Esports tournament organiser Blast won a hat trick of trophies at the inaugural GameFace Awards ceremony last week, which was held online.
GameFace is a new business-oriented esports awards show, aiming to ‘make heroes out of the people behind esports organisations and to connect them to global brands’.
The ceremony celebrated everything from the best social media and internal events teams to the best partnership activations and tournament experiences.
Blast took home trophies for Best Internal Social Media Team, Best Live Event Production and Best Partnership Activation for its work with watch brand TW Steel.
There were gold trophies and also ‘highly commended’ accolades on the night.
“We are determined to bring our media and marketing contacts and awards judging processes to the esports sector and believe this awards programme is the first step in our mission to connect global brands to esports organisations to help them develop fruitful partnerships.”
Jeremy King, GameFace
Betway also did well, with two highly commended awards and a gold trophy for Best Internal Content Team.
Entries came from around the world including Latin America, Singapore, Sweden, China and Ghana.
GameFace was founded by the management team behind Festival of Media, a company which has been producing award programmes for the global advertising sector for the last 15 years.
“We are determined to bring our media and marketing contacts and awards judging processes to the esports sector and believe this awards programme is the first step in our mission to connect global brands to esports organisations to help them develop fruitful partnerships,” said Jeremy King, co-founder of GameFace. “We would like to thank everyone who entered and believed in what we are doing.”
As part of the process of bringing global brands into the esports sector, the jury comprised of global media directors from Unilever, P&G, Adidas and Virgin, alongside media agencies VCCP, MediaCom, Mindshare and Havas and other people in esports.
Full list of GameFace 2021 award winners
Winners are gold trophy winners unless otherwise stated:
- Best Partnership Activation: Blast Premier and TW Steel for Time to Rush (Gold), Betway and Blast (Highly Commended)
- Best Internal Social Media Team: Blast social media team (Gold), Betway social media team (Highly Commended)
- Best Internal Events Team: Fnatic events team (Gold), Evos events team (Highly Commended)
- Best Fan Activation: Havas Sports and Entertainment for The Panorama Diner – Now Serving Coca-Cola
- Best Internal Content Team: Betway content team
- Best Brand Game Experience in Esports: Mindshare China – KFC – The Growth of Colonel AI
- Best event – tournament organisers category: ESL Gaming – IEM Katowice 2020
- Best live event production: Blast production team
- Rising Star(s): Rezi fron LDN UTD and Patrik Jackiewicz from ChallengerMode
There’s more info on the GameFace awards website
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
