This is a recorded interview (Bits and Bytes) with Justin Wong, co-founder and CTO of Battlefy, describing how Battlefy built a platform to power esports competitions at all levels—from amateur/college to semi-pro and professional. Justin explains Battlefys dual-facing functionality: tournament organizers configure and market events (game-specific customizations, seeding, bracket formats) while players register, share usernames/stats, receive match assignments, and can open admin support tickets. He lists partners and use cases (Riot Games/League of Legends, EA/Apex Legends, NFL activations, collegiate programs) and discusses the rise of corporate leagues and community organizers.
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Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Bits and Bytes. Today we have another guest in the gaming industry, Justin from battlefy. Justin, how about you give yourself a quick introduction about what you do and what battlefy is about, all right?
Hi everyone, I'm Justin. I'm one of the co founders and CTO of battlefy. Battlefy, we built a platform for esports which is competitive video gaming. Basically, kids nowadays, they play video games, they compete, go to play in stadiums and they win millions of dollars. Our platform, our services, our company, we look to power all levels of competition. So you imagine from like amateur to collegiate, where UBC uses us to kind of the beer leagues to semi professional leagues, all the way up to professional leagues. So we work with a lot of game developers who use us. So riot games, we work with them on League of Legends. So that's really fun. Where college students play in there and are able to win scholarship money. We also work with like EA on Apex Legends and their global series. So all around the world people can compete and be the best kind of Apex Legends players. We also work with different brands. Recently we work, we are working with like the NFL who wants to kind of, especially in the, in the pandemic, wants to kind of create these events for kids to be able to come on and really interact with the NFL brand, which is exciting. So, you know, we have a lot of community side, our organizers use our platforms and create lots of cool content tournaments and we also work with the game developers brands to kind of help them get into esports and help them run really successful tournaments of all sizes. Awesome.
So for those that might not be familiar with esports or the gaming industry too much, how exactly does battlefly work as a tournament platform? Like is it like an automated kind of like software where, you know, people can just join in and join their teams or how exactly does it work?
Yeah, there's really kind of two sides to it. One for tournament organizers, what we tos they come on and hey, I want to have run the League of Legends tournament this Saturday at 7 o'. Clock. And so they're able to go to our website and for every game we have different customizations, a little bit, you know, maps and things like that. So they're able to come in and input, you know, all the details about the tournament and they can go and now market that page, share on the Facebook groups, Twitter and people can come and join. So on the player side, when players come in and join those tournaments, we collect the right information. For example, for League of Legends, we can collect their summer name. With that, we can also grab some of their stats so the players know who they're competing against. Then on tournament day, we provide organizers more tools such as seeding tools. They're able to create brackets, single elimination, double elimination, all those different kind of competitive formats. And when they do that, they can put the teams in however the way they want using our tools. And players will get that on our platform. Hey, you're now playing against this team and the tournament progresses. We also have some cool features like admin support tools so when a player runs into trouble, they can open a ticket and the admins can come on and in chat, work together to solve whatever issues they have. We built a lot of tools for them to be able to run a great seamless tournament experience.
Honestly, I wish this existed back when I was at school. I'm not sure if you guys know, but at SFU I ran a gaming club specifically for PC games. And one of our cool stuff that we did was we ran league tournaments as well as starcraft or Dota and. Oh my gosh, trying to organize a tournament from scratch is a lot more difficult than you think.
Why are you shouting out all these dead games?
I'm sorry, I'm an old generation gamer.
I was gonna say like from Justin's intro, he's like, oh, kids can join tournaments. I'm like, no, no, no. Old people join tournaments too. They just don't.
It's cool. Well actually there's actually like corporate leagues now, so we actually play in some of these corporate leagues. And so you know, when, when you get out from school and you have a job and stuff like that, it's, it's harder to kind of get in touch, stay in touch with people. Some of these corporate leagues as well, it's pretty cool. You kind of, it's team building at your company and you get to play with other companies around you and really like. Well, I guess it's team build in some ways when you win, sometimes if you lose, you kind of, you know, shout at each other here and there. But it's all good fun.
Yeah, I don't know when Gene and I play games together. Whether it's Team Build or Team Break.
Depends on how competitive you are, I guess.
I mean, Sam always mentions how competitive I get with Apex or not Apex Valorant.
So I don't think it's, I don't think it's just one game.
I think it's game specific. Competitiveness is in your nature, right?
Yeah, I mean, I'm more interested in these corporate leagues. So I remember you told me a bit about this before but like, so are there a lot of actual corporate teams like in Vancouver itself or is it kind of like you guys also do like compete against like international like United States corporations or.
Yeah, the ones we kind of joined, they're North American. So I mean you may know day nine, right? Big kind of Starcraft streamer. Him and his business partner started it back then with after hours Gaming league and it kind of evolved from there, but. But yeah, there's a bunch of companies. North America esports really has no boundaries. Right. Which is pretty cool. We get to play with teams from like Amazon, IBM, Facebook. Some of these teams have really interesting team names as well. It's like we played against Facebook and the name is like Ganked by Zuck. Yeah, yeah. It's just fun to kind of hang out and chill and talk with people from all different companies.
Yeah, no, that's awesome.
That's really. Because, because like I know, like I've played, you know, a couple sports in the past and, and, and like locals who are listening to this episode are going to recognize some of these names like urban record or I604 if you're in a hockey or whatever. Like those, those leagues, like, you know, a lot, a lot of professionals like go in those leagues.
Right.
But it totally makes sense. I think you guys have come up at a right time where, you know, we grew up as gamers like Gene says, the Starcrafts and the Warcrafts and the red alerts and now we're growing up and they're like, oh, where do we go now?
It's awesome that there's like a, like an online platform community that, you know, gamers now like they don't have to just like disconnect with just, you know, as they get older, like you can actually play with your co workers now and stuff like that. I don't know. That's awesome to me because I think one of the growing pains of gamers is that, you know, you have less and less time to spend towards your hobby or your passions. Like I'm in that boat right now, like trying to find that balance to still spending gaming is a little hard, but I think having corporate teams is fun. I don't know, me and Sam were like talking about all the time, but I don't think we have enough gamers on the team and I know I don't have the patience to probably train someone.
Yeah. But gaming is also pretty cool, right. When you know, you have friends back then. High school, university. You're kind of together, but, you know, as you graduate and life kind of goes on, people move away as well. And one of the great things about games is that you can.
