You’re only 16-24 once. The rest of your gaming life is about balance. Between our real lives and gaming lives. We are an amateur league and competitive outlet for passionate gamers who are not looking to give up their real lives and more often than not have successful or at least interesting lives outside of gaming. We are NOT a financial avenue for those chasing the dream of making a living by playing. Increasingly the average age of a gamer is now approaching 40

Part gaming/LAN club, part business network and part esports. BaLANce fills a niche where often players and teams are indistinguishable between unmemorable handles to the mainstream and franchises that often disappear as quickly as their appear. What remains constant are the players themselves. Players who are more than just the games they play. Our target demographic are the working class gamers who aren’t vying to go pro or even amateur but are still passionate or competitive in their own way. BaLANce offers its members the opportunity to both connect with gamers who are often also interesting or aspiring professionals around the globe for relationship building and opportunities beyond only just gaming while also potentially offering a taste of e-sports style events without the time commitment or top tier skill requirements.

BaLANce also aims to introduce both old and new games to emerging markets and feature more “exhibition” type events. Regardless of how much time someone can commit to gaming, an exhibition event can also offer a blank slate for many players to start fresh. Other event types could feature more “just for fun” / troll-ish gametypes that differentiate us in a now crowded market and also provides great opportunities for streaming and social media cross-promotion. We’ll try to take ourselves a little less seriously than more competition focused organizations.

We have enough of a network to launch and tell player stories from three major regions. North America, SE Asia and Europe with Australia as a local-play invitational only as they are limited by poor internet infrastructure. The reason to have such a global approach to connect the different gaming cultures (including introducing each other to new games) and tell the stories of gamers as people from around the world. It isn’t only from the business standpoint of having a larger TAM (total addressable market). This would also be the first time that gamers from different regions will stand equally both culturally and from a gaming standpoint.

Our prizes or rewards(members only) also should not be primarily monetary in nature. In addition to gaming collectibles and gear, games themselves, in game credit and other things that gamers would find appealing, we would also prefer to offer things that would help improve lives outside of gaming i.e. scholarships and courses, business or equipment grants, charitable or similar giving (i.e zakat and others). Promotional prizes could be used to incentivize signups

League / Competitive Format (if used)

Sorted into divisions by time played (as this is about balancing real life)

In this particular case our motivations lie in the “cringe” of seeing much of the eSports world having a seat at the table because they have access to money and/or connection to professional sports as well but with no real gamers at the helm or understanding of the market. For this reason we’ve seen a bottomless pit of money burn in esports so far without profitable results especially from those trying to apply models from professional sports to gaming. Many things that are overspent on could have been achieved for free or significantly less through in a “gamer to gamer” fashion. Examples such as Super League Gaming, MLG and other high profile but ultimately clueless management and executives are why this kind of “spectated / organized gaming” ultimately fails to tap in to very much gamer commitment. Commitment is key and if you don’t have commitment and mindshare, you will not have spending. An average *YEARLY* spend of $5 per gamer is worse than pitiful as this article by Kotaku points out what most gamers + those in esports “industry” already know. Our goal is to have an entirely gamer owned and run organization with those at the seat of table not there mostly because of their access to capital. Another motivation is to take some of the “sports” out of esports which has been a noted factor of disinterest between many gamers and move things back to a gamer centric culture.

In some of Munly’s past startup experiences, both investors and early employees underrate the motivations of the team behind a particular project. Having a strong “why” or connection to the problem at least at the level of a pain point can help provide the measure of a team to push on and really work on a project passionately to fulfill the end goal vs giving up on it early or not being able to direct it. Having a good project/cause or a great niche and a team that has the skills on paper in theory isn’t enough.

We will also aim to have a pro full-time e-sports team for the best of us that want to min/max their lives all the way to competition and embrace the dark side of..... Imbalance