At War in the City of Love: The Summoners War World Arena Championship Takes Paris
Photos courtesy of Com2uS
Paris might be known as the City of Love, but for one day in October it became the City of War—Summoners War: Sky Arena, specifically, the mobile strategy game from Korean developer Com2uS.
The Summoners War World Arena Championship 2019 was held at the Maison de la Mutualite, an almost 90 year old building that has held all manner of concerts, performances and other events since before World War II. Eight players from around the world vied for their cut of a prize pool valued at $100,000. Their path to the finals took them through both a preliminary and group stage, and then the winners of three regionals—the Europe Cup, the Asia-Pacific Cup and the Americas Cup—punched their tickets to Paris.
Summoners War: Sky Arena’s path to esports was even more protracted. The game launched in 2014 as a turn-based RPG, and quickly became a mobile smash, with tens of millions of downloads in its first two years. Still, something was missing. As David Mohr, Com2uS’s general manager for Europe, explains, “People are very competitive. And people like to play against each other. Previously we didn’t have real time battle in the game until we added this in early 2017.”
Once players could go against each other head to head, it was only a matter of time before Summoners War made the esports jump. 2017 was also the first year for the Summoners War World Arena Championship, and viewership doubled for the 2018 follow-up. And it’s not just the audience that’s responding to the Championships. As Mohr tells us, “Our players are taking it more and more seriously. All the qualifiers are more and more important to them. We’ve been able to increase our prize money. We managed to get sponsoring by Google Play, which is something we’re very proud of. They’re the best possible partner we could think about for something like this.”
I might not know a great deal about Summoners War specifically, but I’ve been to enough esports tournaments to know the score. Esports are still young, especially compared to the hoary theatrics of something like baseball, but its events already have a well-defined vibe. It has the flash of a pro wrestling event or NBA game, with the lights, the personalities, the passionate crowds, and the rapid fire announcers who are often as much characters as the players themselves. And although all three share a love for loud music that resonates with a youngish, male audience, the particular style of that music diverges greatly; whereas you’ll hear hip hop or current pop hits at most mainstream sporting events, and geriatric oughts-era dunce rock still predominates at a WWE show, the esports sound of choice remains dubstep. Always and forever dubstep. Walking into an esports event is like being whisked magically back to 2012, when Skrillex surveyed his boundless musical fiefdom from his booth on high, and everybody everywhere was still waiting for the drop. The Summoners War World Arena Championship 2019 summoned the brostep spirit of the recent past with absolute verve and commitment, and frankly I wouldn’t have had it any other way, no matter how terrible that music has always been.
Still, it was very much unlike other esports events I’ve been to. Maison de la Mutualitie is not necessarily a modestly sized building, but it’s one of the coziest I’ve seen esports in, and it wound up being a perfect size. Instead of getting unreasonably ambitious and booking a venue far larger than the demand—instead of running a quarter-full NBA arena or a larger theater with hundreds of empty seats—Com2uS realized that an absolutely packed building creates a much better impression, even if it’s smaller in size. There were no empty seats at the Maison de la Mutualitie, which turned into a standing room only sweatbox thick with the steam of excess human bodies closely quartered to one another. Sure, that made the room hot and sticky, but piling people in almost on top of each other made the action more exciting, raising the passion of the fans and making each round of the tournament feel even more pregnant with pressure and importance.
Also setting it apart from other esports events I’ve been to: the hosts on stage spoke in French. In Paris, of all places!
Summoners War: Sky Arena isn’t a squad game. Get those images of two rows of identically dressed, hyperalert teens with call center headmics staring with unblinking eyes at banks of computer monitors out of your mind. This is a gentlemanly game with two opponents going head to head in a battle of magically powered anime superpeople (and beasts). Each player sits at their own private mobile device and summons their team of five creatures, all of whom’s power is ranked on a five-point scale. Each player bans one critter from the opposing army’s lineup, and then gets down to the business of pummeling every enemy into submission through a variety of basic and special attacks. There are cooldowns and characters “awaken” into more powerful versions of themselves and there’s a hierarchical battle system based on the elements, like the ‘80s toy Battle Beasts. It’s a videogame full of videogame ideas, and one that anybody with a phone or other mobile device and the desire to play it can play.
Only a handful of players throughout the world are good enough to make it to the world championships, though. Among them is the American known as Tree!—yes, the exclamation point is part of his name. Brian Choi, of Los Angeles, is one of two Americans in the Championship tournament—his rival from the Americas Cup finals, Thompsin, a fellow Los Angeleno and good friend and sparring partner in real life, is also in Paris. Tree lost his first-round matchup to a hometown hero, the French player Rosith; as Tree tells us, after using a slightly unusual strategy in that matchup, “I took a gamble, and I lost.”