Ben Drevitch had the chance to catch up with FACEIT co-founder Michele Attisani via email to talk about his time in esports, FACEIT's growth and the company's future with Counter-Strike and other games.
Ben Drevitch: What is your background in esports and how did you get involved with FACEIT?
Michele Attisani: I started playing online in 1999 with Quake 3 and since then I have avidly consumed every multiplayer/competitive game you can imagine, including but not limited to Starcraft, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Warcraft 3 and more. I also played at a decent international level but never professionally.
I was working in consulting when my co-founder called me to ask for feedback on his idea of an online gaming platform from which FACEIT was created. I loved the idea so much that I suggested we start the company together. Soon after, we reached out to an old friend from our Quake days with a background as professional gamer to join us as co-founders.
BD: How did you help FACEIT grow and expand into the competitive scene with ECS?
MA: ECS was created with the goal of building a stable ecosystem for professional teams and players that allows them to make investments with more certainly about the future thanks to long term commitment and financial support (currently $3M a year) that ECS provides to participants. On the other side, stability allows for better commercial opportunities that we then share with teams and players. We keep improving this model thanks to the support and feedback of the teams and players participating and we see the benefits season over season.
New record! 70,000+ concurrent players on @FACEIT!
12th Nov 2017 - 40,000 concurrent players
1st Jan 2018 - 50,000 concurrent players
7th Jan 2018 - 60,000 concurrent players
3rd February 2018 - 70,000 concurrent playersAndiamo! #Roadto100k
— Milos Nedeljkovic (@Faceit_Mikey) February 3, 2018
BD: What goes into making a Custom HUD for your tournaments?
MA: It's a collaborative effort to improve the viewing experience for the fans. It requires a lot of work from different areas of our team, including technical and broadcasting, graphics, observers and talent. Having a custom HUD shouldn't be a show off of capabilities but add value to the viewers, giving us the flexibility to show or remove information when meaningful to supporting the storytelling of the match. This is part of the narrative our in-game team delivers thanks to the work of our observers, replays, highlights, graphics/animation, and tech guys.
So far, the best implementation we have is our Arena experience that we created for the Season 3 Finals at Wembley, but we're working on some new surprises for our online content as well.
BD: How important is feedback from the community to the FACEIT team, and how do you continuously strive to improve?
MA: The community is the key component of FACEIT’s culture. People will be surprised to know how much time we spend reading Reddit, forums, social media or chatting with our users. This counts for everyone from the new hires to the top management. I'm usually the weird guy that stops fans at ECS asking what they liked and didn’t like at the event.
BD: FACEIT Pro League has been widely praised for the lack of issues involved with it recently; how have you been able to please a community that accepts nothing but the best?
MA: Running CS:GO events is one of the hardest challenges you can face as an esport production company. There are thousands of variables you need to consider that could easily compromise your event.
Our multi-year experience allows us to improve our workflow after each and every event (we've been producing over 500 hours of live CS:GO every year for the last 4 years) and to prepare backup plans for almost everything that could wrong. Unfortunately, the perfect event doesn't exist, but we always try our best to get as close as possible to it.
BD: What is your favorite feature of anything FACEIT is involved in that you have worked on?
MA: FACEIT is a community-focused tech company with a media arm. Being an esports native digital content provider gives us a unique ability to build exclusive features and experiences for the fans. From our platform and community competitions at amateurs and local level, all the way to our large-scale events, we work to keep a fresh perspective and continually produce fun and entertaining content and features like our HUDs, exclusive stats integration, tournament widgets and FACEIT Loot Drops and so on.
BD: How does the FACEIT team decide what changes should be made (essentially what goes into every announcement the team makes), such as the recent announcement of the Challenger Cup and the brilliant FACEIT Point System implemented at the Cancun Final?
MA: It's a process of collecting the feedback from all the stakeholders, including the community, players, teams, talent and internal staff. Once we have that we discuss internally starting with a larger group who decide
BD: What is the next feature FACEIT is working on?
MA:
