The company allows esports gamers to create and share their most remarkable moments of play without friction. They will soon be launching sections where gamers can share their favorite movements from games such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Rainbow 6, and Valorant.
“I created All-Star a little bit over a year ago with Gavin Silver. I am the CEO, and he is the CTO (Chief Technical Officer), and we are setting out to make it fast, easy, and fun to make and share really game content,” said Cuomo.
Dukes: Do you think being an OG Gamer has helped you build a brand like AllstarGG?
Nick Cuomo: I think so, and I was there at the beginning of esports. I used to go to tournaments all up and down the east coast, and we were playing video games in shopping malls back then. I have always been very passionate about gaming, and I’ve loved Counter-Strike, and I still do. I still play CS Go.
I have certainly never been a pro, but I have my moments. I got to see space develop, and I think some of the things that made it special back then have gotten bigger and better today.
Dukes: Can you talk about how you guys are using Cloud?
Cuomo: It depends on how competitive you are when you play one of these competitive shooter games. Anything that can impact and threaten your ability to win, you will not want to mess with. So, in many ways, you create content by recording a screen unless you have an excellent computer. It is going to impact your gameplay. That is why many people do not mess with creating their own content because of that, and that is fair. Good computers are expensive, and playing these games at the highest graphics level is not always the best way to get your max up and win the game. So, I looked at that and said, how about we make the content for you in the Cloud. That’s how we essentially offload the work, resources, and create content into our ecosystem in cloud-based content creation.”
Dukes: How did all of this get started?
Cuomo: I have been thinking about this for a very long time. I remember when I first made my first movies in Counter-Strike. The old one is how I got my career started; I remember going to the CPL (CyberAthlete Professional League), these are like the world’s biggest tournaments for Counter-Strike.
At one of the events, I went and pitched a guy by the name of Jason Lee. He was a team owner of Complexity. I did not know him; I walked up to him and said, “you are a smart business guy, and you own a team. I make these videos, and there has to be a way to sell these things and make money, and I want to turn this into a career.” He was very nice and said we would be in touch, but nothing ever came of it. Back then, I was thinking about how I turn this passion that I have into a career.
So, I spent the last 15 years in marketing, creative, and technology, and finally, it came to me. I used to fly 30 to 50 percent of my time at my last job, and during a flight to Atlanta, I was not able to sleep. So, I ended up writing the business play for All-Star on my phone. Of course, something changed after, but that is when I said this is a problem I can solve. When I got home, I started pitching my good friend Gavin and told him it was something we had to do. It took some convincing, and once I proved it to him, we decided to quit our jobs to pursue it.
Dukes: Is the typing mechanism a marketing strategy?
Cuomo: That was a deliberate decision, and the way I thought about it was when you would use something like this. After you just did something that is bad a**, and you got to say something in the chat, and what more can you say I just turned that into the content.
Dukes: So will this be provided to the console community as well?
Cuomo: So, long term, the plan is we want to be everywhere our goal to be the brand name and snackable content. To us, this starts in PC gaming, right?
Competitive gaming is exciting to play; it is fun to watch, highly social, and has a lot of pain in making content. So, it is a space that I know very well, and it is a huge market. PC Gaming is more than a third of all video game revenue, and I think there will be many opportunities for growth to generate content for stuff like mobile, but right now, I don’t see it. There are like a handful of watchable mobile games, but I don’t want to watch Candy Crush, but like with you just started playing Counter-Strike, and if you get an awesome no scope. I want to watch that, and for me, that is a great opportunity and start there and what we are going to do is bring people back to games.”
Make sure to listen to the whole interview with Nick Cuomo above and follow him on Twitter.
