UPDATE 3: NEW BACKER REWARD - BTS HOODIES!
UPDATE 2: WE ADDED STRETCH GOALS! THINK HOMESTORY CUP, DOTA STYLE.
UPDATE 1: WE REACHED OUR INITIAL GOAL OF $25,000 IN A LITTLE OVER 24 HOURS!
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We've seen the power of the Dota 2 community and would love to do more. Already we have nothing but gratitude for everyone who has donated so far and helped us reach this goal, but because of the amazing interest in our campaign we are going to set stretch goals that if we reach, we promise we will fulfill.
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With a deep bellow, Beyond the Summit presents the G-7 League. We'll invite the best teams from Asia to compete in an online invitational tournament. The format will be compelling and concise, and every game will be meaningful. Our mission? To give back to those who gave us our start, by bolstering the professional scene in the Asia-Pacific region where we got our start.
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With some impressive micro skills, Beyond the Summit displays its true power. We fly out 1 top team from North America, 1 from Europe, and 1 from Asia, and have a 4th team from one of the regions as well! We pay for their flights, arrange for accommodations, food, and plenty of liquor. They duke it out on LAN for a substantial prize pool and hang out with the BTS team for a full weekend of amazing Dota content. Think Homestory Cup, Dota style. The tournament would happen late 2013 (After TI-3), or more likely early 2014.
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Hi guys!
We're David and David, and we want to build the Beyond the Summit ESPORTS Broadcast Studio! If you're reading this, you've probably watched your fair share of nail-biting Dota games, shared a few laughs with us on stream, and maybe even seen us at events such as The International 2. All your support over the past years has helped us to get where we are and is the reason we are here talking to you today. Our dream is to create an ESPORTS broadcast studio in Los Angeles to produce all our content with a professional production level.
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Beyond the Summit (BTS) sprung to life back in March of 2012. I (GoDz) was a fairly established Dota commentator at the time, and with Valve's Dota 2 starting to become a major E-sport, I was pushing for more global events, specifically in Asia. At the time, there was a plethora of European and American events, while Asia saw virtually none. I pestered established community members and professional organizations such as GosuGamers to remedy this problem, but nothing changed. The top Asian teams were ready to switch to Dota 2, the viewers were ready to watch them play, and I was ready to commentate them, and so Beyond the Summit was born.
In April 2012, I ran our first Dota 2 tournament, the Gigabyte Dota Masters. After many sleepless nights, I manged to secure funding, commentators, a website, admins, and commitments to participate from the top teams. Finally, the event was ready to begin. After inviting 22 of the best teams in Asia directly, we hosted 2 open qualifiers to give unknown teams a shot to compete with the best of Asia. Nine of these teams would go on to earn invitations to The International 2 in Seattle later that year. Seven would finish in the top 8, winning over $1.3 million dollars in total prize money, in no small part due to our efforts organizing this event and the subsequent Beyond the Summit World Tour.
The Gigabyte Dota Masters was only the beginning for us. Since then, we've continued to broadcast and organize events within Asia, and recently we've begun to expand our coverage into Europe and North America.
When we started last April, Beyond the Summit was just a cool name. But what started as a catchy name has evolved into a philosophy that guides our every step. Like Matt said, Beyond the Summit means something different to each and every person, but to me and LD, it means that our work is never done. It means always striving to improve and never resting on our laurels. Beyond the Summit means constantly challenging ourselves to do more and to do it better.
For every success we've had, we've had a dozen failures, but we'll never stop experimenting with new ideas and working hard to give you guys, the teams, and the players the Dota 2 coverage you deserve. What lies Beyond the Summit? A new summit!
We've come a long way since BTS was founded. In our first month, we had ~80 thousand unique viewers, 50 thousand total hours watched, and 142 thousand video plays. Pretty good, right? That's what we thought!
In last December ALONE, we reached over 1 MILLION unique viewers, 1 MILLION total hours watched, and 3.7 MILLION video plays, all in only 14 days of broadcasting. You, and viewers like you, have made our incredible growth possible.
Beyond the Summit, or BTS, has grown and evolved a lot in the past 10 months, but we would never have grown the way we have without all your support. This community gave me the confidence to organize and produce the first major Dota 2 tournament in Asia. This community supported my decision to give David (LD) a shot during The International 2 East Qualifiers last June, even though he was an unknown, inexperienced caster at the time. Thanks to you and viewers like you, that same LD would go on to become my full partner here at Beyond the Summit and cast the Grand Finals of the International 2 with Luminous later that year. And it's this community whose unquenchable thirst for more and better content drives us to improve our product every single day.
Last October, we were invited to provide official English coverage of a Chinese Dota tournament known as the G-1 League. It was the first ever Chinese Dota 2 tournament with English casters, and coming right on the heels of Valve's The International 2, we know we had to do something really special to achieve even a fraction of the production quality of that event. Unfortunately, we were a few million dollars in funding short...
We needed help, and we had faith that this community would deliver. That's why we started our search for graphics designers, video editors, and stream mods with a
Reddit post! With the help of some talented community members like
Chester Gee,
QoJ, and
Joakim Tobiasson, we put together some unique content to enhance the overall production quality of the event.
Examples of this additional production include
our now iconic BTS intro,
a hype trailer for the event,
group stage and
playoff highlight reels, team/player introductions (featuring
DPM voice acting!) for
DK,
LGD,
iG, and
Orange, player interviews with
1437,
iceiceice, and
Mushi, translated Chinese content such as
iG's team discussions, and overlays with daily schedules, group standings, brackets, and other important information. Our G-1 League production was the first time something of this magnitude had ever been done for an online production of a Dota 2 event.
It's always been our philosophy to put the teams, players, and viewers first. With the G-1 League, we wanted to create a compelling story, put faces to player's names, and give these top-class teams the exposure they deserved. Additionally, we wanted to give the viewers a memorable and enjoyable viewing experience.
We’ve always looked to you guys for support, inspiration, and feedback and you've never failed us. So we're coming at you again, with a bigger dream, a more ambitious goal. We're setting our sights even higher and we're confident you can make it happen.
Thanks to your support over the past year, we've been able to devote ourselves more and more to producing e-sports content. What started as a part-time hobby for us, is quickly becoming a more full-time undertaking. Our ultimate goal? To be able to produce awesome ESPORTS content full-time for you guys, as a sustainable business.
To achieve this goal, we need to build our studio! In a real studio, we'll have the equipment, infrastructure, and space we need to step up our production quality. Not to mention the human resources, with both of us in the same location and able to focus on organizing events and producing content. On that note, we've chosen to base ourselves in LA, in large part because we'll be near other great community figures, such as Purge, Luminous, Blitz, and Fluffnstuff, amongst others. You better believe we plan on taking full advantage of them to improve our product!
A real studio means more and better content for you to enjoy. But to make the best possible studio, we need your help.
Building a full-fledged broadcast studio isn't cheap. Here's just a short list of some of the costs your contributions will help cover:
- Travel / relocation expenses (we have to get to L.A. to build a studio there!)
- Equipment purchases: Furniture, computers, monitors, cameras, microphones, mixers, lighting, audio gear, cabling, and more!
- One-time startup costs: sound-proofing, networking, painting, electrical work, etc.
Finally, if you guys are really generous and we exceed our goal, the money will go directly into the prizepool for our first major event.
We chose indiegogo because it's a great way for you guys to contribute what you want, easily and safely, plus we get to give you some awesome rewards!
We've done our best to come up with some cool and unique rewards for all our supporters, such as exclusive access to replays, 1-on-1 coaching in Dota or broadcasting, personalized narrations of anything you want (yes, yes, even you brushing your teeth!), rare BTS T-Shirts and gear, and much, much more! Check out our list of backer rewards on the right for the complete list.
Whether you give $1 or $100, every little bit helps and goes directly towards our dream of building and running the best esports studio possible for Dota 2.
What was initially an online project based out of my office in Thailand at times, TriumphOfMan's bedroom in Tasmania at others, or even LD's shared flat in Philly has grown to become something so much more. Every day, we're constantly reminded that we could never have achieved any of it without you (and Twitch, whose amazing support from the very beginning has helped make this all possible). We hope to continue doing our part to grow a healthy and sustainable Dota community. You're the best community we ever could have asked for <3
If you have any questions about rewards, fundraising, or anything related to this BTS project, feel free to contact us via email -
bts [@] beyondthesummit.tv