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  • Josh Bryan

Esports Performance Analysis – FIFAe World Cup

Are you a casual gamer, a rage gamer, a secret gamer or perhaps even a professional gamer? If you’re not one of these, I’m sure you know somebody who is at least one of them! Maybe you’re not a gamer at all, but you’ve done what millions of others do around the world, you watch gamers. Entertainment is constantly evolving and the gaming industry is a huge part of that now. With many gamers having loyal Twitch followers, Facebook fans and YouTube subscribers, there is a growing audience waiting to support them and generate a genuine revenue stream. For the heavily committed professional gamers, there are huge esports competitions with an enormous amount of fans and followers and even bigger prize pots! But what about esports performance analysis?

As we’ve all seen in professional sport throughout the ages, if there is a competition to win and progress to be made, then getting an edge over your opponents helps to unlock success. As with the physical sports we usually refer to, a great key to unlock that success would be esports performance analysis. The bonus with esports is that the key component of quality video capture is simple! No wet and windy gantries, no camera batteries running low, no spectators getting in the way, bliss! Games consoles and PCs have many native capture facilities and tools like our strongly recommended Avermedia devices for camera capture were designed for gamers to record their footage.

We know that esports performance analysis will continue to grow and that users can apply the same processes and workflows from the physical sports world to improve and understand performance. The Nacsport video analysis software is already being used by professional esports teams around the world and this following blog shares the experiences of Andrew Condell, who used Nacsport and KlipDraw to analyse the FIFAe World Cup 2018. Andrew then looks at how the tools will benefit his FIFA team improve their performance and gameplay understanding. I hope this gives you an insight into esports performance analysis and you can see how these recognisable processes and workflows can benefit any environment and activity that has video!

Thanks to Andrew for sharing his experiences and processes with Nacsport and KlipDraw!!

I have always had a passion for video games and after I stopped playing Sunday League football, I turned to FIFA to get my competitive fix. There has been an explosion in the popularity of esports in recent years and this has helped fuel a huge demand for competitive gaming content on YouTube and other social media channels. As more and more gamers try to enter the FIFA eSport scene, the demand for help, tutorials and analysis has continued to increase. As I have always had an interest in analysing my own game and FIFA matches in general, I sought to find a comprehensive analysis tool that would allow me to improve my own performance while also helping others.

Over the past 18 months, I have tried a variety of different software packages to help analyse competitive FIFA matches and share the content with others. No matter which package I went with, none of them were able to meet all my requirements. Some packages were great for tagging or categorising previous footage, some provided great illustrative drawing tools and others offered almost everything but then, unfortunately, took way too long to render the final output, which made it an unsustainable process to continue sharing with others. I had given up on the idea of analysing competitive FIFA matches until I came across AnalysisPro and their suite of available tools.

After a few days of initially trialling the KlipDraw telestration software, I was able to see that it was a great fit for my requirements. After discussing further with AnalysisPro and researching their other products available, I was soon up and running with the full Nacsport video analysis software and making use of the integration of the KlipDraw tools to further meet my requirements. As the FIFA eWorld Cup Final was only weeks away, I decided my first project would be to analyse the gameplay of the 6 most likely candidates to win the grand prize of over $250,000.00.

I had over 80 hours of footage from previous qualifying tournaments to analyse. My first step was to create a buttons template in Nacsport, which would allow me to easily tag key moments from matches, which I could then review in more detail at a later stage. One key feature here was the ability to set my own interval levels for skipping through footage. I was able to set the right arrow to skip 10 seconds and the up arrow to skip 45 seconds, which enabled me to tag the 80 hours of footage at a much faster rate.


eSports performance analysis of FIFA eWorld Cup with Codimg

Very early into the tagging stage, I started to notice that the same patterns of play were repeating again and again. I could see that possession appeared to be continuously lost in the same areas of the pitch, a huge majority of goals looked to be coming from the same key areas and the same type of finishes were being used to score most of the goals. When I had finished the tagging process I created a custom matrix and my previous suspicions were backed up by the clear evidence of data totals in front of me. The matrix was able to provide me with evidence that would greatly improve my own game. By identifying aspects of gameplay, such as where possession of the ball is regularly lost and where the majority of goals are scored from, I was able to adapt my own playing style to minimise these scenarios.


FIFA eWorld Cup eSports performance analysis data

Having seen my own gameplay noticeably improve after using video analysis, I put together a number of videos to share with other FIFA Pro Club members to help improve our gameplay collectively. KlipDraw was a powerful tool to help with this as it provided a great variety of drawing tools that allowed me to clearly illustrate the key aspects of the gameplay.


eSports performance analysis of FIFA eWorld Cup using KlipDraw

As the videos were well received among my FIFA Club members and so beneficial to the improvement in our team gameplay, we plan to continue using esports performance analysis going forward into FIFA 19. Through the use of Nacsport and KlipDraw, we aim to compete with the world’s best FIFA Pro Club esport teams, which now includes several of the biggest names in world football such as Manchester City esports, Sevilla esports, Valencia esports and many others.


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