EDINBURGH — Oct. 30, 2020 — Games Without Frontiers (GWOF), developers of award-winning and revolutionary business simulation games, has announced the first ever ‘Esport’ For Business, The ROCKET Challenge (TRC), with a US $10,000 cash prize offered to one team winner from anywhere in the world. From November through mid-December 2020, companies, universities, business schools or non-affiliated groups who think they have got what it takes to win The ROCKET Challenge can decide to enter into this exciting tournament. The winner will be announced on December 18, 2020, and 10% of profits from the challenge will be donated to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Esports kicked off as far back as 1972 at Stanford University followed by the introduction of leaderboards for Space Invaders and Asteroids in the 1980s. By the 1990s, Nintendo was launching international tournaments. Subsequently, multi-player and team games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike started to dominate the landscape by the noughties. Today, esports is a billion-dollar business with hundreds of millions of viewers online.
While esports could present many challenges to the business community – with the fun element potentially lost and the associated technology barriers of video conferencing – Games Without Frontiers has now solved these issues with The ROCKET Challenge. Arising from the social distancing pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Edinburgh company has achieved a remarkable pivot in less than two months, taking its hugely successful ROCKET classroom-based game and morphing it into a fully remote game, known as ROCKET-remote, the basis of this exciting TRC tournament.
Played live online and over a 4.5-hour runtime, The ROCKET Challenge will allow participants to optimize a simulated business while solving increasingly complex problems with each repeated 26-minute play representing 26 weeks (two quarters) of the calendar. They must quickly improve how they work together as a team and establish best working practices, continuously reviewing and updating their methods. The team or individual who can maximize profits from the full gameplay will win the coveted TRC cash prize. In The ROCKET Challenge, all teams will also have to battle it out for leaderboard supremacy as they monitor their progress throughout the competition.
“We believe that businesses and organizations with a competitive spirit will love playing The ROCKET Challenge,” said GWOF CEO Tim Dew. “We also believe we are the first company to create an ‘Esport’ For Business competition of this kind, which is ideally suited to enticing remote working teams to shoot for a $10,000 prize and the prestige of winning the top spot on the leaderboard.”
“Obviously teams will want to enter to win the extraordinary cash prize,” said VP, Commercial, Nadine Pierce, “but we will also urge both private and public organizations to purchase the ROCKET-remote game as an indispensable team-building experiential tool and one that encourages empathetic working practices. The product’s commercial relevance leverages the low price per gameplay, and therefore it represents a high value proposition for businesses, independent of The ROCKET Challenge itself.”
For organizations or individuals who would like take part in The ROCKET Challenge and have a chance to win a $10,000 cash prize, the entry fee is $495 ($195 for students) per team. Please register at www.rocket.gwof.uk. #therocketchallenge
About Games Without Frontiers
Games Without Frontiers (GWOF) designs and develops breakthrough business simulation platforms and helps organizations drive transformational change using advanced game technology and behavioural dynamics. ROCKET, the company’s award-winning first simulation game, equips organizations with new skills and a commercial awareness of what it takes to grow and scale a successful business, all in the space of one day. Both the classroom-based ROCKET and the online-based ROCKET-remote represent a fun team-bonding exercise but, more crucially, provide a tangible learning tool that can be both tested and delivered back in the real world. ROCKET is winner of the prestigious ‘Digital Game of the Year’ award at the 2019 International Business Learning Games Competition, and Games Without Frontiers is the winner of the 2018 Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce ‘Innovation in Business Award’. For more information, please visit www.rocket.gwof.uk.
