One of the most fun things about tech is anticipating how and when a company is going to blow up. One day it’s business as usual, then suddenly, KABOOM!

Explosions rarely occur in a vacuum. They are the cumulative effect of thousands of consistently good micro-decisions, executed by a smart team over a given period of time. It’s a phenomenon that also goes by another name — karma.

eSports titans Fnatic have secured 7 million USD in their latest round of financing. The Fnatic banner now includes ten professional gaming teams and evidences how eSports companies, like most professional sports teams, are evolving into lifestyle brands.

In 2017, NEVERBLAND worked with Fnatic to unveil Fnatic Gear, an exclusive range of branded peripherals, including headphones and professional-grade keyboards with an Indiegogo campaign.

Since then the brand have hit 1 million Twitter followers, 400k Instagram followers (hat-tip to our sister company: OK COOL) and their eSports concept store, BUNKR, shares prime Shoreditch real estate with brands like APC, Aēsop, and Versace.

Focusing on performance, Fnatic.com is a server-side rendered site with optimised response time and a lightweight frontend. It’s connected to different APIs to display live updated data and stats. The Fnatic website is managed by a custom CMS built as a Single Page Application based on React and Redux.

The eSports market has already breached the $1 billion revenue mark and could generate as much as $1.5 billion by 2020. If teams like Fnatic continue to deploy innovative forms of engagement and monetization they stand to transform the overall sports and entertainment industry sooner than we might think.

NEVERBLAND are building the right long term relationships in the industry to ride that wave.