Belong Gaming Arenas is a subsidiary of global esports and technology company Vindex. In 2021, Belong revealed plans to open 300 experiential gaming centres across the US, in addition to its 27 UK venues. The aim is to create a series of safe and accessible connected spaces at the local and amateur level, as the esports trend continues to grow.
Gamers and their friends can watch, practise and compete at Belong venues. They can play leading titles on state-of-the-art equipment, due to Belong’s collaboration with PlayStation, OMEN by HP, ViewSonic, and Mavix.
A venue that opened in suburban Chicago last month at Streets of Woodfield, an outdoor shopping mall in Schaumberg, is the latest addition to the Belong stable. This will be home to the Schaumburg Foxes esports team.
A love of gaming
Mary Antieul, Belong’s VP of strategy, spoke to blooloop about the Belong Gaming concept, future plans, and the industry.
She has always been a gamer:
“When I was a kid, I pestered my parents for Game Boy for years until they finally got me one. “
She studied psychology at university and assumed that she would become a psychologist. However:
“I started working at the retailer GAME in the UK, and realized how much I loved the gaming industry.”
She took on some office roles inside GAME.
“We looked at how to transition the business from being a retailer of video games,” she explains. “The film and music markets have moved into the digital space. We wanted to look at how to adapt games for that, which is where the concept of Belong came in. I worked on the first Belong arena that opened in Manchester back in 2016, and really built up the strategy from that.”
Global strategy
Vindex, the leading global esports infrastructure company, acquired the Belong Gaming Arenas brand and all associated IP from GAME in 2020.
“My focus is on Belong’s global strategy,” Antieul explains. “This means being focused on how we operate the arenas, the customer experience, how we work with partners and operate tournaments and events that serve the community inside Belong.”
She hasn’t entirely left psychology in the past:
“It is interesting to think about what the drivers that encourage people to participate are, and the factors that mean that they have a great time when they’re doing so.”
Working towards equality
Esports is still quite male-dominated. Antieul comments:
“There is a lot of work being done to target this by multiple groups in the industry. In terms of the career side and the promotion of women in esports and gaming generally, there are several great groups, both in the UK and the US.
Whoever you are, you can feel welcome at Belong, and know we will make sure that you have a great experience when you visit us.
“We partner with a couple: British ESports here in the UK, and women-led interactive platform for gaming, *gameHERs, in the US, to look at ways to drive that from a career side and the community side, in terms of how we can activate and support it, and leverage what Belong is: a safe space for people to come together, and to celebrate gaming.”
The name, Belong, she says, works well as a statement of intent:
“Whoever you are, you can feel welcome at Belong, and know we will make sure that you have a great experience when you visit us.”
Belong Gaming Arenas expand
The company’s rise has been meteoric, as the rapidly growing esports sector shows its potential as a spectator experience. Antieul charts it:
“We started out with the initial test location in Manchester and continued to roll out across the UK. Our ethos was to look at ways to engage the esports and gaming communities. So, we looked at the types of experiences that we could offer. We didn’t want to exist solely within the esport space, but it was good to build venues that encouraged social gaming as much as competitive play.”
“Our ethos is very much around thinking about the right types of locations for every gamer, and looking at the right types of experiences for every individual.”
Belong has opened 27 locations across the UK in the last four of five years. It has also moved into the US:
“We are operating five locations in the US,” she says. “We have more to come over this year and are looking to establish 300 more in the US over the next few years. It’s very exciting, and is going to be very busy.”
Rising to the challenge
Inevitably, there have been challenges:
“As with any business, there have been things we have had to work through. It’s about how to make sure that your experiences are consistent.
“The great thing about the business is that we have a mix of people who have event experience, people who have esports experience, and people who have multi-venue operations experience, and who understand that you need to provide training to your teams, that you need to enforce processes and best practices.”
“There’s a lot to consider in order to ensure that everything we offer is a safe and consistently excellent experience. A lot of it comes down to those internal best practices: to making sure there is a really good operations team and a really good training team.
“The biggest thing for us is making sure that we’ve got best practices happening in all of the locations, and keeping the experiences consistent. I think we’ve done a good job in making sure that happens.”
Belong Gaming and the esports trend
The esports trend has suddenly taken centre stage. Antieul talks about the sector both in the UK and the US:
“Esports has been around for many years. In the UK, esports events have been happening for over 20 years in conference centres and bars.”
There are 2.4 billion people playing games across the world. It’s a $180 billion industry; esports is a growing part of that. It’s a really good time to be in esports.
Now, the gaming industry has exploded, she explains:
“There are 2.4 billion people playing games across the world. It’s a $180 billion industry; esports is a growing part of that. It’s a really good time to be in esports. There is the ability to do great broadcasts and great live events. So the industry is set to continue to grow over the next five to ten years.”
Belong’s role is clear within it:
“We are very much around providing the support for amateur communities as they grow and train to become better.”
Arena Clash
Arena Clash, Belong’s flagship tournament, open to everyone, allows players to qualify regardless of skill level. With a variety of solo and team-based titles, there are multiple chances to win from the prize pool.
She explains:
“Arena Clash is about being able to come into a location, meet other players, form a team, and practise together.”
“We know that people want to participate, but are often worried that they’re not good enough. We provide tournaments that are, first and foremost, fun. These allow people to meet friends, play together, build their skills and get better, while consistently playing against other teams.
“Arena Clash is essentially a format where each arena location has its own squad identity. Those squads allow the teams to form underneath. We run three seasons a year in the UK and will run a similar format in the US. Those seasons allow squads to compete against each other. It’s a unique experience for the amateur and grassroots world.
“The infrastructure and support that we provide for those teams mean it feels more like a professional tournament than they would find elsewhere.”
The evolution of gaming
Belong Gaming fosters a welcoming, democratic ethos:
“If you are not playing in Arena Clash, you can still play at a lower level. We do smaller tournaments people can take part in, that might be with their local community around them, where they can practise to improve, before coming into Arena Clash.”
It’s a young demographic:
“The 14-30 age group is our primary audience. It’s a very young, but very invested demographic. We are careful in terms of the content available for different age groups. If a game is an 18- rated game in the UK, we make sure that the players are over 18.”
In terms of the next evolution of gaming, she says:
“It’s interesting. Gaming is becoming more immersive, and, as the technology improves, the experiences that people can access are growing. The potential of meta and what that looks like within the gaming world is interesting. For instance, how you can play games within games, and experience more social interactions within the digital metaphor. I think there’s a lot of excitement to come.
“The esports world is going to continue to develop and to become more organised. I think what Belong is doing in terms of servicing the grassroots scene really helps to stabilise that lower tier of competition, and to support the communities as they build.”
Belong Gaming & COVID-19
Inevitably, the COVID pandemic brought difficulties that have had to be negotiated:
“COVID means we’ve been very considerate of the safety of the players when they come inside the arenas. We’ve adhered to the lockdowns and the subsequent safety guidelines in the UK and the US. We have been very careful when considering when to reopen the UK venues, and when to launch the US ones.”
However:
“We have also been able to engage with our audience online throughout. In the UK, we were continuing to run digital tournaments in the absence of being able to do those in person. Obviously, our preference is always to be able to bring the community together in social experiences in the arenas. But we were able to continue to engage with the audience meanwhile, online.”
Connecting people
Belong contrives to integrate within local communities and support the grassroots level of play, while also connecting people on a global scale digitally. Antieul says:
“We connect people in a physical location where they can come together and meet the people that they are playing with, but, ultimately, we have a network of those communities which can then communicate.”
“There are also moderated Discord channels for Belong. Through these, players can engage with each other and with our social channels online. We support the communities, bringing them together; we encourage them to do more casual gaming against each other and networking with each other, and then there are the Arena Clash tournaments.”
Positive social experiences
Belong Gaming is focused, she explains, on offering positive social experiences.
“There have been numerous bits of research around the positive impacts that you can get from gaming and from esports,” she explains. “Play-based learning positively engages aspiring learners. We believe that the experiences that Belong offers empower people to have a great social experience together.”
There have been numerous bits of research around the positive impacts that you can get from gaming and from esports.
“We are, of course, careful in terms of the health of players. For instance, we make sure we’re checking in with people if they’ve been playing in the arenas for a couple of hours, to make sure they’re okay. We think about things like the range of food and drink that we offer, too. So we make sure we’ve got healthy snack alternatives in the arenas.”
The future of Belong Gaming
In the longer term:
“Ultimately, we want to make sure we’ve built a network of physical locations that can cater for all of the different communities that exist in the US and UK. We want to build a connected network of gamers, and to service them through our physical locations, making sure we have sufficient locations to be able to do that, all networked across our digital infrastructure so that communities can engage with and talk to each other.”
One of the other components of what Belong does is to work closely with some of the professional esports teams:
“We are able to create fan engagement moments for those teams when those players are not playing in matches. Belong offers offer additional fan connection opportunities that didn’t exist in such a structured way previously; we offer consistent experiences for all the different groups of fans for their relevant teams, both in the UK and the US.”
This sort of personal connection to pro players is unique to esports.
“One of the key things about esports is that there is a real familiarity between the players and the teams themselves. There is, of course, a lot that those teams and players do in terms of digital streaming and so on. But Belong offers a really nice way for fans to access the players outside the physical events and professional matches that they’re doing.”
