Esports Team Uses Tournaments to Gauge Interest in New Campus Space

Peter Mathu has been into video games for most of his life. Now, as a student at UW-Milwaukee, he serves as the esports program manager, where it is his job to help other students experience their favorite games.

Mathu uses his passion for games to organize events and tournaments for the Esports Lounge in UWM’s Student Union. The most recent event they held was a Fortnite tournament on Thursday, April 17.

“We decided to do this tournament based on data that a lot of people like Fortnite,” Mathu said. “A lot of people who came to this event were already playing Fortnite in the space.”

The Fortnite tournament in the Esports Lounge marks a step in the process of figuring out how to best use the newly-renovated space. The esports team has used the events this semester, not only for students to have a good time, but also as a way to gauge interest in different games and tournament types.

This tournament presented a learning curve for the esports team. While turnouts for their more popular tournaments were in the 40s, only four contestants showed up to participate in the one-on-one Fortnite tournament.

“I think the biggest thing that we learned from this event compared to a lot of our more successful tournaments throughout the year was that a lot of them were team based,” Mathu said. “It’s, ‘Hey, here’s the tournament that I participated in with my friends,’ There’s a lot more camaraderie.”

The participants in the tournament agreed that Fortnite is more fun with others.

“I like how collaborative it can be,” said Emely Cortez, a sophomore. “I like how I get to play with my friends.”

“Whenever I’m playing, it’s with a friend,” said Jeremiah Cooper, a freshman. “If it’s not a friend that’s egging me on, then I’m not playing.”

Even though the tournament didn’t attract many people, Fortnite remains one of the more popular games for students and staff alike.

“Me and my friends have been playing Fortnite a lot recently,” said Yaya Vega, a sophomore. “One day we just randomly stumbled across the rec center, and the first game we saw was Fortnite. We were like, ‘Ok, let’s play Fortnite.’” 

“It’s one of those awesome homesteads of gaming that has existed for years and will always be there,” said Mathu.

Cooper ended up winning the double-elimination tournament, which could be attributed to his dedication to the game around its release.

“I played when the game first came out, but then I quit in 2020,” Cooper said. “For those three years, that was my life. I would play every day. I was borderline pro level.”

Though Cooper won the tournament, he admits that he didn’t know about the event prior to arriving at the Esports Lounge Thursday afternoon.

“I came down to play Marvel Rivals, and then they said that they were closing at 5 o’clock,” Cooper said, “So I just said, ‘Yeah I’ll sign up, I’m not doing anything today anyway.’”

The low turnout, as Mathu theorized, could be mostly due to the tournament’s solo format, but it also presents the question of how to market these events.

“It takes a lot of coordination and knowledge of the building to be able to get people to show up and get stuff reserved for the place,” Mathu said.

The esports program uses many different forms of media to try to market their events: printed posters and flyers in the union, announcements on their Discord server and the campus weekly news calendar and even pop-ups on the Esports Lounge computer monitors.

“Whenever you log on to the computers, it shows you a really quick splash screen of upcoming events,” said Mathu, “So if you’ve been in this lounge anytime in the past two weeks, you’ve known that this tournament is upcoming.”

While this tournament had a lower turnout than expected, this hasn’t discouraged Mathu and the esports team from continuing to build on their program for the future.

“There are some interesting maintenance updates that we’ll be doing over summer that we’ll be sharing with our community,” Mathu said. “Then come fall, we’re going to be hitting the ground running and probably have close to four or five events the first week of fall classes.”