2023 Update and Roadmap

Hey everyone! 

In this post we will sum up what has been going on with Meta Plays, and detail our plans for 2023.

Changes to our League Structure

In 2023, we are changing our overall content strategy in order to grow our reach, and in the process make our project more sustainable.

Instead of having low prize pools in Monthly Tournaments and then a slightly larger, but ultimately still small Season Finale, we will be putting all our eggs into the invitational basket. We are also reducing the length of seasons. 

We believe that these changes will help generate more hype, and also make all audiences (players, viewers, supporters, brands) take the leagues more seriously.

We are also rebranding our events to a more standard, easier to understand format: 

• The Monthly Tournaments will be rebranded to Qualifiers.
• The Season Finales will be referred to as a Main Event.
• Main Leagues will be called Pro Leagues.
• Skirmish Leagues will be called Amateur Leagues.

Game Support Update

Renewed for Season 2 - Age of Empires IV:

We are naming this season "Genghis Khan's Legacy"! We are allocating a $500 starting prize pool, and accept community contributions to boost this.

Below are our article announcing our league, the first Qualifier Tournament, and our promotional showmatch! Join ASAP!

Renewed for Season 4 - Age of Mythology:

We are naming this season "The Golden Gift"! We are allocating a $500 starting prize pool, and accept community contributions to boost this.

Linked below are our article announcing our league, as well as the first Qualifier Tournament! Join it ASAP!

Renewed for Season 4 - Halo Wars 2:

We are naming this season "Sentinels"! We are allocating a $500 starting prize pool, and accept community contributions to boost this.

Linked below are our article announcing our league, as well as the first Qualifier Tournaments for the 1v1 Pro League, as well as the 2v2 Amateur League! Join these ASAP!

Renewed for Season 3 - SpellForce 3:

We are naming this season "Circle Mages"! We are allocating a $500 starting prize pool, and accept community contributions to boost this.

Linked below are our article announcing our league! We will post the qualifier at a later date, as the previous season has not yet concluded.

Our New Media Manager

One of the biggest changes for 2023 will be that we now have a dedicated Media Manager. Please welcome @Lucky_Spaidsto our team! He will be looking after all social media, and create some additional content with the aim of growing our reach. Expect highlights, shorts, recaps and more! We will do everything in our power to build a thriving community in as many places as possible.

Fresh Looks

You have probably already noticed the new website background, and/or social banners! We think the darker style is easier on the eyes, fits better with our shield logo, and is ever so slightly more environmentally friendly. This will be applied to our stream assets as well.

The banners on our socials also get a little descriptive text box, helping people figure out what we do immediately.

New Page: Sponsors and Affiliates

We have also set up several affiliate links on the website - by using any of these services with our links, you support Meta Plays at the same time. These news will be re-iterated in the main news article as we kick off the upcoming leagues.

In Development: Clans

We have started work on a rudimentary clan system. While the website sort of supports this out of the box, people are able to join multiple clans even within the same game at the moment - which has lead to us hiding the feature. So we are working on cleaning this up, and featuring the clans in several profile areas.
There is always the potential of developing clan-based events in the future, but for the moment, significant further development like that is not planned.
Our priority will shift to ensuring that the events we run are sustainable both financially and in terms of not burning our team out.

The Next Item: Unified Profile

The final item on our development roadmap is to work the tournament profiles into the main website profiles. Our implementation of tournament profiles was hacky - it was easier to do it on a separate page, but this makes for a much worse browsing experience, and has very poor SEO, making our players difficult to find. Full integration of this area will be a significant improvement we believe.

The Future

Other than bug fixes as and when needed, this is it for website development. We would revisit this stance in the event that we can secure sponsorships to cover tournament prize pools. Doing website development on the side would be perfectly feasible in that case, but we cannot keep bleeding budget out of pocket while we are as small as we are now.

Looking to Support our project or events?

The best way to support Meta Plays directly is becoming a subscriber on the website. This is a monthly recurring payment that you get perks for, and help us cover the running costs of the project.
You can also increase prize pools of individual tournaments by donating.

Where To Watch

We will live stream all our events on our Twitch, and VoDs will be available on our YouTube. Be sure to follow/subscribe, it's free!

That's all! Let us know what you think in the comments. Also don't forget to join our Discord for real time chats!

Thank you for reading, we will see you on the battlefield!