Team executives think fans may one day watch games from a virtual seat. Courtesy Atlanta Braves
In April 2020, more than 12 million Fortnite streamers attended a virtual concert by rapper Travis Scott, a record-setting figure. Most watched in excitement. Adam Zimmerman watched in awe, fascinated by the spectacle, the fan engagement, the seemingly endless business-related opportunities this metaverse presented — and what it could all mean for the Atlanta Braves.
“That was my road-to-Damascus moment,” said Zimmerman, the team’s senior vice president of marketing. “It blew my mind.”
A month later, Zimmerman and Greg Mize, the Braves’ senior director of marketing and innovation, began talks with a contact at Epic Games, the software developer behind Fortnite. And on Feb. 15, the Braves unveiled the creation of Digital Truist Park, a photo-realistic digital twin of the team’s home stadium that is powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine technology. It’s the first foray into the metaverse by an MLB team.
No bricks, no mortar, yet Zimmerman still insists: “We believe that we are launching a venue, much like we did when we built and unveiled Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta.”
The new project will allow users to create an online avatar, much like in the popular game Sims, and experience all that Truist Park and The Battery have to offer in an immersive, multiplayer environment streamed directly to their browsers. Many of the business possibilities are similar. There’s opportunity for sponsorship through digital signage, for ticketing through concerts and other live events, for merchandise sales through interactive shops. But that’s still only a fraction of what’s possible.
“We believe this becomes a living lab for a lot of things that people are thinking about,” Zimmerman said. “How would NFTs live in this environment? What about cryptocurrency and microtransactions?”
What excites Braves President and CEO Derek Schiller most about the project is the way the organization will continually look to address and then readdress those types of questions.
“This gives us an entry point, but by no means is this the final version,” Schiller said. “I would anticipate that many of the things that we might do in this space are probably going to be ideas that are brought to us by fans. The fans that embrace this are going to have a chance to define the features and experiences that they have in it.”
At any given time, there are anywhere between six and 10 developers, artists and specialists working on Digital Truist Park, according to Josh Rush, co-founder and CEO of Surreal Events, a close client partner of Epic Games that is leading the development of the project. Through a technology called pixel streaming, Surreal Events is able to stream the avatar-based gameplay in a way that taps the high-quality graphic capabilities typically reserved only for high-end gaming consoles.
“We’ve got this opportunity now to connect the actual Braves players, team legends, dignitaries, brand sponsors and more to the fans that make all of this stuff possible,” Rush said. “And it’s all running right there in your browser.”
At the outset, Mize said Digital Truist Park will be event-based as users create their avatar and explore. There will be specific times when the digital venue opens and closes, with programming, including some level of gamification such as scavenger hunts, within that window.
“But again,” Mize said, “that’s just the start.”
Could fans one day watch a Braves game in the metaverse, enjoying it from a virtual seat at Digital Truist Park?
“The answer is they definitely could,” Mize said. “That would be something that we would have to work collaboratively with the league on, based on the structure of the digital rights and streaming, but anything’s doable with the right time and resources and partners. So yes, there very well could come a time when instead of streaming a game on your laptop, you could immersively be watching the game while sitting in the outfield at Digital Truist Park.”
The Braves set a high bar last year with $466 million in revenue through the third quarter, already near the franchise-record $476 million in revenue it earned in 2019. But this latest project — the cost of which the team wouldn’t share —wasn’t prompted by the reigning World Series champs looking to capitalize from a business standpoint on their first title in 26 years. Instead, it was just fortuitous timing.
“Candidly, our original goal was to get this out in 2021,” Mize said. “But with the World Series and everything that we had to work on and were doing then, we just didn’t have the resources to support [Rush] and his team as they built this to launch it by then.”
To that end, Digital Truist Park could at some point lead to the creation of a new department within the Braves, Schiller said.
“If we’re going to be active and not make this just a publicity stunt, we’re going to have to invest talent into this initiative,” he said. “And I think with talent, we should be able to build a completely new revenue enhancement of our team. With revenue is going to come jobs and all kinds of ways that we, as a baseball team, will try to monetize this opportunity.”
It’s not the first time the Braves have been first. Last August, they signed name, image and likeness contracts with two local student athletes, becoming the first MLB team to officially partner with them since the NCAA and state regulations were passed earlier in 2021.
Innovation, Zimmerman said, is “the spirit of our franchise DNA.” With the metaverse project, Zimmerman said Schiller and team Chairman Terry McGuirk gave him, Mize and the rest of Atlanta’s marketing department a “license to dream.”
“There’s always been an embedded innovation culture here at the Atlanta Braves,” Zimmerman said, “and this is just the latest iteration of that.”