What’s an esports course? Is probably a question you’ve asked yourself if you’ve been looking to study esports in the future.
Our BTEC level 3 in esports management might just be the perfect course for you. In this blog you can find out exactly what the course entails and the wide range of skills you can obtain from studying with us.
With our course being a BTEC you gain the equivalent of three A-Level so it’s perfect for getting into university. So, what will you learn?
The fundamentals of our esports college course
Our first module will teach you the fundamentals of game design. This will help you understand the factors that go into making a game, allowing you to analyse it critically with your team. This module includes level design, narrative structure and learning how to write a Games Design Document (GDD). We will also look at where you want to take your esports career and gain a basic understanding of the jobs in the industry. You will be partaking in case studies and researching the industry on your own in an area you have an interest in.
This module is followed up later in the year with an application module where you will apply all the skills you have learned and start developing your own GDD for an esports game that you could create. Bringing together all the areas of esports we’ve looked at as well designing something you would want to play! You will evaluate your classmates’ ideas and work together to get the most out of each person’s idea to make sure your game is the best fit for an esport.
Our next module will get you right into the games. Skills prep is a module that focuses on understanding the technical aspects of the esports games and learning the mechanics and gameplay needed to win. This includes understanding the meta and learning the ins and outs of the champions in each game. Alongside this, you’ll learn all about the way high performing teams practice and also how they run their business. You’ll be evaluating a team and players of your choice to provide a report on them. This is a great module for learning the nitty gritty of esports and giving you the first taste of competition with the potential to compete against other ACC ACES teams across the UK!
Skills application is the module where you will bring all of this together and start analysing other teams strategies and understanding how they beat their opponents. Once you’ve learnt the strategies the teams are using you will then apply them to a game of your choice. You will then pick a professional team and analyse them. Not only will you look at how they play but also how their business is set up and understand how they fund their business through merchandising and sponsorships. These will both be made into written reports that focus on the key areas of each team and game you choose.
Health and wellbeing in esports
Sports and esports get compared to each other a lot. The most important similarity is the focus on health and wellbeing.
Teams put a lot of focus on making sure their players are healthy, both mentally and physically. If your player isn’t healthy,they won’t be able to perform at their peak.
Our course has a focus on the different ways health is monitored in esports, for example getting a consistent amount of sleep. We will take these techniques and apply them to ourselves and see if we can improve our own health whilst studying. We will gather data on the health and wellbeing of players and understand what steps are needed to improve it.
Esports production, marketing and broadcasting
Every esports team needs content and video production.In this module you will learn the basics of making videos and how to use video recording equipment like film cameras and microphones. You will also learn about the importance of viral marketing and trends to get as many eyes on your brand as possible. We will also learn about audience and engagement, learning how to target your audience and how to understand analytics to see just how successful your content has been.
We will look at all the different platforms for marketing such as YouTube, Twitch and TikTok and learn what type of content works best on each of these platforms. You will also learn the three steps of any production process. Pre-Production which involves scripting, storyboarding and planning. Production which is the hands on filming and recording. And finally post-production which will involve editing, colour correction and promotion of your video. All of these skills will culminate in you making your own content for your esports team. We will also analyse and evaluate other esports teams marketing strategies, looking at what works well and what they could improve on.
Building your brand
This brings us onto our next module: Esports media. This has a larger focus on social media and using it to build a brand.
Understanding and evaluating how companies use influencers to promote their products or play their games live to millions of players. We will look at the use of twitch streamers and how they have become a vital part of marketing any game or esport team across the world. You will also have a chance to run your own twitch streams for the course, allowing you to put all the skills you’ve learnt in the module to the test and help grow your team’s brand and hopefully bring in some fans! Once you’ve made some content we can analyse your own numbers and see if your product pieces were as successful in the areas that you researched.
Esports careers
Finally we’re going to look at your career moving forward and help understand what jobs exist in the esports industry and you can start to think about what jobs you might want to pursue. The esports sector is massive and doesn’t just include playing games! In this module we will explore all the different job roles and apply your interests to one of those roles. You will learn about the structure of esport organisations and how they operate. You will then research a team of your choice and break down how their structure works and then create a development plan for your career. After learning about the industry we will start to develop your presentation skills and you will end the module by presenting your business plan to the group and will receive feedback from your peers and provide feedback to others. This module will give you all the industry knowledge needed to help identify your potential future career and how you can start making money from the industry.
As you can see the esports course covers a wide range of topic areas and gives you lots of skills you can transfer to other industries should you be interested in any area. We aim to be really hands on with the course and allow you to develop your passions and skills by doing alongside supporting it with understanding and writing to give you every possible benefit we can.
If you’re interested in studying our esports management level 3 course, find out more and apply here.