Interview with Relics: An Indian mobile gamers community focused on Brawl Stars

GamingonPhone had the chance to talk with Panda, the Founder and COO to know more about Relics’ current and future plans. In the interview with Relics, we asked a few questions regarding their rise on Brawl Stars, their expansion to other mobile games and future plans of the organisation.

Let us start the Relics interview with the background story

Panda: Prior to Relics being formed, we were just a group of clubs that were affiliated to various organizations, like Nova, and SynerGE.When we were affiliated with those organizations, ESL India decided to start hosting tournaments for Brawl Stars and our members decided to participate. This led to ESL India organizing LAN Events where Brawl Stars was also featured. This galvanized the community and we saw a lot of people forming teams to participate and become the best. What happened was that invariably most of the teams, and all of the top teams in India, were affiliated with our group of clubs. It wasn’t intentional, but once we saw the potential, we kept at it and consolidated our position in Brawl eSports in India, winning the majority of the major Brawl eSports events, and every single LAN event conducted for Brawl Stars in India. To summarize, it was a case of the right place and the right time.

How would you describe Relics and differentiate it from other organisations?

Panda: I wouldn’t classify Relics as a classical organization. We don’t operate for profits, or for any financial return. We’re basically a group of people who volunteer our time to building and fostering a community. To those ends, we have a lot of community outreach events in the form of daily tournaments, interviews with pro-players, AMAs with the management team. We do not have merchandise, and any money we make goes into ladder rewards and giving back to the community. We invest our own money, time, and resources into the community. People who’ve joined Relics, join us for a multitude of reasons, to summarize them it would be the following:

• Our vision
• Our direction
• Our community
• Our reputation
• Our club building expertise
• Our management skills

In short, we are a community first organization.

Which games current Relics is associated with? And what are the current scenario in those games?

Relics is predominantly in Brawl Stars. Other games that we’re in includes Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Wild Rift, COD Mobile and PUBG Mobile. In regards to Brawl Stars, we have about 40 clubs, out of which 36 are Indian, and over 30 of our clubs are in the top 100 in the Indian leaderboards. In the global position, we have 2 clubs in the top 50 clubs, and another club in the top 100.

Apart from Brawlstars dominance, what is your vision towards the other games?

Panda: Other than Brawl Stars, we are currently focusing on Wild Rift. We started out Wild Rift journey trying to ensure that our community members from the other games have somewhere to call home in the Wild Rift fandom. But we didn’t realize the potential that the game had when we did create our Wild Rift branch. It looks like Wild Rift is poised to dominate the Mobile Gaming esports

The scene in 2022 and our goal is to stay at the forefront from the perspective of Content Creators, Tournaments Organizers, and Esports Pioneers. Blazin has been in charge of partnerships for Wild Rift, and has completely set up our eSports division by filling all the necessary positions from players, to managers, to casters, and streamers.”

“Relics Started in Wild Rift back in December. We found good responses from the existing Indian community and saw rapid growth on our discord server. We also created 2 competitive teams, Relics AT and Relics Ragnarok, both of which are arguably one of the best teams in the Indian esports scene at the moment. We also organised the Relics Rifters Cup, an ISC tournament for all competitive teams. 40 teams participated in this tourney, and we have also live-streamed the Finals for this tournament from our official YouTube channel .” – Soham “Blazin” Roy (Relic’s Wild Rift lead)

Who runs Relics and what are the future plans of relics as an organisation?

Panda: The CEO of Relics is Bos, and l’m the COO. I manage the bulk of the day-to-day operations, but the organization is largely run by the Staff. Directives pass from the CEO/COO to the Board of Directors and finally to the staff who execute the directives aligned with the organization goals. As we mentioned earlier, we are community-run. To put it bluntly, Relics is at a very confusing juncture in the esports organization life cycle.

We have a lot of options at the table and we need to weigh the pros and cons of each of these options before making a decision. Impulsive decisions, at this juncture do not seem to be effective, and are largely unnecessary for us at the moment. From the perspective of the future, there are a few avenues that we’re actively looking into:

• Esports
• Events Management
• Partnerships
• Content Creation

Esports

We will try and nurture a competitive environment and give our members, and all Indian community members opportunities to improve their skills and abilities by hosting routine scrims. If some of our teams are actually at the world-calibre level, we will try to act as an intermediary agency and try to get them contracts at higher tier organizations. Holding onto talent, though very enticing, would be a disservice to the athlete in question, if they could flourish under better circumstances or environments.

Events Management

We’ll try and keep hosting scrims while streaming such events to hype up the community and our goals here are to content-centric. We want the larger player base in India to realise that esports exist in our scene and that we’re comparable to any world level athletes.

Partnerships

Relics has grown from 10 Clubs in 2020 April, since our founding to 40 clubs. From 600 discord members to over 8,000 members across 40 servers. We are looking to leverage our sheer size and dominance in certain communities to deliver value to our possible partners in the future.

Content Creation

We have a slew of content creators at Relics, with a few at over 100k subs. We’re looking to provide small level content creators exposure and expertise to help grow their presence and become larger with more engaged communities. Hopefully, by the end of 2021, we’ll have a content creator ensemble who can collaborate with one another to provide a truly unique viewing experience to our members, and people in the Indian community alike.

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