And the Thunder (Gaming) Rolls!
February 2, 2018
By Christian Bishop
As thrills go, it’s hard to beat seeing your company’s name on the seven-story NASDAQ video tower in the heart of New York’s Times Square. It appeared on that massive blue silo earlier this week under a banner that read “Breaking Company News” and the announcement that GG Media Network has formed a strategic alliance with Thunder Gaming.
This is a marriage made in esports heaven. We’re combining the resources of Thunder Studios, the parent company of Thunder Gaming, which operates the largest independent esports gaming and production facility on the west coast, with GG Media, the company I co-founded last year to create original esports content and manage esports events, brands, and talent.
The Thunder Gaming facility is truly awesome. We’re talking 150,000 square feet of production space in Long Beach, California, that includes a new, 16,000-square-foot esports arena, broadcast stage, virtual reality room, VIP player/media lounge, and a soundproof broadcast studio. The facility doesn’t open officially until March, but we launched a “soft open” earlier this year to get the bugs out, and we’ve been holding tournaments weekly tournaments attended by hundreds of people. Throughout the coming year, we’ll be co-hosting a serious slate of esports events with some of the most respected tournament organizers in Southern California.
For GG Media, this alliance is mainly about the additional opportunities it provides to develop even more original, live gaming content, and that will continue to be our focus. In fact, our core strategy is to create hundreds of hours of live programming and a whole slew of original, esports-related media content. That’s how we provide the most value to the global gaming marketplace. As the chief executive of the newly combined organizations, my number one job going forward will be to help content creators and influencers make magic and connect with their audiences.
With that mission in mind, we also plan to integrate for the first time Thunder Studios’ proprietary image-capture technology, called “SightDeck,” with gaming to create some seriously compelling content. This is technology that wasn’t originally designed for games, but because it can, as the brochure says, “allow the live integration of talent into any source content and the distribution of that content across all live social media platforms,” we expect it to be an amazingly useful tool.
Because I’m going to serve as CEO of the combined organizations, we’re moving our headquarters to the Thunder Esport Center, and I could not be more excited! I’ve been operating at a 20,000-foot level for a while now, working via GG Media with agencies, brands, and people trying to create content, and helping the Thunder Gaming organization with the new facility—all of which was necessary to get that big-picture view of the esports landscape. But now I’ll be on the ground and on hand, overseeing day-to-day operations, immersed in the activities of the gaming community. My community.
One more thing about the Thunder Esport Center: when it’s not booked for events, it’ll be open every day to the public. It’s true that providing this kind of access is part of our business strategy, but it’s also important to me, personally, to support the local gaming community. How could we build this big, cool gaming center and not give the local talent a chance to come in and show their stuff?
Providing this kind of local access is also consistent with a deep, philanthropic thread that runs through our organization and our community. I’m talking about influencers and talent committed to raising money for good causes through a range of events that we will be hosting during the coming year. It’s one of the reasons I’m so proud to be part of the gaming and esports community.
#esports
