Evil Geniuses, the well-known esports organization and brand, has launched its Meesh AI chatbot in a partnership with Theta Labs.
Evil Geniuses, the 2023 Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) world champion, has launched the text-based chatbot that was built by Theta Labs, a provider of decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media, and entertainment.
The new AI chatbot has been personalized to bring the loveable critter’s personality to life, allowing fans the chance to interact with Meesh in a variety of ways, including meme-worthy trash talk, trivia challenges, personalized interactions, and much more.
“EEG has always been a pioneer in the AI space, starting around 2021 and 2022. We helped bring Moneyball to esports, using data scientists to build AI tools and advanced algorithms to scout talent across the globe and help define winning strategies,” said Chris DeAppolonio CEO at Evil Geniuses, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We won a Sports Business Journal award because of it in 2022 and have continued that work through our competitive teams, especially on Valorant.”
He added, “We’re always looking at ways we can utilize technology to empower champions every day, whether that’s our own players, whether that’s our fans, whether that’s the people here at EEG, and for us, you know, we it kind of all came together this this year because we also launched EEG’s first ever critter.”
(Other people would call this a mascot). Meesh is a minion.
“And every evil genius needs their own minion,” DeAppolonio said. “After extensive work with focus groups of our fans, we helped Theta create an IP, a critter Meesh, which is short for mischievous.”
Meesh is fully integrated into Evil Geniuses Discord server and official website, giving fans the chance to ask them questions about all things Evil Geniuses, at all times of the day. Through Theta EdgeCloud, Meesh will use AI to answer community questions that include things like match schedule, team standings, roster information and history, player stats and past highlights, along with providing iconic EG esports moments on demand.
Fans will also be able to participate in exclusive giveaways, community events, and find the latest news about the organization.
“Our team at Evil Geniuses worked directly with the Theta team to create an AI chatbot that is a true representation of the personality we envisioned for Meesh when we started imagining our digital pet ahead of their launch last year,” said Kayci Evans, head of marketing and global partnerships at Evil Geniuses, in a statement. “Now, with the help of Theta, that personality is on full display and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Our fans can now fully engage with Meesh to learn more about our history, ask what’s coming up for Evil Geniuses or simply chat with Meesh for a personal interaction.”
Evil Geniuses Theta partnership is the first of more exciting partnerships to come for the organization as it puts an emphasis on finding new and unique ways for fans to become more immersed in Evil Geniuses happenings.
DeAppolonio said that Meesh gives fans another touchpoint to engage with the brand. The company has embued Meesh with a personality and built a storyline and lore around the creature as someone that fans can interact with.
While Meesh isn’t so cutting edge as to be able to speak with fans, it can take typed questions from the fans and respond to them with text replies. Meesh is also animated in ways that make the character more believable. There are some Easter Eggs in the AI responses for passionate fans. Meesh is also integrated with the Discord community for Evil Geniuses.
“We want Meesh to come to live for our fans, to really make Meesh feel alive and unique as they are,” DeAppolonio said. “As a character, Meesh is fairly non-verbal. Meesh speaks in sounds and squeaks, but can type. When fans type questions, Meesh can respond with dialogue.”
Meesh’s personality is strong and replicates what we believe our fans connect with, their hobbies and their interests and all those things. In a demo, Kayci Evans, global head of marketing at Evil Geniuses, took me into the environment of Meesh’s lair, which is very artistic. the demo didn’t work so well at first but Meesh started responding after a bit. Meesh can answer questions like where will Evil Geniuses play next in its worldwide schedule and it can tell inside jokes that fans get.
Evans said, “We updated and uploaded the profiles of all of our players into the AI to make sure that Meesh really felt like part of the team and could teach fans about what our team does in their free time. You can ask Meesh for advice and it can tell you about games or other lore about the brand.
Evil Geniuses also had to make sure that Meesh wouldn’t write anything inappropriate. That’s not an easy thing to protect against, given that fans will no doubt probe for such vulnerabilities in Meesh. Theta had experience in working with other teams in the NHL to do similar systems that could handle toxicity.
“It’s something we continue to monitor,” DeAppolonio said.
“We created Easter Eggs for fans who want to engage in a different way, and lead them down a path of exploration and fun while getting to know the personality of our brand in a way that is really unique to us,” Evans said. “The most fun part has been getting to push our partner, Theta, in more creative directions. We have a great partner in theta who’s willing to explore how to make it more unique and creative.”
This is all happening in a context where AI has been polarizing for the esports industry. Some view AI as something that could potentially take away people’s jobs, but the company sees this as empowering people to do their work in a more creative way.
“AI has been a way to enhance our gameplay, enhance how we compete and scout talent across the globe, specifically because games are based on data, and we can get millions and millions of players and rate them and figure out who could be great, no matter what their background is and where they’re from,” said DeAppolonio. “This AI allows us to connect and engage with fans in a way we couldn’t on an everyday basis.”
Evil Geniuses is a global esports organization at the intersection of gaming, sports, technology and entertainment. Founded in 1999, Evil Geniuses is the oldest North American esports organization with more than 180+ championships.
Theta Labs is a provider of decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media and entertainment powered by a global network of 30,000 distributed edge nodes and a native blockchain. Backed by Samsung, Sony, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and CAA, Theta is among the top AI tokens on Binance.com and top 10 DePIN blockchains by market capitalization on Coingecko.
Theta EdgeCloud is the first hybrid cloud-edge AI computing platform with over 80 PetaFLOPS of always available distributed GPU compute power.
Evans said that costs for doing chatbots using AI have gone down significantly, enabling the company to do something with low cloud compute and storage costs. AI is a new frontier, but it’s one that Evil Geniuses believes in and wants to be a pioneer in,DeAppolonio said.
“We want to make sure that we’re using technology to help improve our business and make informed decisions and provide engaging content for our fans, where we can while still embracing the creativity and opportunity for esports enthusiasts and creators to build on our platforms as well,” he said.
As for the state of esports itself, DeAppolonio said, “I’m feeling a lot better about the industry these days. We’ve had continued growth on viewership for Valorant, which is the game we currently play. We won the world championship in 2023. From an EEG perspective, our merchandise sales are up significantly, 250% year over year. Our average video views are up 40% year over year.”
He added, “We’re moving upwards. We’re seeing higher engagement rates, having much more conversations with brands now than we’ve had in the past few years. I wouldn’t say it’s pre-pandemic levels when esports was at its highest, but the esports winter feels like it’s starting to end.”
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