SVG Sit-Down: PUBG’s Everett Coleman on Producing Esports in a Pandemic, Storytelling for Battle Royale Games

In a normalizing world, plans are to apply lessons learned during COVID

As one of the most popular videogames on the planet, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) has had a growing footprint in esports over the past few years. In addition to tentpole global events like PUBG Global Invitational.S (PGIS) and the PUBG Global Championship (PGC), game developer PUBG is currently in the midst of the PUBG Continental Series 4 (PCS4) with regions competing in the Americas, APAC, Asia, and Europe.

PUBG’s Everett Coleman: It’s less that the broadcast philosophy and workflows have changed drastically [during the pandemic] and more about efficiency and finding the most streamlined ways to communicate.

PUBG Head of Esports, Americas, Everett Coleman oversees all of PUBG’s esports operations in North America and Latin America. He sat down with SVG to discuss how PUBG’s esports strategy has evolved, lessons learned from producing live events in the pandemic, the launch of a new studio at its Santa Monica offices, the challenges of storytelling for a battle royale game like PUBG, and what’s ahead for PUBG in 2021 and beyond.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background in esports.
I call myself a product of the industry because esports is my entire world. I’ve been in esports for 13-plus years and worked across 30-40 different videogames. I’ve been able to see the entire spectrum and every angle of esports. I started out as a competitor when I was a teenager, then got into team managing and coaching and, eventually, team owning. A few years back, I joined ESL when they opened their ESL America office in Burbank.

I’ve been at PUBG for about 2½ years. I originally came on as part of a global team that built the esports ecosystem in 2019, including writing the original draft for the global rulebook of PUBG esports. I helped shape the global ecosystem and served as an intersection between all of the regions to help guide league operations, project management, scheduling, and other logistics.

How do you describe your current role as head of esports, Americas, and PUBG’s activity in 2021?
Today, my primary focus is to head the Americas division of esports, which is North America and Latin America. This was a big year for us because we made the strategic decision to merge North America and Latin America.

This year, we’ve had a great mix between first-party online events, third-party online events, and our big global offline events: the PUBG Global Invitational.S (PGI.S) at the beginning of the year and the PUBG Global Championship (PGC) at the end of the year. It’s my team’s responsibility to fill in the schedule between those two tentpole events, and we’ve done that with our online first-party event in PUBG Championship Series and our online third-party events in ESL PUBG Masters. Performance across both of those series qualifies teams for PGC at the end of the year.

What did your esports tournament and live-production operations look like prior to the pandemic?
Prior to the pandemic, we were launching a global series of offline events, called the PUBG Global Series. We had several cities around the world picked out to host big offline events like what we produced in 2019. Regional qualifiers would have been executed across several regions, and the top teams would have attended the global events. These events would be the key moments throughout the year and build up the story arc on the way to a massive global championship. Once the pandemic hit, we shifted the focus from those big offline-event moments to big online-event moments.

How did the onset of the pandemic impact your operations?
The biggest change was transitioning from our plans for the PUBG Global Series into creating what became the PUBG Continental Series.

We were very far along in planning for offline events. We had already booked travel and venue, and the event was only a couple weeks away. Some of the other regions had already completed their offline qualifiers, and our NA, LATAM, and OCE teams were going to be some of the last teams to qualify for the event that was going to happen in Berlin.

When the pandemic really hit, we made the decision to postpone the global events as well as the remaining regional events until we could figure everything out. Eventually, the global event was canceled, so there was no reason to do an offline qualifier. We did pay out the prize pool to all the teams that would have qualified for the global event because we wanted to reward those players for all their hard work and make sure they were taken care of, knowing that the impact of the pandemic would be so significant.

At that point, we transitioned into the PUBG Continental Series (PCS), and everything moved online as we started up again.

How did your production/broadcast operations have to adapt once online play began?
We had to rely on cloud-based solutions for all of the broadcasts. It took us only 30-60 days to spin up an entirely new annual plan and broadcast workflow, which is pretty amazing.

At the time, we were in the process of building an in-person production studio, but that had to be delayed. Instead, we ended up putting on full-blown productions with everybody basically working from their bedrooms. Our TDs, audio engineers, graphics operators, and everybody were just sitting at home doing shows. We’ve done plenty of small-scale broadcasts online; that’s something we’ve seen for a long time in esports. But we hadn’t ever seen an industry-wide effort with people trying to match the quality and caliber of a big offline event broadcast from their bedroom. It was a very interesting experience, and it forced us to change a lot.

Instead of coming up with all the coolest bells and whistles that we try to put on at our big global events, we were focused on just making the event happen. We still wanted to offer something that our players and our fans were going to be happy with and was up to the quality standard they’ve come to expect.

What was fan and player reaction during the early days of online events?
When you have remote observers and remote talent, there are a lot of hiccups and a lot of misalignment that can happen between all those pieces, so we were being very critical of ourselves and trying to perfect and refine that. But it ended up being extremely rewarding because our fans looked at this and said, “PUBG is doing one of the best jobs” during the pandemic. The fact that the pivot happened so quickly was amazing.

As far as the players were concerned, the transition was pretty seamless. I think a lot of them looked at it as a huge win because we were one of the few games that didn’t use COVID as an excuse. It would have been easy and even justified to say, “There’s nothing we can do about it. Sorry, guys. See you next year.” But we put our heads together and came up with a new program to keep things going.

Once that transition took effect, 2020 was our best year in esports in terms of KPIs, efficiency, and overall business strategy. We may not have had the same production level as 2019, but it gave us a picture of what is possible for PUBG esports, and it kept the momentum going in a very meaningful way.

Now that the world is beginning to normalize, what’s ahead for PUBG Esports in terms of offline events?
We have our sights set on the upcoming offline PUBG Global Championship. We haven’t announced details around that — like location, exact dates, and formats — just yet, but we are very much looking forward to another big offline event. Beyond that, we hope to see offline events become much more feasible and possible as the impact of the pandemic continues to lighten.

We also did the PUBG Global Invitational in Korea at the beginning of this year, which was a big global offline event. That was a massive undertaking in that we had to create our own bubble system, which took months to plan and execute. But we pulled it off and were really happy with the event. After that, we knew that, as long as the right precautions were taken, it’s possible to do a large offline event.

We’re optimistic that, as things are continuing to improve around the world, PGC is going to be even better. Obviously, we have a lot of the learning and the experience now after doing PGIS, so we’re looking forward to that one.

As the world gradually normalizes, will the workflow and technology changes you’ve made be used in the future, even after offline events return?
It has definitely forced us to get more efficient. It’s less that the broadcast philosophy and workflows have changed drastically and more about efficiency and finding the most streamlined ways to communicate and to accomplish certain things on the broadcast. I think that those are the learnings that we’ll retain, whether we’re in-person or remote. A lot of the technology side is largely similar. Obviously, you have to navigate more obstacles when it comes to cloud solutions and things like that, but the end result is very similar.

Tell us a bit about the studio you just launched.
That’s a huge milestone for us. We’ve built this brand-new production studio at our offices in Santa Monica, CA. The first event it is being used on is PUBG Championship Series 4 Americas Grand Final, which started on June 10. That’s the first big step towards getting back to normal. The players aren’t going to be traveling for that event, but the production staff and the talent are all in the studio to do that production.

It has been a passion project of ours for a very long time. We wanted to roll it out a year ago, but it’s finally built and up and running. That’s super-exciting because we feel like we are overcoming the impact of the pandemic and are now able to put on higher-quality broadcasts and get the whole crew back together in person.

How is the studio laid out, and what are some of the key design elements?
The entire space is extremely dynamic and has multiple zones, so we have a bunch of options. We also have a very sophisticated production-control room that opens up a lot of possibilities.

One zone has a gigantic LED wall that is used as a host area and also serves as our establishing shot coming in and out of our broadcast. We can either have a host standing there with a microphone or bring in couches and tables and have a more casual lounge setup.

The other is a more traditional caster desk, where we can have two or three people sit down with a headset and talk about the matches.

We also have an analyst lounge area. We wanted to go with something a little more casual, instead of just a second desk. A lot of other esports studios have a caster desk and an analyst desk, and you just go back and forth. We want it something a little bit more casual, with the analysts still talking about all the insights and details about the matches but in a more casual way where they’re kicked back on a couch.

And then we have four player streaming stations. They can stream individually or can all connect into the overall broadcast. That gives us the ability to work with our community team or our development team to bring certain people into the studio and show off new features of the game or play with different kinds of PUBG content.

Between those four areas, we’re going to be pushing the limits of this space for esports broadcasts. It gives us a whole new playground to produce all kinds of content. We can accomplish basically anything that we would want out of that space. It’s super-exciting to finally see that come to life because it’s something that we’ve dreamt about for a very long time.

PUBG was a pioneer in battle royale tournaments. What are the biggest challenges of producing battle royale competitions, especially given the number of players competing and parallel storylines?
Especially at global events, it’s not just that there are so many teams and so many players, but it’s also that there are so many languages. At some global events, we have had more than 40 observers, or in-game camera operators, in the match at the same time. A typical observer team for a main broadcast is eight to 10, but we often have “biased streams” that are specific to certain teams or languages. You need to have dedicated observer teams for each of those different broadcasts because you can’t rely on just the main observer team to cover Japan as thoroughly as you would want to cover Japan on a Japanese broadcast or to cover China on a Chinese broadcast.

We’ve had some events where there are almost as many observers as there are players because we’re trying to accomplish so many different goals. On the regional side, it does get a little bit easier just because there are fewer languages and fewer things that we’re trying to do all at the same time.

How do your observers’ and the production team’s production philosophies for battle royale events differ from other esports productions’?
Typically, we look at like observers as teams in their own right. We’ll have an A team and a B team, and, within a team, you have people focused on cinematic shots or first-person angles or third-party angles, and they’re all setting up different fights in different ways.

We have two leadership roles: the game director and a game producer. The game director calls the shots on which team of observers and which individual observer we cut between. The producer is more the storyteller — always watching the map feed and predicting where the next fight is probably going to be, based on the ways the teams are moving around the map. He can “see” into the future a little bit in that way and say, “30 seconds from now, Observer A is going to be in this spot to look at the next fight.”

From a storytelling perspective, how do you produce a battle royale broadcast with so much action taking place simultaneously?
The way we manage our observers and try to capture all of the action is very complicated. A fundamental goal of esports is to tell the stories of the teams and players and create these star players. But, when you have 16 teams in a match, that becomes challenging. You want to focus on star players and teams to build them up, but you also don’t want to discredit all the other teams. You have to find that perfect balance.

In a team-vs.-team game or player-vs.-player, both sides get 50% of the exposure, but, at best, every team is getting 1/16 of the exposure. Elements like picture-in-picture, instant replays, match VODs, and shoulder content can create multiple layers within the broadcast. Instead of just taking the game and dividing it by 16, we have all these other inventories where we can show teams and players simultaneously.

The worst feeling would be for fans of a certain team or region to tune into a broadcast and not be able to watch that team or region as much as they would like to. We’re always trying to strike that perfect balance.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.