Like many people on the
@ParallelTCG team I’ve seen a ton of people who attended our event or watched our stream applaud the event and share their excitement for the future. But I’ve also seen some people share statements like “why is Parallel investing in eSports right now” and “imagine hosting a global final when the userbase isn’t in the millions”.
I want to make it clear that this event was a resounding win in our eyes. From an operational perspective we ran this tournament on an almost break even budget (kudos to
@Fitchinverse and our incredible sponsors for helping us get there). From an awareness perspective we solidified our place in the upper echelon of not just Web3 gaming but TCGs broadly. The pros we invited that came from other TCGs like Hearthstone & MTG had nothing but great feedback to share. We made sure these great players not only enjoyed their time but had several opportunities to directly provide constructive feedback to our team. When looking at the numbers our streams (on just Parallel accounts only) were watched by over 15,000 unique viewers. We had over 200 people attend the event in person across 3 days (with a full crowd on our final day). We brought in the best casters, hosts and influencers like
@JakeSucky &
@RduStreaming to drive more eyeballs to the game (generating ~1.7 million impressions in 3 days).
Streaming is important but for the growth & marketing team right now it is not a huge focus. Let me unpack why.
Our game right now is PC only. A vast majority of people who watch trading card games on stream do it through a mobile device. This means even if our streams from the tournament got 10 million views overall a majority of people watching won’t have a device capable to download and play the game.
This is why we are laser focused on getting the mobile version of our game out and why it was great to not only host a successful tournament but to announce the date of our first regional launch for mobile TCG (March 19 - Philippines). We will have two more regional launches (in India & Brazil) before we launch our mobile game globally. Once that happens we will have a game that is truly accessible to anyone and that is when it will make sense to turn the jets on streaming, bigger influencer partnerships, more activations at gaming events/conferences, mobile/PC cross-play tournaments, etc.
I don’t come from the world of Web3 but as a long time debater (who represented Canada at two world debating championships) I principally understand the value of interoperability, of truly owning in-game assets and of being compensated for in-game success. My past life was spent in scaling consumer Web2 products to millions of users and after selling my last company, I joined Parallel because I believe in our world class team, our unbelievably welcoming community and our game that is actually fun to play (and like any game out there, one that can still be improved in many ways).
My promise to the Parallel community is I will continue to work harder than anyone to make you proud of not only our game but our community. This community will exponentially grow primarily off the back of mobile coming out and I have the utmost confidence that we will be at over 1 million registered users by the end of year.
Back to building 🧱