Red Bull Gameball Royale, Sporthalle Hamburg, April 2023

Client:	Red Bull Deutschland GmbH
Commissioned by:	the very essence GmbH
Date:	7th April 2023
Location:	Sporthalle Hamburg
Services:	Video, Audio, Lighting, Rigging, Content Production, Broadcasting
Project Managers:	Marc Ehrhardt, Richard Gasch, Lennart Beimesche
Branches:	Erfurt, Berlin, Munich
Special features:	8K LED floor with an area of almost 200 m² lighting design and set construction for the entire event

When “Dodgeball” meets the rules of “Battle Royale”, you can be sure of an awesome genre mashup. At the beginning of April, Red Bull initiated the content creator event of the year at the Sporthalle in Hamburg: four teams made up of over 30 creatives from the games scene competed on an interactive LED court. Over 100,000 sports and gaming fans saw the event on the stream, and 2,000 enthusiastic spectators experienced exciting matches, pinpoint throws and acrobatic dodges at the venue itself. Red Bull Gameball Royale is a unique mixture of dodgeball and the online gaming genre Battle Royale.

In our role of technical service provider, we contributed our expertise in set building, lighting design and Content Production in addition to our “standard” Audio, Lighting, Video and Rigging services. The creative team from Digital Media added to our scope of services with real-time graphics on the LED floor and tracking of the players, thus creating a more immersive experience both at the venue and on the livestream.

The highlight of the event was the LED floor in the centre of the hall measuring almost 200 m² – a court in 8K resolution. Like in Battle Royale in the virtual online world, this space got smaller as time went on, whereby the digitally visualised outer edges continually moved inward or allowed eliminated players to re-enter the game.

The floor also added to the game with interactive elements – for example additional balls that could be collected or triggered. This was realised by means of all-optical tracking of the players so that we could detect their position on the court.

We were also responsible for every aspect of the broadcast of this gaming event packed with superlatives. Using twelve cameras, we produced a total of eight different livefeeds for platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and linear television on Red Bull TV. As a result, our client reached 1.7 million views on TikTok, Twitch and YouTube alone; together with the other livestreams a total of 26 million live minutes was achieved. If you add the 840 postings by users on TikTok, YouTube and YouTube Shorts, the event reached more than 116 million people. Our streams helped to make Red Bull Gaming Royale one of the most successful events ever held in the German esports and gaming scene.