Free Fire Championship has cinema broadcast and football sponsor

In a more or less crowded movie theater at the Santa Cruz mall, in São Paulo, during the long Easter holiday, noise was allowed. The session was not to watch a movie, but the final of the Brazilian Free Fire League, a mobile game that has more than 1 billion downloads.

Each game play has 50 players, each on a smartphone connected to the internet, who parachute into 1 of the 9 available map options. The objective is to search for weapons to eliminate opponents and seek equipment to increase the chance of surviving enemy offensives. The last one alive wins the match, as in the Hunger Games franchise.

Tauane Vitória, 19, and Beatriz Pereira, 18, were among the few girls at the movies. The two met playing Free Fire, and met for the second time in person that day. “We play just the two of us, but just for fun, we don’t want to play professionally”, says Beatriz.

Free Fire is an example of the huge impact of esports (as virtual sports are called, including games) today. Like football, the online game moves fans, competitions and a lot of money.

Tournaments, usually watched by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts, are often broadcast not only on social networks such as Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook, but also on television on open and paid channels.

National competitions usually have total prize pools of up to R$2 million, an amount that can be multiplied dozens of times when it comes to an international event. Among the games that win championships in the country are also League of Legends, PUBG, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, Dota 2, Rainbow Six, Valorant and Wild Rift.

Conglomerate of games and influencers, LOUD team has already won two global runners-up

In the studio in Vila Leopoldina, where the final of the Brazilian Free Fire League was recorded, the ten teams, with five participants each, alternated between staying on their cell phones during matches and paying attention to the technicians’ tip during breaks.

The teams B4, Magic Squad, Los Grandes, LOUD, Fluxo, Corinthians, Team Liquid, GOD Unidas, Vasco and Cruzeiro competed. The winner was LOUD, took R$ 105 thousand and will compete in the world championship in Sentosa, Thailand, this month.

This victory, however, represents only a part of LOUD’s performance in esports. In addition to Free Fire, the company invests in League of Legends, Fortnite and Valorant teams.

But it wasn’t just winning championships that the brand managed to be relevant in the middle.

“LOUD started in 2019 and the main reason that made it grow so much in such a short time was that we placed great emphasis on content production within the organization. I also wanted to tell these stories to the public through content, as a kind of reality show”, explains businessman Bruno Bittencourt, 28, co-founder of the team.

It was this idea of ​​associating competitive events with the creation of online content, through influencers and streamers, that the company managed to retain an audience and, at the same time, engage supporters for its teams.

Despite the LOUD Free Fire team having already won second place in the game’s world championship last year, in Singapore, it was a different feeling to have reached the same position in this year’s Valorant Masters, one of the main championships of one of the games of most popular PCs today.

Developed by Riot Games, Valorant is inspired by mechanics familiar to players of Counter Strike, a shooting game that has been a fever in Brazil for almost 20 years, and includes characters, spells and weapons that make it more complex and vibrant.

While Free Fire is more popular in emerging countries, Valorant and other FPS (first-person shooter games), which are played on expensive computers instead of smartphones, are more present in more consolidated markets, such as the United States and Europe, the which also reflects on the competitiveness of the international tournaments of these games.

“LOUD formed the team [de Valorant] in a short time and has already achieved results quickly. It was a team that faced a very structured scenario, because the organizations that we ended up facing have already been investing in that environment for ten years”, said Bruno, also known as PlayHard.

For Argentine Matias Delipetro, known as Saadhak, who plays Valorant for LOUD, it was with talent, training, experience and support from the company that it was possible to reach the runner-up in the Masters and the prize pool of US$ 120 thousand (R$ 598 thousand ), divided among the five players of the team.

“In Brazil there is a lack of professionalism [nos esports]and one thing that LOUD did was to give as much support as possible”, he says.

Free Fire player and trainer as a profession

The professional perspective is something common among players, explains Eryson Almeida, 18, Free Fire coach. Eryson started playing at 15 because of his girlfriend, who accompanied him to the movie session. “I called him to play. It was us and some friends, but then I got sick of it and he continued and still took money,” says Analice Sandes, 17.

“I used to play as a joke, I had a bad cell phone, until I bought a good one”, diz. “Then I liked it more and more, I was training, entering amateur championships, I went to the B series, until I entered the A series”, explains Eryson.

As in the Brazilian football championship, Garena, developer of Free Fire, has divisions. Serie A, the highest, is made up of 18 teams, whose teams have football-caliber sponsors: Santander, Motorola, Vivo, Casas Bahia, iFood, among other brands.

“In Free Fire it’s like this: you start by standing out in amateur championships, then you enter the B series and even manage to get a minimum wage”, says Eryson. “I ended up becoming a contact coach, and I ended up coaching teams and making good money,” she says. Eryson did not want to reveal the amount, but guarantees that he was able to pay the bills. At the moment he does not coach any team, but he is looking for new opportunities.

Streamed on YouTube, BOOYAH and TikTok platforms and Rede TV channels! and SPACE, this year’s Brazilian Free Fire League final had an audience peak of 960,000 spectators, according to the organization.

The golden hammer Fernando Costa, 24, a Free Fire player for just under a year, says that his plan is to join a team. He wasn’t much for games, he only liked GTA, but he intends to make Free Fire a profession.

“I started playing with the people at work, until they left. I’m training a lot, participating in amateur championships”, he says.

The Free Fire World Series 2022 (FFWS), the world of the mobile game, will be held between the 14th and 21st of May in person. With 18 participating teams, Brazil will be represented by the LOUD and Vivo Keyd teams.

“In Free Fire, unlike Valorant in which a team faces only another team, a match has up to 12 teams falling on the same map, so there are many random factors, styles of play, you can never know what will happen. But since the beginning of LOUD, this is the year that the [nosso] team is more prepared”, says Bruno.