Business

Toornament evolves

As you may have noticed, we rebranded the website last week. This is the first step of a full-scale evolution for Toornament in the coming months and years. We are indeed moving to a business-to-business (B2B) model, relying on our robust tournament engine to provide organizers with all the tools they need to create and manage their esports competitions in the best conditions.
As such, we decided to deliver our software as a service (SaaS), with premium features packaged in paid plans tailored for professional organizers.

For the amateur and esports enthusiasts, rest assured that Toornament will still provide access to the core features of the organizer software for free, for you to organize a tournament on any game, for your friends and communities.

Thank you for your continued support and trust in this adventure, and we will be back soon with more exciting news about what is yet to come!

Austrian eBundesliga on Toornament

Skilled Events GmBH is an Austria-based esports company with 15 years of experience in the field. They are working with the Esports Federation of Austria to provide players all across the country with great and compelling competitions, and are notably the organizers of the biggest e-soccer league in Austria, the eBundesliga, in cooperation with the official Bundesliga.
In their search of the ideal platform to manage the competition, they found in Toornament the best alternative, thanks to our advanced engine and API. They had to be able to handle multiple qualifiers, a custom registration process and other complex challenges, all made possible thanks to our solution.

The eBundesliga website is a custom-made platform with deep Toornament integration. The registration happens directly on the website, and players can then register in tournaments depending on their place of residence and club. The tournament registration process is easy and quick thanks to the API that takes care of sending the needed information. Then, email and text notifications are sent to the players for the important steps of the competition.

During the tournaments, live results are displayed on broadcast and in live venues. This is again entirely automated, without the need for any manual refresh, and information is always up to date, and error-free.

The second season started in December 2019, and ended early February, with the crowning of the FC Red Bull Salzburg in the Team tournament, and Marcel Holy in the Solo tournament. This was the outcome of a circuit that started with 12 qualifiers, one for each of the main soccer clubs participating in the competition, and ended with a Main Event in Vienna.

Contact us if you wish to learn more about how to build an esports universe around your game or brand, thanks to our tournament engine and advanced features!

A new LOL official league happening on Toornament!

On this day last year, we announced our partnership with Riot Games for the French League, entirely managed via Toornament, and with a custom website we built for them.
This partnership is carrying on, and it gets better, as it has been extended to the 2nd Division of the French League. This means that Toornament is now the go-to platform for the whole circuit in France, from the LOL students league to the pro players that have a shot at the LEC.

This new website dedicated to the 2nd Division comes with a brand new design, but retains the features and navigation of its 1st Division counterpart, to create a coherent environment for players and spectators alike.

We are pleased and proud to be the official solution chosen by Riot Games for the entire French esports ecosystem, and we have other exciting things to come working closely with them!

Use Case: LANA France

Today we want to introduce one of our first ever professional organizers, LANA France, a nonprofitable association that has been created in 2000, organizing events around video games. They made a name for themselves during the great era of LAN Parties (with the MaxLan), and now accompany communities in creating their events and exhibitions, by bringing them expertise and skills relevant to esports tournaments.

Here to talk more in depth about their experience is Cyril Grosjean, VP of LANA France:
We have been using Toornament since 2013 to manage our competitions (around a hundred now). It made the whole management, registration and communication process way easier for us.

On our latest project, Moselle Gaming Network, we needed a new feature to let participants choose their city of participation from a list of allowed cities. Indeed, this League of Legends competition was held simultaneously across 5 cities, and only participants from these cities were allowed to take part.
We then used the Toornament API to build a custom registration form directly on our website.

The advantages of this solution were numerous:
– We could build the feature in a few hours, tailored to our needs
– We now have the players only using our website, and do not need to have them go to and from Toornament and our own website, which prevented confusion sometimes felt by some of our younger players
– We could communicate entirely on our own media and networks, controlling the entire process and user experience

In the future, we plan on integrating Toornament even further in our websites, to allow for a fully white-label experience, with all tournament information being directly available on our website, which we know is possible thanks to Toornament.

Thank you Cyril for your time and insight on the work of an organizer, and congratulations the great environment you provide to your players!

What was up on Toornament in 2019?

2019 was quite a year for Toornament. For us, it was all about leveraging our B2B technology to create the best esports platforms. And we succeeded big time, by working with some of the biggest names in the industry, to offer players and organizers all around the world the tools and environment they need for their esports journey.

First off, there were quite a few large scale tournament operations held on the platform, with Red Bull Player One 2019, the Mastercard Nexus Tournament and the Burger King by x6tence tournaments among others.

We have also worked directly with game publishers to create their esports platforms, such as the Splatoon 2 Tournaments platform for Nintendo, a complete national environment for Riot Games with the Grosse Ligue, targeted at students, and the two divisions of the LOL French League to find the pro players that will play in the LEC and the Rainbow 6 French League for Ubisoft.

Last, but not least, we have been working hands in hands with the teams from The Coalition, Xbox and PGL to develop, maintain and improve the Gears Esports Platform, a complete ecosystem for the Gears community, to play competitively, get to the top rank of your region and become a Pro Gears player.

Updates

To make all of these projects possible, and make the experience of everyone using our technology the best possible, we kept updating and improving it all year long.
Among the major changes, we have added new bracket structures: Gauntlet and Free-for-All. We also made visual optimizations to better display all brackets on the website.

The API, upon which are built all the business projects, also received plenty of love with the addition of Webhooks and the Open-Api Specification. This makes it easier than ever to build entire websites based on our technology, and allows for even more customization and automation.

2019 has been a great year for Toornament, and we already have plans to top that in 2020! Thank you for staying with us, and get ready for another exciting year in esports!

Toornament enables the E.V.A world first VR Stadium tournament

In our effort to accompany all esports initiatives that come our way, we have worked with the team of Esports Virtual Arenas to deliver a world first for players and spectators alike: a competition played in a Virtual Reality Esports Stadium.

It was played on After-H, a free team-based VR shooter accessible to all owners of VR headsets, playable in large-scale arcade setups for a truly immersive experience, like what we saw during the Paris Games Week:

The tournament started online with a qualification phase, and the finals were played live in the EVA Stadium. The management of the participants and structure was made easy thanks to Toornament, along with the communication around the results and schedule, thanks to our sharing modules:

“We were looking for an easy way to organize and keep track of our After-H competitions; and Toornament has provided us exactly that! We can now open registrations for a tourney in no time, update the tournament results as the games are being played and integrate customized widgets in our blog posts. Everybody can browse through the competition history, which comes very handy when live streaming phases of the tournament. Ever since we’ve started using Toornament for our competitive events, we’ve seen VR arcade doing the same and organize their own internal After-H championships via Toornament!“, says Eloïse BEUVANT, Communication Director at EVA.

We strongly believe that VR has its place in the esports landscape, among the giants that are the MOBA, Shooters and other Card Games. We can not wait to see what the future holds with actors like EVA paving the way, providing them and their community with the tools they will need to develop the scene.

Toornament empowers the Gears Esports Program with a dedicated Platform

Toornament has created the official white-label esports platform for the Gears Esports program, on behalf of Xbox, The Coalition and PGL. It was tailored to gather their entire game community on a single website, from the grassroots players to the pros, setting a new standard for esports platforms.

Taking part and following competitions from all around the world has been made easier, with all levels of play integrated on the platform:

Regional Ladders
Weekly Online Tournaments
Regional Events
Pro League
Major Championships

The platform is a true white-label website, based on the game’s visual identity and focusing on a great mobile experience.

We have also created custom-built features for the platform, such as Regional Leaderboards based on tournament standings, and a complete Team Management system, with roles and advanced roster lock rules.
The whole system is revolving around the Microsoft login system, which allows participation with the same account used to play the game.

“This new esports platform offers the community a unique environment in which all players can find their match to play Gears competitively. We are working hand in hand with Toornament to make it the best experience for all players, and provide them with everything they need to make their Gears Esports journey a great one,” says Silviu Stroie, CEO of PGL Esports.

For more information, check out the official Gears Online Competitive Platform!

Riot Games renews its partnership with Toornament

After the success of the first year, Riot Games has decided to continue using Toornament to organize the French Collegiate League known as the ‘Grosse Ligue’.
More than 650 teams, amounting to close to 4,000 students, have registered for this third season through a custom-built registration form present on the official website.

The competition splits the teams based on regional and skill criteria, with 36 tournaments featuring different structures and match formats depending on the number of participants:

Matches are using the LOL Tournament Codes feature to create the match lobbies in game, and automatically report the scores and upload data after it is played.
All-in-all, Toornament allows for a complete competitive environment for students, from registration in the regional qualifiers to the national finals.

Use Case: Gladiabots and Toornament integration

Thanks to its complete API, and even more so the OpenAPI Specification, Toornament is ready for in-game integration.
That’s an opportunity GFX47, developer of the game Gladiabots (an arena game where you assemble a robot squad and construct their IA to outsmart your opponents), understood and seized to let his community organize and take part in tournaments directly in the game.

If you play Gladiabots, you will be able to find a “Tournaments” item in its main menu, that will bring you to a list of tournaments, all organized on Toornament. Register to one, and your matches will automatically be pulled from our website thanks to the API and appear in-game. In the same fashion, match results are then pushed to Toornament and new matches pulled again for the tournament to move forward with no admin interventions.

On top of the official tournaments organized by the game developer, any community member can create his own tournament, and have it appear in game for all interested players to participate in.

“Having a solution like Toornament has allowed me to offer a competitive option for the players that wanted to take part in tournaments, without having to develop the whole feature myself. It has been a great time saver, and having the community be able to create their own tournaments ensure the game stays lively and active.“
– GFX47, Gladiabots creator

If you are a game developer yourself, and would like to know more about what Toornament can bring to your player experience, send us an email to [email protected]!

Improving our developer experience with OpenAPI Specification

We are happy to announce that Toornament now provides OpenAPI Specification (OAS) for its RESTful API, to deliver the best experience possible to the developers using the Toornament API!

“By applying the OpenAPI Specification to our API, we allow client developers to generate data models and SDKs from our specification files in minutes. Developers can also use REST clients to quickly test and develop their project with our API.
OAS was our go-to choice because of its tooling support and fully customizable stack, and it being an active and ever-evolving solution.”
– Olivier Paradis, Toornament CTO

As a reminder, the Toornament API can be used to improve your Event Production and build dedicated websites to display and manage your competitions (registrations, calendar, results, replays etc.).
Providing OAS support means that Toornament-based esport websites such as the Rainbow Six French League Official Website and Splatoon 2 Esports Platform are easier than ever to develop!

OAS support is included in all of our API offers, and OAS files can be found in our API Documentation. You can also find a list of tools developed for OpenAPI on the OpenAPI tools website.
So reach out to us if you are interested in enhancing the esports experience you provide!