MateCrate wants to make professional e-sports possible for every gamer in Germany. With the first tournament series for individual players, the City Masters, the company links players to regional teams and promotes entry into e-sports.
MateCrate uses its own professional organization, MTW (Mortal Teamwork), to further accompany talented young players on their way.
Since 2020, MateCrate has been producing and organizing professional e-sports leagues and tournaments
in German-speaking countries under the UNITED (e-sports) brand. Live broadcasting plays an important role in this and is produced in the company’s own studio. MCI supported MateCrate in the technical implementation and start-up of their first live e-sports studio.
The Hamburg-based company was founded in 2017 and, in addition to tournament and league organization, also independently implements social media and marketing concepts in-house. MateCrate also advises various partners on their way into e-sports and acts as a sparring partner for companies and agencies.
The e-sports sector in Germany is still growing and not as professionalized as in some Asian countries or the USA. While the community is large, it is largely scattered and disorganized. This is where MateCrate’s concept comes in as Sebastian Kuch, founder and CEO of MateCrate, explains:
“It is almost impossible for amateurs, i.e. non-professionals, to participate in organized competitions and pursue their passion in Germany. This is exactly where we come in with our products, linking players to teams and communities and offering professionally organized e-sports competitions for everyone.”
MateCrate was already able to set a first milestone in 2019 with the League of Legends tournament “City Masters”, in which 20,000 players registered for the qualification and 80,000 viewers watched the event online on Twitch. To build on this success and take the e-sports community in Germany to the next level, planning for an e-sports livestreaming studio began in 2020, with support from MCI.
The Studio Hamburg workshops designed the backdrop for the new studio, which was planned for up to 10 players and with enough spectator seats. In addition, a commentators’ area has been set up, where a fixed presenter can comment on the match encounters with alternating experts.
The control room concept consists of a main control room, where the various signals converge, and a kind of “play control room”, through which the play scenes are routed to the main control room. The technical heart of the control room is a Ross Ultrix router, which routes the various signals from the studio, presenter area, audience seats, players and POV game scenes. A Ross Carbonite Black video mixer provides user-friendly handling of the video signals.
A special challenge was the linking of personalized POV player scenes with the matching facecams of the players and additional graphic ingest about game data, maps, tournament standings, etc. For this purpose, MCI, in cooperation with Ross Video, set up and programmed the “game control” based on Ross DashBoard software. A Ross XPression provides graphic ingests. The head-up display and graphics are combined with the game scenes via Open Broadcast Software®. These signals are transmitted to the Ross Ultrix as a combined single signal per participating player and are available for live production as independent video sources.
Basically, the game sends a text string via UDP to the PC in the main control room. The string contains a unique ID that represents the player over the tournament. This string is confirmed and accepted by the custom panel and mapped with the correct facecam. Der Key mit dem DVE wird geöffnet und der Spieler ist zu sehen. Before that, the correct ID must be assigned to each player of a team in the DashBoard panel. Only if there is a match, you will see the corresponding player, with matching facecam and game data.
Benjamin Bolinius, Solution Engineer MCI: “We knew Ross DashBoard would give us the ability to network the different in-game scenes, webcams and ingests for automated signal routing, but we were surprised ourselves at how low the latency was when switching between the complex signals.”
On November 18, 2020 MateCrate launched the new CS:GO league UNITEDProSeries and the first tournament. Due to Covid-19, players were easily integrated into the studio workflow from home, via the Ross DashBoard, and streamed live on Twitch from there.
On-demand matches and highlights can still be followed at www.twitch.tv/unitedproseries
MateCrate is passionate about revolutionizing German e-sports. MCI is pleased to be able to support this mission to some extent.