A Sydney, NS based tech company is providing superior eSports gaming experiences for players, becoming the only platform to offer tournament hosting, reduced lag (slow network responses), and streaming and live-casting functionality all in one package.

Swarmio eSports, Canada’s first web-based channel with live-casting content dedicated for eSports, provides a portal for players and game companies to host tournaments online for games including Minecraft and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with technology that allows for much more responsive gameplay while online.

eSports players as well as game development companies can utilize the company’s portal to host gaming tournaments. The competitive world of eSports, or electronic sports wherein video game players compete in organized leagues, has spiked in popularity in the last decade. Back in March an eSports event hosted by Intel had more than 46 million unique online users, and 173,000 fans attending the event live in Katowice, Poland.

Originally launched in 2015, Swarmio eSports is unique in that it offers the three main components needed for eSports gamers to play and stream their content to viewers. “We’re the only vertically integrated eSports company out there,” says Swarmio’s Chief Revenue Officer John Smith. “If you look at our competition, you’ve got people out there who claim to reduce ping (a determinate of network speed), people out there who do tournament management, and people out there that do live-cast streaming, but you don’t have one that integrates all three.”

In 2016, Swarimo’s parent company Ubique Networks Inc. received nearly $1 million in funding from the Canadian Government to develop technology to improve online gaming by providing servers that equalize the gaming experience regardless of physical location or Internet capabilities. Normally someone located closer to a game server would experience better response times than someone located further away, thus creating unfair gameplay even if it’s by a fraction of a second.

A main reason eSports players travel for competitions across the globe is because the speeds of wireless Internet options can be unreliable. When playing a game that calls for pinpoint shooting accuracy, milliseconds of lag can mean a loss for the team. LAN, or local area network, is a connection that spans a smaller area and is increasingly more reliable than other wireless connections. eSports competitions will utilize LAN connections to ensure the players encounter as minimal lag as possible.

Swarmio’s Marketing and eSports Analyst Rory Andrews believes the structure of Swarmio’s servers, which use an algorithm to locate the most centralized server for all players, could mean players wouldn’t necessarily have to travel to get guaranteed lagless gameplay. “The solution that [eSports players] want is as close to a LAN experience over the Internet…because LAN is the only thing they trust in an actual competitive scene,” says Andrews. “What we’re trying to create is the closest thing to LAN as possible.”

Rory Andrews speaking on why Swarmio is able to bring several different technologies together for a better gaming experience for eSports players and game companies.

Swarmio currently has physical servers in Chicago, Seattle, and Toronto, with cloud-based servers on the way. Cloud servers will allow for pop-up servers to give focused and improved Internet to specific areas where it is needed on a case-to-case basis. Swarimo’s Managing Director Senthil Ratnasabapathy says, “What our system will do is figure out where you are, where you competitor is, and we will be having nodes in major cities. So what it will do is create a temporary session for this game, and move it to a place where both of you will have a level playing field.”

Looking forward, Swarimo eSports will allow users to play the extremely popular game League of Legends on its portal by the end of the month, with Team Fortress 2 coming shortly afterwards. Conversations are also underway to hopefully set up partnerships to host games for Overwatch and Dota 2 as well, all of which are extremely popular eSports titles.

The next hurtle for the company will be developing into Asian countries. For integrating into these areas, Ratnasabapathy says “Singapore is the gateway to Asia.” Therefore, plans are underway to have a large node placed in Singapore with the goal to keep developing into the continent as the company progresses forward.