Rezzil’s Premier League games plan: 02/05/2024
To games, to sports, to games, to sports…
Rezzil chats to us about how games inspired a sports business (and vice versa)
Roll7 to close its doors as part of Take-Two restructure
Sea of Thieves sets sail to PlayStation 5 in the week’s releases
Hello VGIM readers,
Well, we put on a real spurt of subscribers last week didn’t we? Thank you to everyone who shared the newsletter and who helped me get over the 1500 mark. Give yourself a pat on the back, a round of applause and a hearty hurrah to celebrate.
Anyway, the reason why I was hoping to put on a few more subscribers was a simple one. After eight months of careful market testing/ massive procrastination, I’m finally ready to officially launch my business: Half-Space Consulting.
I first had the idea for it on holiday in Portugal in 2022 because, frankly, I’m a disgusting workaholic who needs to learn to chill out.
Shortly after going on a Monday morning port tour with a Belgian family (yes, I am a middle class man in his 30s, thank you very much), my mind drifted towards my work at Ukie and two problems in the industry that were interconnected and couldn’t be solved by the trade association alone.
First, organisations outside of games - including brands, commercial businesses, NGOs and even governments - wanted to get to grips with the market but lacked the knowledge or contacts to know where to start: leaving them scratching their heads and wasting their money.
And second, companies within the games business were becoming more aware of how external factors - such as industry reputational challenges and policy changes - could directly affect them, but were uncertain on how to address them: leaving them frustrated and feeling like they were open to attack.
Each side needed help. Each side needed someone they could trust. And each side seemed to want to work with someone who “got” where they were coming from and could guide their way forward. That’s where, eventually, Half-Space came in.
Since October 2023, I’ve worked with eight clients to educate them about the games market and the factors shaping it, build strategies to enter the sector (or interact effectively with the wider world as a games business) and communicate through content, events, media relations tips and one-to-one engagement programmes to reach the audiences they need to hit.
And while each client is different, the core argument for working with Half-Space stays the same. By bringing me on board, your business is able to tap into my brain, contacts and comms skills to set you on the path to glory within the games sector or as a games industry player within the wider world.
Because Half-Space’s work is so cool (read: spectacularly NDA’d) I can’t actually show you much of what I’ve done so far. But I have done things that look a lot like:
Writing the Playing for the Planet’s Annual Impact report to assess the performance of its Alliance of video game businesses as they try to decarbonise themselves and the world around them.
Speaking to the European Commission’s Radicalisation Awareness Network Policy Support event in Barcelona to discuss how law enforcement can build practical partnerships with games businesses.
Curating and hosting the London Developer Conference with wide ranging content that showed how culture, law and technology outside of games was shaping the industry as much as the trends inside of it.
And thankfully, the feedback from clients who have dabbled with my service so far has been good. I’ve been praised for my “extensive industry knowledge” for “effectively understanding” client needs and for being the “go-to” for strategic insights into games. One client even described me as “invaluable”, giving me the perfect excuse to immediately jack my rates up after I got off the phone to them.
Anyway, the great news is that you can now hire me via Half-Space to help your business or organisation out. I have limited space for a couple of Q2 2024 projects and a bit more room for work in the second half of the year. If you want to snap up my time before it’s all gone, email me at george@half-space.consulting.
And quickly, before I conclude a truly disgusting self-promotional essay, this is the first of three announcements over the course of the summer. The next will be the long awaited details of VGIM paid subscriptions, which will finally start in June. Oh, and there’s a very fun news story that should be ready just in time for a certain popular UK games conference in July. Be there or be square.
Thank you for tolerating some intensive personal horn tooting. Shall we turn our attention to a big read instead?
The big read - Rezzil’s Premier League games plan
One of the major trends in the games industry over the past decade has been the increasing use of games technology beyond the sector’s borders.
“Spillover” technologies such as game engines have emerged from the industry and crossed over into the wider economy, generating nearly £1.3bn of economic value in the UK in industries as diverse as visual effects production, energy extraction and healthcare according to a report released last year.
But are we on the cusp of seeing some of that spillover slosh back towards the games industry? Rezzil offers an interesting argument that it could be.
Founded in Manchester in 2017, Rezzil provides sports teams like Manchester City and Red Bull Racing with VR powered training software that promises to boost the cognitive powers of the athletes they work with.
And though the company’s mission has been to build a world class athletics performance business, its experience creating engaging virtual practice drills for professional sports people using games technology has seen it land a flagship deal to make interactive entertainment for a purely consumer market for the first time.
The company announced at the end of March 2024 that it had signed a four year partnership with the Premier League to create a VR game that’ll be launched later this year; marking the company’s transition from professional service provider using game technology to game developer creating a title based on a professional service.
So how does Rezzil work? Why did a company that wanted to make games start out by making training tools for athletes? And how did winning the trust of the sports business set it up to land its first video game deal? I caught up with Andy Etches, the company’s founder, to get to the bottom of things.
Turning professional
Despite being framed as one distinct service, Rezzil is split into two tiers aimed at different audiences.
Rezzil Player is a $10 experience available across all major VR platforms, which allows players to test themselves on a range of training drills based on popular sports.
It provides ordinary punters with a streamlined “off-the-peg” product that gives them a wide range of training activities to enjoy while having access to competitive global leaderboards - encouraging them to keep coming back to hone their skills.
Rezzil Index, on the other hand, is purely focused on professionals. As with the Player product, the Index service gives football teams access to a series of virtual drills to test their players with.
But instead of giving participants a generic result from each test, the service scores players against a home brew index that the company has invented with the help of leading boffins to support their “cognitive training” efforts.
The aim is to use that result to help players to understand how good mental and visual aspects of their game (such as the quality of their spatial awareness or effectiveness in pressure situations) are: supporting their development in the process.
Training Play
There are three main ways that the service is practically deployed in the world of professional sport. First, Rezzil is often used by clubs to provide players with a meaningful way of keeping their skills sharp when their bodies can’t handle high intensity physical practice.
“The actual use cases for a Premier League team would be when a player has a serious anterior cruciate ligament injury,” Andy explains.
“They’re not going to interact with a ball for many months and that causes lots of issues for them including a loss of confidence, having to get used to their own bodies again and keeping their cognitive focus. So we are often called in when an injury happens and told to come and help out player A or player B whilst they’re on the sidelines.”
A prime example of this was Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford, who used the service during recovery from a long term injury to make sure that he didn’t lose touch with his skills.
Another major way that Rezzil is used in a professional setting is to support young players who are still developing the mental side of their game.
By strapping players into a headset and running drills with them when they step up from an academy to the first team, clubs can use the Index to benchmark a player at the start of the season and measure their progress as it unfolds.
But as Andy told me, the Index also gathers enough data through both the software and the spatial tracking tools in the headset to provide gentle tips on how a player could be used - nudging their career in the right direction.
“We can start to make recommendations on these players [who interact with Index]”, says Andy. “The system is intelligent enough to go ‘this player who is playing as a number six (a defensive position in the midfield) might actually be better up the field because cognitively they’re creative and more of a risk taker…it has that much foresight.”
And speaking of sight, Rezzil is also being used as part of a recently launched co-created product called Exar to make post match analysis easier too.
To grossly oversimplify, Exar lets you feed broadcast footage into its tool and then spits out an interactive spatial timeline that literally maps out a game for you. This allows people to jump into a game like they’re in the Star Trek holodeck and move the camera around freely so they can see exactly what a player saw during a crunch moment in a big match.
It’s a feature that Andy says “helps to build empathy between the player and coach” because it increases understanding about why a decision was made in the heat of the moment.
This reduces blame for taking a decision in the stress of the game and redirects the focus towards identifying what other choices could have been made instead - providing value to players in a way that also builds interpersonal relationships within a team..
Valuable game time
All in all, Rezzil is an impressive professional package. But as many of you will have spotted, much of what makes it good is built upon what makes games great too.
The service offers repeatable entertainment that genuinely feels fun to play. It instinctively understands the value of bringing social and online networks together to encourage you to keep coming back. Even Exar, the most purely professional service on offer, allows you to zip around a recreated football pitch in a manner akin to snapping pictures in a Triple A video game’s photo mode.
In most cases, this might seem unusual. But in Rezzil’s case it isn’t. Despite being founded as a professional service provider, the company was grounded within games design and saw creating video games as fundamental to its future.
“We've always wanted to build a game,” Andy explained to me. But interestingly, the Rezzil team felt that the best pathway to making a sustainable spatial video game was proving that a game-led experience could cut it in the world of professional sport first.
“We thought the best way for us to get there was to build something credible that could break through in the performance field because it's one of the hardest crowds in the world,” he said.
And when you think about it, the decision makes a lot of sense. Whether it’s football, *uses American voice* football or Formula 1, every sport is - at its heart - a game.
By breaking each sport down into drills, recreating them using game technology and adding measurement over the top (including competitive aspects like high scores and leaderboards) Rezzil could theoretically build a service that worked for highly demanding sports teams while being paid to constantly hone and refine its in-house game development processes.
The challenge was convincing football audiences that this was a serious prospect. For Andy, this meant cleverly disarming scepticism by giving clubs the confidence to try Rezzil out and the power to steer its evolution.
“I’ve actually come from a football background and worked as a consultant with all those teams in the past. I knew that when I walked in with a headset and said “we’re going to improve your players and make your first team better using gaming technology” that most people would look at me like I’ve got two heads,” he laughed.
“But we had a strategy from day one to reinforce what we do through academic research, credibility [around the value of the Index] and with joint progress with teams. The teams weren’t investing in it in the same way that we were but they were helping to shape the products and integrate it into the daily routines, giving us ideas that we wouldn’t have seen if we just went in and said ‘do this.’”
And while Rezzil didn’t initially receive investment from the world of sports to support its efforts, its success in translating fun into function secured it some high profile backing
Over the past seven years, figures such as Gary Neville, Vincent Kompany and Thierry Henry gave the company both financial support and credibility - demonstrating that people across football could see the professional value of the company’s play based service.
As the credibility and cash rolled in, so did growth. Over the course of half a decade, the company opened up offices in Paris, New York and Rio De Janeiro to service its clients. Rezzil began to expand beyond football, getting picked up by F1 teams and American Football sides in the process. And Exar had its moment in the sun earlier this year when football pundits in the UK used it in an analysis package as part of Sky Sports’s Monday Night Football show.
So when the Premier League began to expand its games team and look for interesting licensing opportunities in the market, they called up Andy and the team at Rezzil - achieving the company’s dream of making a game seven years after it first started.
Beautiful games?
What will the company’s new game look like? For now, Andy is keeping tight lipped.
He’s “quite restricted” in what he can say until it is formally announced later in the year, which is pretty standard in the industry. He did, however, promise that it would do “interesting things” with the Premier League license, which is a phrase I find personally intriguing.
But without giving the game away, Andy insists that it will retain much of the accessible appeal found in the Player service that has brought people of all backgrounds together in one virtual space.
“I think games are an incredible leveller. We’ve got Premier League players and World Cup winners in the same leaderboards as anybody else who picks up Rezzil Player. A nine year old or a kid in Texas can be against a professional player. And there are definitely professional players who are not number one in their respective leaderboards.”
And whatever the game looks like out the other side of this, Andy was clearly proud of securing the deal and felt it justified the work the business has done over the best part of the decade.
“The point of creating Rezzil was to build a business that would be presented to leagues around the world as “you want to partner with us because we’re going to deliver an amazing experience to your fans” and to be taken seriously. I think we’ve done that…we just got to make sure it’s a success.”
That, of course, is one of those things that is easier said than done.
But at a time when the games industry has been scratching around for fresh thinking, Rezzil shows that there is value to be found in looking at the challenge of building a games business, almost literally, from a different angle.
News in brief
Roll7 to shut down: Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported late on Wednesday UK evening time that Take-Two Interactive is shuttering Roll7, the studio behind BAFTA award winning games RollerDrome and OlliOlli, as well as Seattle’s Intercept Games. The news comes just months after Roll7 had celebrated its 15th birthday, making this a real kick in the teeth.
TikTok Thwocked?: ByteDance has denied that it plans to sell off TikTok in the US, despite the passing of a new “sell-or-ban” law last week. The company has claimed that the new law is “unconstitutional” and that it plans to challenge it in the courts in response after The Information claimed it was considering a sale during the law’s 12 month implementation period. Oh and in definitely unrelated news, Twitch unveiled its own TikTok rival earlier this week…
iPad Oh No S: Apple is definitely crossing the European Commission off its Christmas card list after it decided to add iPad OS to its register of gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. This means the company has six months to ensure that its tablet operating system complies with the EU’s recently rolled out rules, likely forcing it to allow iPad users to access third party web browsers and app stores by the end of the year.
Marketing mover: Michael Douse, Larian Studio’s Director of Publishing, sparked controversy in a PC Gamer roundtable last week after claiming that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 has taught him that “video games marketing is dead.” Douse doubled down on his claim in a lengthy thread on X, cleverly outwitting his foes by outlining in detail the wide range of marketing tactics Larian used to successfully sell the game. Checkmate, nerds!
Events Down Under: Screen Australia has announced a new Games Festivals and Events Fund to offer $100,000 of funding to events that significantly benefit the Australian video games community. The cash available isn’t enormous but the intent behind it is excellent and it supports a direct industry need - demonstrating, once again, that the Aussies really get the games industry.
On the move
Illka Paananen, CEO at Supercell, has joined the board of LEGO…Supercell majority owned studio Trailmix has announced two pleasingly rhyming hires, with Matt Hood and Nathalie Wood joining as a Product Director and Senior Marketing Manager… Nina Adams has become the new Studio Director of Auroch Digital. The studio’s co-founder Dr Tomas Rawlings has moved upstairs to become a Vice President at Sumo Digital…And friend of the newsletter Daniele Schmidt-Fisher has been promoted to Senior Policy and Public Affairs Manager at Ukie…
Jobs, jobs, jobs
LEGO is asking a Gaming Community Manager to do the unthinkable: move to Slough…Charlotte Tilbury has reposted its Gaming Lead job on LinkedIn merely a week ago…Tencent would like a VGIM reader (probably) to become its Production Director for Level Infinite…Fandom is looking for a Creative Producer & Copywriter to join its team in Los Angeles…Or if you fancy moving to Stockholm (and don’t mind me sneaking over to look at Gustavus Adolphus’s massive ship with you) Ubisoft would like to hire a Narrative Lead for a new game IP it is working on…
Events and conferences
AMAZE, Berlin - 8th-11th May
Digital Dragons, Krakow - 19th-21st May
GamesBeat Summit, Los Angeles - 20th-21st May
Nordic Game, Malmo - 21st-24th May
Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 8th June
Games of the week
Sea of Thieves - BAFTA award winning - and thoroughly silly - multiplayer pirate game arrives in port for PlayStation 5 players.
Endless Ocean Luminous - Scratch your Dave the Diver itch with the release of the multiplayer online diving sim on Switch.
Braid: Anniversary Edition - Celebrate the…16th (?) anniversary of puzzler Braid with this souped up remake of the classic puzzler.
Before you go…
Manchester City footballer and goal viking Erling Haaland has become the first real person to pop up in Clash of Clans as part of an exclusive partnership with Supercell.
The surprising story was big enough to be covered by the BBC News, with the channel calling for expert insight into the partnership from a representative of Video Games Industry *checks notes* Meemo?
Live TV is a capricious beast, I tells ya...