Nouns Esports - Dota 2023 Season

NounsDAO NounsDAO Proposals
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Authors: Sasquatch, Maty

Introduction

Nouns Esports was founded with the passing of Proposal 68, which brought a professional Dota team under the Nouns banner. This proposal’s aim is to double down on what seems to work and extend the signing of our world-class Dota roster until after The International in 2023, with the mission to continue proliferating Nouns through esports competition.


Watch our recap video of the last 6 months!

The Past

During the last six months (funded via proposals #68 and #112)

  • We sponsored one of the best teams in North America, formerly known as 4zoomers, and gave them a regular salary and bootcamp opportunities for their upcoming Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) season.
  • Our team won BTS Pro Series, the largest Dota tournament in the Americas outside of the Dota Pro Circuit.
  • We had a strong result in the latest season of the Pro Circuit, with a final season score of 6-1.
  • We went to Singapore to compete in The International LCQ - an international LAN to qualify for The International, one of the biggest tournaments in esports.

The Future

We are confident in our ability to secure a world-class roster for this competitive season, and already have a team in mind to work with throughout 2023. This roster includes three of our players from last season.

What is different from the last proposal?

  • We have more established supporting infrastructure due to efforts from Proposal 119 - Nouns Esports Pod
    • A more sophisticated network of content producers and supporting contributors.
    • Support and cooperation with Nounish brands, e.g. promoting Nouns Coffee, working with the AI Pod on a drafting tool.
  • A longer term of length with the team (full season as opposed to 3-month stints) allows for greater association between the players and our brand.

Timeline

While the DPC schedule is announced in advance, many third-party tournaments are not announced until much closer to the event date. We expect that there will be continued support from operators such as BTS and ESL for online competitions or international tournaments.

Dota Pro Circuit Schedule

  • Winter Division 1 Regional League & Major Tournament in Peru: January-March
  • Spring Tour Regional League & Major Tournament in Germany: March-May
  • Summer Tour Regional League & Major Tournament in Bali: May-July
  • The International 2023
    • Dates TBD
    • Depending on yearly Dota Pro Circuit results, our team will either be directly invited or have to play in qualifiers.

This season, as a North American Division 1 Team, we will be competing regularly against well-established professional organizations such as:

  • Shopify Rebellion (ex-EG)
  • TSM (Formerly sponsored by FTX…)
  • B8 (Ukrainian team including legendary player Dendi)

Budget

The total ask is 420,000 USDC / 360 ETH (including volatility buffer)

  • Portion of ETH converted to 420,000 USDC upon receiving.
  • Remaining ETH will be sent to Nouns Esports Pod multisig.

Budget Breakdown:

  • Salaries:
    • Talent Compensation: estimated 250,000 USDC
      • Targeting 4000 USDC per player each month over the course of a season of 10-12 months.
      • We will implement incentive structures so players are rewarded for streaming, content creation, and other Nounish proliferation efforts outside of competitive play.
    • Support Staff: estimated 90,000 USDC
      • Compensating a player-manager, coach, and any additional support staff.
        • Dota-native operators who work to improve competitive performance and the proliferation efforts of our team. Coach and manager roles can be considered the “sixth man” of a roster.
        • Additional supportive efforts include social media support, organizing practice, content plans, player travel, and bootcamps.
      • This season we will be looking for a sports psychologist to work with the team.
        • The most recent winners of The International attribute a good portion of their success to having one.
  • Bootcamp Expenses: estimated 80,000 USDC
    • Bootcamps are when professional teams gather in one venue for an extended period of time (weeks to months) to hone their skills.
      • They are considered essential for competitive teams to be successful.
    • This bootcamp fund will be deployed pending a successful qualification for an international event (DPC Major, The International, etc.)
      • A likely minimum of four bootcamps
        • Three DPC Seasons and The International.
        • Potentially more based on unannounced international events, we can work with the Pod budget to facilitate them.
  • Detailed expense documentation, for the past four esports proposals, can be found in our Nouns Esports Notion.

Dota x Esports Pod

Dota Pod Members

We will be using the same multi-sig that was created via Proposal 68 consisting of Nouners and Nounsfolk.

Multi-Sig Members:

Deliverables

  • Competitive Results
  • Audience
    • Dota remains the second most-played game on Steam, and in October 2022 broke year-long records for peak players.
    • Our North American regional matches consistently had some of the highest viewership
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    • Our peak viewership during the last six-months was our match in The International LCQ against Vici Gaming with 116,388 concurrent viewers (excluding China)
    • The International 2022 had 1,700,000 peak viewers, excluding China, representing the potential available viewership if our team has a successful season.
    • YouTube recaps of our matches regularly receive 5 or 6-digit viewership.
  • Individual stream viewership
    • Players individually stream and regularly present the Nouns brand on stream
  • In-game branding
  • Team name branding
    • The team will continue to operate as Nouns/Nouns Esports
  • Player name branding
    • Player names will include a Nounish sponsor tag in-game e.g. nouns.Gunnar.⌐◨-◨

Thanks for reading!

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Nouns Esports has an easy 10x potential in terms of growth, viewership, and the ability to lift up all other nouns projects. Glad to take part in building it and can’t wait to see what more we can do in 2023

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This year I discovered NounsDAO through esports. I saw on Twitter that 4Zoomers, a NA Dota 2 team, was being signed by Nouns Esports. Like many others in esports, I knew very little about crypto, web3, DAOs, NFTs, etc. My reaction was “Oh another random crypto organization, great, just what NA Dota needs…”

As I dug in more I ran into some familiar faces and learned more about their community. I discovered the unique opportunity to work on ambitious proposals without the associated risks of trying to do so elsewhere. I’ve told countless others about the unique opportunity that exists here and will continue to onboard new users into web3 via esports. Esports is due for a shakeup this recession and I’m optimistic that web3 will help move the industry forward.

My feedback would be to consider how we can use web3 to support the team/players in ways other than their expenses. I believe that we need the players to buy-in on web3 in order for them to actualize the opportunity that exists here for them.

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lets goooooooooooooooooooo! also worth noting we are looking into options to ensure that we can retain our players/talent throughout the duration of the proposal/season (or negotiate with other orgs/teams that might be interested in our players)

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this is such an easy no brainer yes

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I know nothing about Dota, and I’ve still watched so many of the matches because I love the work you’re doing. What will the POD be doing with the rest of their funds? That may be helpful to outline here as well to clarify the need for this additional ask.

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Some examples of what the pod budget has extended to has been a pokemon unite and CSGO roster. Sponsorship of FGC player Aklo. 2 Noggles Cups with 10,000+ in prizes. Sponsoring of streamer soy_takii. Multiple art contests. Content production fees for videographers, photographers, and editors. Extra bootcamp costs. A GC valorant roster. The pod budget will continue carrying on expenses like this while available.

The pods purpose was always smaller-mid budget general expenses. Securing 1 year of funds for a bigger roster like the Dota roster allows us to continue on with guaranteed team expenses covered. This helps secure quality player talent, and ensure the team can operate without hiccups or the need to seek emergency funding.

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Maybe consider sponsorship in Formula 1? As far as I know, the minimum price of a logo on a car is about 1 million.

For example, the Formula 1 final 2021 in Dubai was watched by more than 108 million people worldwide and the final of The International 2021 was watched by only 2.7 million viewers.

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I don’t think that’s a very strong comparison. A car sponsor on a F1 car would have minimal engagement besides tooting our horn in our closed twitter circles. The impact from esports sponsors creates opportunities to engage with fans, build communities, and onboard new users to our ecosystem. The cost to return is significantly higher with an esports roster.

Additionally 2.7m viewers in the international would have 90%+ engagement with the nouns brand vs F1 the engagement or even acknowledgement of a nouns logo would be less than 1% and probably closer to .01% in reality.

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as an avid gamer and a huge advocate for esports. I love this initiative and where they are trying to take this. would love to get involved somehow as this was one of my goals to build an esports team.

Fully back the project and the numbers speak for themselves. Really like how the team is taking a very good approach to including the nouns into this. Can get very big very fast.

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Join the Nouns Esports Discord, really easy to get involved. Nouns Esports

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