GameReady was the winner of WFS Asia’s StartCup Competition that took place last April in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). Seven of the region’s most innovative startups pitched the different solutions they have been developing for the sports industry and this company, based in Malaysia, proved to be the most successful with a very interesting platform aimed for eSport tournament promoters.

We catch up with its CEO, Wei Chee Lee, to chat about how the project is growing and the exciting times that the eSports industry is experiencing.

First of all, congratulation for winning the StartCup! Game-ready is all about a new platform that will change eSports tournaments for good. Could you explain a little bit more about it?
GameReady is an eSport tournament platform in which we allow the organizers to run their own tournaments more efficiently. Currently, the events are organized everywhere, on Whatsapp, Google Forms, Google Sheets and all the social platforms available. The idea behind Game-ready was to provide users with tools to organize tournaments in a more systematic way. 

The platform is new, but you already have a big amount of users.
We just launched a few months ago, but we already have around a million users. 

How did the project start? Why did you come up with this idea?
We have been organizing eSports events for all the big companies for some time now. When there’s an event going on, there are multiple tools working at the same time just to organize one part of the event. For example, the scoring, the registration, the user, mash-making… all these parts are using different platforms. We saw the need to have one single platform that’s able to organize and run everything. 

What are your expectations for the company in the upcoming years?
We want to cover the whole of Southeast Asia and want to be a license holder for all the major games as well. For example, PlayStation and EA Sport’s FIFA. We aim to have a direct connection to the game servers and to be able to automatically register and get the live scoring of all these servers. Ideally, we should be the premium sector organizer for Southeast Asia. And we expect to achieve that in the three years’ time. 

Tell us a little bit about your experience at World Football Summit and how you think winning the StartCup competition can help you.
Hopefully, we will be capable of increasing our branding and let more people know about us. Eventually, raise some funds to keep the business and expand to other countries. When we go abroad, we seek the support of local partners. Coming to World Football Summit gave us credibility. It gave us more access to industry players and the possibility to network. I hope that this prize will get us more connected to Europe.

As an expert and a player, how do you see the current scenario and the future of the eSport industry?
I think it’s getting more acceptation and becoming more appealing for brands. This will attract big companies to jump on board the eSports market. The industry is booming very fast.