Not everything at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) is about the latest mobile phone innovations. For years, the main companies in the sector have been expanding their scope of action to other business areas, where technology can also serve to transform them. One of these is video games, a clearly booming sector in Barcelona.
In this edition, Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital) has opted for them. Together with Mediapro and Telefónica, its stand hosted a League of Legends match with ten players this Tuesday. With 5G, provided by Telefónica, players were able to participate with their mobile phones from Madrid, Lleida, and Barcelona, and do so at exactly the same time and on equal terms, thanks to the low latency, greater bandwidth, and network speed that this technology provides.
Mediapro, through LVP, its professional esports league, was responsible for providing the knowledge on how to carry out this type of competition. For its CEO, Jordi Soler, being able to play these games with 5G represents "a paradigm shift," considering that until now the advantages of this technology could not be combined with the geographical dispersion of players. "The experience is much better," he emphasizes.
The fact that this experience took place in the Catalan capital is no coincidence. "Barcelona is a world power in video game development. At the e-sports level, we are also a benchmark," Soler emphasizes. This leadership also benefits from the fact that video games are increasingly popular and widespread among the population, as well as the growing popularity of video game competitions with an audience ---what is understood as electronic sports---.
This is demonstrated by LVP's business figures. In the 2021 fiscal year, Mediapro's professional league closed with the best audience figures in its more than eleven-year history. Specifically, it managed to reach 69.8 million accumulated viewers through its broadcasts, a figure that represented a 24% growth compared to 2020. The League of Legends Superliga, the benchmark competition in Spain, contributed greatly to these results, with 13 million viewers. The peak of viewers was registered in the final, which was held in Barcelona last summer, with 73,596 viewers, the highest figure in history for a national LVP competition.
Beyond e-sports
Walking through the Four Years From Now (4YFN), the entrepreneurs' hall at MWC and where the new trends being promoted in any vertical can best be seen, the boom that the world of video games is experiencing and the new approaches that are emerging are evident. The consultancy Deloitte has detected this and, for this reason, has created a specialized area in gaming. With a team of five employees, they are responsible for advising companies that want to enter this emerging sector. Its head, Christian Herreruela, confirms that the video game market in Spain is "in full boom" and that companies of all types want to join it, from telecommunications companies, media and banks to traditional sports companies. "50% of the population is gamer and, therefore, the market niche is wide," he explains.
Walking through the 4YFN, the boom that the world of video games is experiencing and the new approaches that are emerging is evidentBanks, for example, want to enter this sector to offer loyalty programs to their clients that include the purchase of video games, while traditional sports see the possibility of developing their own vertical of e-sportsa way to leverage synergies and attract a very complementary audience to the usual one. That is the case of the JapaneseSpolive, a platform to watch onstreamingany type of sport and being able to comment on it with other fans, with whom you also have to compete to be the one who generates the most interaction. Now focused on tennis, hockey, rugby or basketball, they also plan to expand into electronic sports in the future. They are focused on FC Barcelona and it is that, for international companies, participating in the Mobile also helps them find partners with whom to expand throughout the city that organizes it.
All this translates into the fact that it is no longer just about creating video games and organizing competitions, but that many more areas are covered. This is the case of Kaikoo Gaming, specialized in offering training for gamers to play better. The company, based in Malaga, analyzes how its users play and what mistakes they make, with the aim of proposing exercises to them to improve. They also offer them classes in which professional players tell them their tricks. The company emerged during the pandemic, when its founders saw that many began to play to kill the time forced at home. Currently, they already have more than 30,000 users in Spain and Latin America.
The coronavirus was also the origin of Job and Play. Its CEO, Sergio Segado, was dedicated to designing team building activities, with soccer or padel matches, but confinement made this task difficult. For this reason, he opted to transfer these dynamics to strengthen workforces through electronic sports, including the option of being able to play them in the metaverse. The Andorran company proposes competitions between workers in which "they feel like professional players", even including commentators who broadcast the game. This specialization is allowing them to attract the many companies that want to enter the world of e-sports, who choose them to have a first contact with the sector.
The popularity of video games also allows them to be used to make complicated tasks more enjoyable, such as learning to program. This is the case of Coded People, based in Terrassa. Its founder, Jordi Rubio, a software engineer, had this idea when he was working as a Computer Science teacher. He started thinking about a pilot to make the curriculum more friendly for students. The idea evolved into designing a video game in which players have to overcome different challenges that teach them to program certain concepts, from less to more difficult. "Gamification in education is a way for students to learn with the language they speak," explains Rubio. People who want to end up working as video game programmers are precisely drawn to this company.