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Is E-sports The Future Of Gaming?

Our next interview at SSVG see’s us talking to Deputy Arena Manager of Belong Gaming, Thomas Horne. Belong is a subsidiary of GAME which primarily focuses on e-sports. Belong Gaming Arenas are a place where gamers can come together, engage in the community and compete against one another to win prizes. These gaming arenas been popping up all over the UK recently and it’s constantly growing. Thomas is here to give us the scoop on Belong Gaming and the whole E-sports movement.

Introductions

Yasir: If you can introduce yourself

Thomas: My name is Thomas Horne, I work at Belong Gaming Arena as a Deputy Arena Manager.

Yasir: I have to say, you look kind of young, how old are you?

Thomas: I’m 21 years old.

Yasir: You’re 21 years old! 

Thomas: Yeah, 22, next month!

Yasir: Still a young’un. I can tell you’re a gamer as well. How long have you been gaming for? 

Thomas: Probably since I was 5 years old.

Yasir: Ok, here’s an ice breaker question. What games did you grow up with? What was your first console actually? 

Thomas: My first console, I remember was a Gameboy with good old Pokemon Silver.

Yasir: Yes, that’s one of my favourites as well. So, you told me you started off in retail working at GAME. How long was you there for?

Thomas: I worked for Game Retail for approximately one year and three months.

Yasir: What position did you have at GAME?

Thomas: I was a sales assistant for five months and got promoted to assistant manager. Then from there I was able to get into a deputy manager role within ten months.

Yasir: Why did you decide to switch over to Belong?

Thomas: I personally decided to switch to Belong because I wanted to run community-based events, whilst engaging with e-sports players. I love both sides of the company, because GAME is such a great place to work. No matter what side you are on! I won’t forget the day I got asked to come in for an interview, and the day I got the call saying I had the job. It’s something I treasure to this day, and I still keep in contact with the Store Manager who hired me. Belong is more what I want to do with my future. My end goal is to become an Events Manager where i organise local and large-scale events, and create great Community’s for them. So, it made more sense for me to switch to Belong.

What Is Belong Gaming?

“All we want to do is give a home to all gamers with different levels. So, it’s not for the best, it’s not for the worst. It’s for everyone”

Yasir: So, Belong Gaming, tell me when did this all start off? 

Thomas: It started just over two years ago I believe.

Yasir: And everything is all E-sports based? 

Thomas: So basically, with Belong, our biggest focus is creating e-sports teams and building an immense community. So, all we want to do is give a home to all gamers with different levels. So, it’s not for the best, it’s not for the worst. It’s for everyone. So, everyone has a place they can call home and can feel comfortable in.

Yasir: I’m a bit older so I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole e-sports movement. It’s the new thing that kids want to get into, right? So, in my mind I’m thinking it’s mainly Fortnite, Apex Legends and games like that. Am I right in thinking so?

Thomas: There’s different e-sports levels and careers in each different game. For example, in League of Legends you have the LCS, that’s the League Champions Series. Basically, what they do is they have professional teams that compete at a professional level and can win millions and millions of pounds in prize money. Even if you come in the top four, you still can get over £100,000 so there’s all different types of levels.

What we do is we’re the grass root of e-sports and we do it on a home level. For example, if there’s five kids that walk into our arena and they want to be on our team, they can be on our team. They can then compete against all the other teams in the company and then the best team gets put forward. They can obviously win special prizes from gaming. We do reward points, peripherals, consoles, headsets, PC’s, stuff like that.

Yasir: How many gaming arenas does Belong currently have? 

Thomas: There are 22 arenas around the country. There’s 4 in London. What they’re looking to do is to expand rapidly all around the country. At the moment they’re just finding good locations to have them. Obviously, Guildford’s one of the places we’re looking into.

Yasir: Yeah, Guildford seems like the perfect place with all the game companies close by.

Yeah exactly, you also got all the partnerships companies around here. There’s clearly a great community for it otherwise we wouldn’t have had all these people here playing today. And from the looks of it, there’s a lot of young people who would be interested in getting into e-sports.

Yasir: What’s the day in the life of your job? Talk me through your day.

Thomas: The first thing I do when I walk into the office in the morning is talk to all my customers who throw abuse at me. Nah, with Belong we have a lot of banter, so it’s a really chilled out environment. It’s mainly about building a community with our customers. If we’re purely there working our arses off and not paying any attention to our customers, they lose interest in us because obviously we are the home for them. If they’re not at home, where do they go? They come to our gaming arenas to have fun, meet friends, party with people.

All we do is set them up on the games, help them develop on the games, help them train, we help them actually understand how to play the games. Heck, we even play the games with them majority of the time as well because at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about becoming one team between customer and employee because we want to bridge that gap. Where there is a massive difference like when you go into most retail stores, we don’t believe in that. We believe in having one community that is spread all around the country. So instead of it being Guildford vs Kingston, then they’ll work together. Obviously, there is competitiveness because whoever wants to win the tournament but it’s more of, we are one family at the end of the day.

The Future Of E-Sports

“E-sports is going to become the future of England if you ask me.”

Yasir: E-Sports is always growing. Can you see a sustainable future in it? 

Thomas: Yeah, it’s growing rapidly. If you think about when belong first started, they originally started with 10 arenas. They were all spread around the country, nowhere near each other and two years later we’re already with 22 arenas. We’ve doubled in 2 years and that doesn’t even include the funding that we’ve been given by Sports Direct and all these other companies as well. We just recently partnered with Hyper X and their one of the biggest equipment brands out there. Now they sponsor the likes of Summit, Shroud, Cloud Nine. All these professional teams and they’ve chosen to sponsor Belong with that, so we’re actually accounted for as much as they are.

Yasir: If a young person is interested in e-sports, how can they start out? 

Thomas: So, with our Arena Clash, that is our main e-sports growth because that’s the grass root of e-sports. We have a qualifier night which is absolutely free, everyone can come in, apply for it and play. If we think you’re one of the best in the qualifier night, you’ll get put into one of our teams. We have three teams: Championship team, Challengers team and the Underground team. Obviously, Championship being the best, Challenger being the second and Underground being the third.

If you get put on the championship team and win, you go to the final. You get to go to Insomnia65 for free which is one of the biggest gaming festivals in the UK.

So yeah, you have to be 16 and over to enter Arena Clash, because that’s old you have be to enter competitions and e-sports. That’s unfortunately the only strict rule about it. Also, we don’t accept any toxicity or abuse because it’s meant to be a friendly fun environment like most tournaments.

We don’t believe in all that abuse because it’s not needed. When you look at all these other professional leagues out there. Is there abuse and toxicity? No. It’s all ‘fair game’, ‘good games’, ‘well done’, ‘you guys played well’. ‘We actually played bad today but who knows, maybe in the future we’ll beat them’.

Yeah if you wanted to get into e-sports, we’re definitely the place to start because it’s such a tough place to get into now and we’ve actually had professional teams who have been massive. Even Excel have just partnered with us now. But we’ve had professional teams like Fnatic scout some of our players in our arenas. What they do is just come and look for young talent.

Yasir: E-sports is becoming a massive thing, would you agree? 

Thomas: E-sports is going to become the future of England if you ask me. It’s going to get so massive and it’s going to be everywhere.

Yasir: This is how I see gaming going in the future-

Thomas: They’re already on about bring it to the Olympics because it’s an official sport. it’s an e-sport. what are the Olympics built off? Sports. Some people don’t agree with it, some people do. If you want my opinion, I think it should be in the Olympics because it’s no different from football, hockey, sledging or anything like that.

Yasir: Awesome, I normally wrap up the interview with this question… what are your favourite video games of all time? E-sports or Non e-sports.

Thomas: Games I normally play are Pokemon, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Player Unknown Battlegrounds. League of Legends is really good but I’m absolutely bad at it. I used to play FIFA back in the day but I’ve kind of died down on it now because I haven’t got enough time to grind out ultimate team. Also fighting games like Tekken and Mortal Kombat.

Yasir: Thomas, thank you for your time. 

You can find out more about Belong Gaming Arena here and you can check out the official twitter.

Missed our previous interview? We interviewed nDreams associate community manager Dan Cosgrove about Phantom: Covert Ops. Read about it here.