The luxury fashion brand Gucci has launched a gaming academy to help budding pro gamers achieve their ambition of joining the professional ranks. Gucci Gaming Academy has teamed up with the eSports platform Faceit, so players will be selected from the CS:GO Faceit Pro League.
The first four players have been scouted from the FPL: Brajan “DGL” Lemecha and Lukasz “mwlky” Pachucki from Poland, Rokas “EspiranTo” Milasauskas from Lithuania, and Mārtiņš “shadiyy” Gūtmani who hails from Latvia. The next intake of players will be scouted based on performance and after undergoing an interview process.
The academy will provide players with the kind of support required to make the step up to the pro eSports level, there will be psychological and physical coaching, while Gucci and Faceit will provide players with networking opportunities.
War and combat games are experiencing huge popularity and this has extended to another area of the entertainment sector. The iGaming industry has a large number of online slot games featuring warriors and combat such as 1942 Sky Warrior, Viking Runecraft, and Warrior Graveyard. The slots can be played via the sites listed at Bonus finder New Zealand, which provides players with information about bonus offers. Evidently, the success of these titles has been helped by the popularity of war and combat in the wider entertainment industry. Just as eSports is a competitive industry, so is the online casino industry as providers compete to get the attention of potential players.
Gucci are hoping to benefit from the high levels of popularity of the eSports industry, which according to the Consumer Technology Association is set to have a worldwide audience of approximately 519 million gamers by 2024. Valuates has forecasted that the gaming sector will be worth $1.9 billion by 2026.
While the British professional CS:GO player Owen ‘Smooya’ Butterfield currently has 141, 000 followers on his Twitch channel, Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev has 3.1 million, and a recent Counter-Strike: Global Offensive stream entitled faceit from BIG bootcamp amassed 466,000 views. These figures highlight the attraction of professional CS:GO players to luxury brands.
And pro gamers have the potential to earn big money. Butterfield revealed on a recent Twitch live stream that Kostyliev and Nikola “NiKo” Kovač earned over $50,000 per month. He also stated that other players are underpaid in comparison with Copenhagen Flames, making just $2,000 a month.
And Gucci is not the only luxury brand to realize the potential of the eSports sector. Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, and Rebecca Minkoff have all become involved over the past few years and Nike, Armani, and Adidas have followed suit by kitting out gamers.
Michele Attisani, co-founder and CBO of Faceit spoke of the aims of the academy: “New talent entering the space must be equipped with the right support from structure at an early stage in their development. Supporting and empowering young eSports talent is at the core of Faceit’s values and through our shared vision with Gucci, we hope the Academy helps equip the role models of tomorrow.”
Clearly, Gucci are hoping to tap into the hugely popular gaming community with this crossover as the brand looks to the future. As the eSports sector increases exponentially we will likely see even more luxury brands looking to create brand awareness by associating themselves with the gaming industry.
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