The massive success of eSports has led to plenty of competition on PCs, but so far mobile games that are ready for professional competitive play have yet to really break through. The latest entrant to throw its hat into the competitive mobile gaming ring is Spacetime Studios, a Texas-based independent mobile game developer and publisher best known for its mobile MMO Pocket Legends. The studio is preparing a mobile multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, Call of Champions, and they’ve enlisted the help of three professional gamers to sharpen the game’s competitive edge.
Spacetime Studios CEO Gary Gattis talked with [a]listdaily about Call of Champions, competitive gaming, and why the company brought in pro gamers to consult.
How did Spacetime Studios get started, and what led to your developing a competitive mobile game?
Spacetime was formed back in 2005 to build a very large MMO for NCsoft. It was a very large-scale product — $25 million — and we invested maybe $15 million in the tech. The game was canceled in 2008 but we got to keep the technology. So we’ve got very, very powerful client-server, enterprise-class technology. We didn’t really know what to do with it. We’ve been watching the rise of competitive gaming on PC for several years. We thought that was something we wanted to take on, so our latest game Call of Champions is an expression of that.
Dealing with real-time multiplayer gaming on mobile is a technical challenge. How have you approached it?
Our tech is fairly unique in that it lets us have global synchronous PVP on iOS and Android, so everyone around the world plays on the same server set, even through very high-latency connections, all the way down to EDGE. When we started looking for consultants we talked to a whole bunch of guys. We think we are the future of competitive gaming, and the guys we’re talking to are also very interested in the future of competitive gaming. That’s really how we linked up with these three dudes.
Tell us about the professional players you have consulting with you on the design of Call of Champions.
The three professional gamers serve as independent consultants, having extensive experience in the MOBA genre and on the Esports circuit. James “PhantomL0rd” Varga began his professional gaming career with Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, Quake3 Arena, and World of Warcraft before immersing himself in the competitive League of Legends community where he co-founded the original V8 Esports team. Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani is among the most accomplished and well-known League of Legends players in the world; he has represented teams such as Dignitas, Counter Logic Gaming, and Curse in tournaments as large as the World Championships. Stephen “Snoopeh†Ellis is a former professional League of Legends player who has competed with and against the best players in the world for more than four years.
What makes these gamers the right ones to help you with your game design?
James, Joedat and Stephen have helped level up competitive gaming and define what it means to be a pro gamer today. Their extraordinary ability to understand MOBAs and how players interact with these games makes them the perfect partners to blaze new trails on the mobile platform alongside our Call of Champions development team.
How will you be marketing Call of Champions?
We’re community-centric, and we’re going to start with the community. We’ve got a very active group of players that already play our games, and at the high end of our MMOs it’s all PvP, and so we’ve got a very core group of highly active PvP players that we will cross-pollinate. We’re also building up a community from the competitive gaming scene through our early alpha program which is a pretty exclusive thing to get into. For us, it’s all about building a great group of competitive players and a community that knows that they can hang out and talk to devs and we’ll listen to their feedback.
Outside of that, we’re looking at the same things that most other people look at. Performance marketing is crazy on mobile right now, and you’re right, it is tremendously difficult to get noticed. We’re hoping we have a very. Very high-quality product that is absolutely unique in the market. I can tell you there’s nothing like this game on PC or mobile right now. So we’re relying on a huge amount of innovation, plus a very, very active and competitive community group, hopefully led by our professionals that will consult with us to make it the best product out there.