AI’s Role in Improving eSports Event Production

Cybersports has become a global phenomenon, capturing the attention of millions of viewers and therefore attracting major brands for marketing collaborations. The question is: how can we make these collaborations not only remarkable but also profitable and efficient? There are several AI-driven tools already being used—or will be used—during tournaments: AI-powered viewer analytics track audience reactions, measure engagement, and highlight the most buzzworthy moments. Can you recognize which Entyx tool does this?

AI generates personalized content for advertisers, enabling dynamic ads and even AR effects. Neural Networks can analyze games in real time and may even contribute to the presenter’s commentary. AI-driven cameras could evolve into tools that monitor rule violations and alert judges about controversial moments. Curious? Let’s dive into this today!

AI and eSports Event Production

AI in eSports is transforming the way eSports events are produced. AI algorithms automate broadcast management, personalize content for each viewer, and optimize ads in real time. This allows brands to integrate their ads naturally, resulting in more organic and positive viewer experiences.

Moreover, eSports sponsorship analytics can analyze viewers’ behaviors and foreseen trends, helping advertisers choose the most effective audience engagement formats. One of the brightest examples of AI in the eSports event production is Riot Games’ Valorant Live Stats System.

During major tournaments like VCT (Valorant Champions Tour), AI analyzes and tracks gameplay in real time, automatically selecting the best moments and immediately reflecting the data, integrating stats into the broadcast. This opens many new opportunities for sponsors and keeps viewers engaged as you might have guessed.  

Advertisers can integrate their ads into the most exciting moments of the game—AI detects clutch rounds or highlights and automatically overlays graphics or replays cuts of the game with branded elements of the advertiser. In this way, sponsorship integrations look more natural, and dynamic and do not irritate the eye of a viewer. This approach is already being used in cybersports and is expected to become standard for major tournaments in the future.

How AI Is Applied Inside Sports Teams

Benjamin Franklin once said, “When you're finished changing, you're finished.” This perfectly captures the urgency sports teams feel in keeping up with evolving technology. Let’s take the Chicago Fire team, for example. Their analytics department uses advanced technology, including forms of artificial intelligence, to gain an edge in performance scouting and recruitment. They've scored goals specifically exploiting work that the machine learning modeling has told them are areas they can attack.

Wearable GPS devices help Chicago Fire collect vast amounts of valuable data during both training and matches. The devices are distributed by a company called “Hudl” which works with elite teams across the globe. These devices allow teams to monitor a player's workload in real life during practice and games, optimizing every single training and practice session to match the game pace without risking soft tissue injuries.

Five athletic programs at Northwestern use similar wearable devices including the Wildcats women's soccer team. They want fast, strong resilience to fit athletes and they make sure that they get to that point so when they're in the season they're ready to go. Coaches could tell athletes somewhat subjectively that it doesn't look like an athlete is running though like they have to cover more ground, but they can now pull out the data and point at the player of the competitor team who covered this much and compare to the athlete of the team, there's room to make up. When the light goes on, athletes start changing the way they train so that they can meet those physical demands.

In the weight room, the men's basketball team uses a different piece of technology: a force plate to measure jump height, speed, force, and imbalances in body movements. It does give some insight as to what's going on. It allows them to put some data to some of these subjective measures they've had in the past, not just asking “How an athlete feels”. They have some data to back that up.

Do they have more to give you now? What do the numbers bear? What does science tell? It's just amazing the amount of AI-powered tools they now have to quantify these areas and help the athletes be at their very best.

The data coaches collect with these devices can now be seamlessly integrated into real time broadcasts. And fans of each athlete can track his success in real time during tournaments. With the advent of AI in regular sports and eSports then, we'll see larger departments and maybe more data-driven processes on the whole as everyone is sort of in the arms race to continue to find those edges over the rest of the competition.

How AI Is Applied In eSports Teams

While AI in traditional sports helps athletes analyze their physical condition, in eSports, AI focuses on improving gaming strategies, monitoring player performance, and increasing engagement.

The AI-driven platforms like SenpAI, Mobalytics, and others, analyze the actions of players, outline the mistakes, and offer strategies to improve performance. AI-driven cameras and eye-tracking technologies help study player focus, reaction time, and decision-making patterns. In cybersports, they also use smart gaming chairs and heart-rate monitors to track stress levels, and fatigue to help players stay on top of their performance levels. They also tend to use AI-assistant coaching as machine learning helps to assess the player's tendencies, analyze their game styles, offer personalized training sessions, and even simulate opponents’ strategies to better prepare.  

With the great expansion and development of AI in traditional sports, eSports teams are also implementing or about to implement these technologies to elevate their performance level.

Why eSports Sponsorship Needs AI

Sponsors demand transparent data: How many viewers will see their brand? How long will their logo be on screen? What is the real cost of the collaboration? What eSports sponsorship ROI will they eventually get?

The Entyx AI-powered marketing analytics platform tracks viewers' behavior, measures the time logos spend in a frame, and calculates interactions—such as clicks, mentions, and shares—in real time. We tracked sponsors of Formula 1 and calculated each brand’s logo in frame time, watch here.

How does Entyx do it? No magic applied! Just a solid data tracking system involved! 
Entyx tracks Media Value, meaning advertisers get an exact time frame in broadcasts. The tool automatically identifies and monitors the presence of brand logos in video content. This feature provides detailed reports on logo visibility, duration of exposure, and placement within the content, helping you understand the effectiveness of your branding efforts.

We make a 360-degree AI-powered analysis of the engagement level. We scan the audio in video content to identify and analyze specific keywords and phrases related to your brand or campaign. The Sentiment Tracking feature tracks the frequency of these mentions and the context in which they are used, providing valuable data on how your messaging is being communicated. Provides insights into the surrounding content when your brand or keywords are mentioned, helping you understand how your messaging fits into the broader conversation. The cherry on the top? This tool identifies sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral, providing a clear picture of audience reactions and perceptions. Sign up to try!
We offer powerful software for data collecting, visualizing, comparing, and analyzing from streaming platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, and Kick. 

Conclusion: The Future of AI in eSports Production

AI eSports trends are connected to automation, personalization, and improvements in viewer experience. AI-driven cameras will replace operators automatically tracking the key tournament moments and choosing the best points of view to improve the dynamics of the broadcast. AI algorithms analyze the gameplay in real time and automatically point cameras to the most epic moments like kill streaks and clutches. The future of sponsorship in gaming sticks with AI technology which easily outlines the most epic game moments and automatically creates cuts to share broadcasts on social media to also give additional exposure to the sponsors.

This technology makes cybersports broadcasts more exciting and convenient for the audience, sponsors, and event organizers. And of course, AI-powered marketing platforms like Entyx improve ad campaigns by making them more measurable, efficient, and profitable for sponsors. Entyx helps choose the best partners based on their performance in real time and tracks logos, calculates Media Value of every collaboration of yours. Ready to use AI automation? Let’s squeeze out the maximum from your eSports events with precise data!