s something people enjoy that doesn’t cost us too much and is a really cool thing to do as a website. The return of the investment isn’t that good but it’s mostly hard to say. I doubt we get people coming to the website because of our events. It’s something we have an excuse to do because we’re a gaming website but mostly we just like doing it. We love watching eSports, we love video games and we love competition.
The costs are really low; it mostly takes our time to run these events. We don’t have to put so much money into it. It’s just time that we should probably be putting into other projects. Despite that, the company is fully behind us. It’s just four people - we’re a small group so we can do anything we want. The website is held by a lot of moderators and people who help out but professionally it’s just us four.
How about other sponsors?
We get stuff from MediaVida of course and we got in touch with a local computer shop: it’s a chain called LIFE Informática and they give us stuff every time. They have 3 or 4 shops and one of them has gaming stuff. It’s mostly merchandising, SC2 shirts, peripherals and we also give away the posters we make. People sign up for the raffle, no tickets, and we also have this thing where you predict the winner of a set of matches and the winner gets stuff.
How do you deal with advertisement?
We use MediaVida as the main place to advertise, then we have StarCraft-ESP which is a community website, and of course Facebook. Oh and I have to say when we did that huge event we sent a press note to the media, meaning all the gaming websites. Also Reddit, Twitter, TL, and yeah Spanish community sites mostly. We actually get a few foreigners every event but it’s usually very few people.
You mentioned you’re trying to help the guys in Madrid: how’s that working out? What are your thoughts about growing as a community?
Madrid had a problem. They couldn’t really find a nice place to hold the event. Because it’s Madrid, they have a lot of sports, and the tournaments are always on Saturday or Sunday. They don’t want to lose their usual clients. When we got established in Barcelona, we wanted to support the guys in Madrid. It gets easier since we can give them pictures and show our success so they can pitch their offer better.
They found a place in January and they tried to do it. They gave out lots of prizes and they did ok. When there’s a big event and they have an event we also promote it on our website to help them out. We reached out to Dreamhack Spain - they are pretty much interested in anything that can promote their brand - if it’s a big tournament they will simply want to help you out. They pretty much run that barcraft on their own. The bar didn’t have enough equipment so they just brought the hardware themselves. They even got a couple of Spanish casters to the bar to help out.
We just help by sending out presentations to anyone who wants to get involved in barcrafts. You know, help spread the word out there. We reach people through Facebook and that’s pretty much all. For some reason they had a much harder time starting up in Madrid but now they seem to be fine.
Why do you think it’s harder in Madrid than in Barcelona?
I don’t know really. I guess people in Madrid just don’t follow SC2 that much. They haven’t broadcast LoL so that might be it - LoL in Spain is huge. There hasn’t been a game as big since CS and that didn’t even get this big. I really don’t have an answer though, and it’s weird since Madrid is a much bigger city than Barcelona.
Any advice to people trying to do the same?
I don’t know, we just don’t have a lot of problems. First bar we went to were fully behind us just like that, and we were really ready. We didn’t have tech issues; every time we do this we have a backup notebook to stream. We also have a tunnel connection we use - twitch tv has problems in southern Europe sometimes, connection wise, and we already try to be ready. If the stream gets laggy we use a proxy switch through France and it works better.
I know some people have problems with bar owners but we just don’t have that. I guess we’re lucky. We actually have bar owners coming to us and asking us to do an event at their place. We got pretty successful. We even got a feature in Time Out magazine.
Thanks for the interview! Got any shoutouts?
Thank you GosuGamers for talking to us and thanks to the Spanish community that comes to our events. It’s a great reward to just sit and drink with all the SC2 fans after planning an event so thanks!
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
The Corporate Box bar, Auckland, New Zealand
Oliver Twist bar, Zürich, Switzerland
Deez bar, Derby, UK
The Sidebar, Buffalo New York, USA
This is a GosuGamers weekly feature by Eyal "KOKOStern" Stern, that is published every Wednesday.
