What is Rize Nexus?

Gaming websites… No matter where you are on the e-sports road chances are you're going to have to get one at some point. If you're starting your own team you can't get accepted into leagues or ladders without one.

Maybe you're a budding manager and you can't get a team to come and work with you until you've shelled out for one they like the look of. Maybe you're an old bloater, bored of taking games seriously, who just wants a space where like-minded people can share their views and have a bit of banter. Either way, you're going to have to try and get something organised and it doesn't come cheap.

Naturally people have looked to turn this requirement into a business model, ranging from the extortionate high end fees, to the affordable if not a little generic "clan sites" provided by several companies. So, what is difference about Rize Nexus? Well, lots of things but let's start with the big one – it's absolutely free of charge.

More on that soon. Naturally though if you read our website you're likely a seasoned eSports veteran, as jaded and cynical as an aging homicide detective. You've seen it all before, heard it all before and don't believe there's such a thing as a free lunch. Yet if you have been involved in eSports long enough to have an air of suspicion about everything then you will already know the name Rize. They're the same group that were behind the Rize Gaming organisation back in the day and in actual fact, they hadn't gone anywhere.


One of the Painkiller winners, fnatic's VoO, in the CPL Tour of 2005

History

"Having already made a splash on the scene by defeating some of the “best” in recent Doom 3 duels, the Rize team is an “old” fresh new face on the pro gaming scene populated by a mere handful of teams who have maintained any semblance of longevity."



"Easily walking past the current top 3 rated teams in Europe Rize Gaming is bound for greatness on the pro circuit."



"The best Day of Defeat team, the best Quake 3 dueler, and quite possibly the best Counter-Strike Source team Rize Gaming may very well be the gaming world's best kept secret."



The name will be familiar to anyone who has followed e-sports from about 2005, when the name was synonymous with a gaming organisation that raising eyebrows on the CPL tour. With several teams across games such as Painkiller, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Source, Soldier of Fortune 2, Quake 3, Doom 3, Enemy Territory, Day of Defeat and Tactical Ops, it was clear that they meant business. Success soon followed in several of these titles, with podium finishes at several LAN events.

Yet this was the culmination of lots of work prior to it, ground work for the organisation having been laid back in April 2004. The founders hadn't wanted to be "here today and gone tomorrow" like many of the other organisations that were cropping up in eSports at the time. With a solid foundation they achieved both success and notoriety, being rated in the top three organisations across each of the scenes they represented at the time.

This made it all the sadder when they had to close their doors on the gaming organisation in 2006 due to working commitments for the young management team. It didn't close its doors entirely at this point, even though its forays into the world of competitive gaming were over. It was just more of a case that the founders were patiently waiting for the way in which they could next make their impact.

The Founders

As you'd probably expect the two founders have a history of being involved in competitive gaming themselves, actually having been on the frontline of the servers themselves before hanging up their mice to focus on the business side of things.

Mark Laurie (pictured left), the Chief Operations Officer, started playing competitive games over a decade ago, starting with Quake 3 and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. When a new title named Call of Duty was released in 2003, Mark wasted no time in making the move to the game and enjoyed some success for both Rize and Levitation Gaming in both the original and its sequel. With the best of his competitive years behind him, he was absorbed into the void that is World of Warcraft before redoubling his focus on the Rize project.


Michael Black, the Chief Executive Officer, fondly remembers his days playing Reaper bots in QuakeWorld before taking his competitive play online in 1998. After representing 4kings for some time, he moved over to the Soldier of Fortune series and was created a team for Rize Gaming in 2004. After some modest success he decided that it was a young(er) mans game and quit to focus on steering the ship. As he puts it now – "I still dabble from time to time but unfortunately, it’s with the likes of Total War."

The Nexus Project

So, where were the pair going to focus their attentions? How could they make a telling contribution to the world of eSports and 'rize' again? Well, terrible puns not withstanding, the two came up with an idea to provide team websites for free to anyone who needed them. It was a simple philosophy. They wanted to provide a free service, as opposed to an expensive product, which had become the norm. The idea seemed almost utopian and was easy to stumble across. Seeing their vision through would prove to be a lot more difficult than their initial brainstorming. Mark explained:



The simple to use Nexus control panel makes customising your website easy "The problem was, web design and media companies were charging an arm and a leg to design custom, professionally built gaming CMS’. Top pro teams could achieve this through sponsorship or in-house web teams, but 95% of teams out there had to make do with badly designed, badly coded and very generic gaming templates and CMS’. Anything that was half-decent required monthly payments, or if they were free, the features were hugely limited in an attempt to force the team to upgrade to their premium paid packages. We thought enough was enough! We’re gamers ourselves and have been running our own teams for years and have hit this barrier numerous times ourselves."

He continues:

"There is always that worry when starting a new team, do you invest money in a team you’re not sure that will last? Game and voice servers are always priority and not to forget, far cheaper. When we’ve ran our own teams, we’ve had quotes into the £1000s for a custom made team site. Let’s face it; for most teams this isn’t realistic.

Not everyone has the means or capabilities to fire up a fully content managed gaming site themselves, so we thought we’d make it extremely easy and completely FREE to do exactly that, in less than thirty seconds."

It took a long time to bring the project to the stage it was at now and it was a path fraught with difficulty. Even the world of e-sports management seemed simpler by comparison. The venture was also completely self-funded but such was their belief in the idea they never wavered. It didn’t help that as they developed their ideas other competitors were looking to provide similar products for pocket money prices, although still no-one had boasted a free service.

Mark was philosophical about the challenges that such competition brings:

"It was hard to consider what’s already available on the market as competitors in a financial sense, as we are the only operation offering a completely free service, however, our goal is to become the most unique and customisable CMS available to gamers, which will most likely upset the apple-cart. At the end of the day, healthy competition between companies can only benefit the gamers, as they will be forced to take their service to the next level. As the great Oprah Winfrey says “Where there is no struggle, there is no strength."

Nexus Arrives

So now that Nexus is here, what can people expect from it? Well, Nexus offers a huge range of tools and features to manage your team’s day to day running. Team, roster, news, downloads and event management, voice server widget, shout box, custom integrated forums, sponsor & partner management and our latest and greatest feature: the Nexus Skin Editor. This allows you to completely edit your site’s skin, meaning adding custom backgrounds, headers, changing colour schemes, fonts, layouts etc. Customisability is high on the agenda from Rize, and they don’t want to limit options to the people utilising their service. Not just being aimed at PC Gaming either, the service supports all major gaming platforms: PC, XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3. “Although we are PC gamers through and through” Mark adds “we realise that the console community is growing larger by the day and they are also in need of the same web resources as PC based teams.”



Websites can easily be changed around to new skins as you deem appropriate They’re not just stopping there either: “We will constantly be adding new skins and features as we never expect to fully “finish” Nexus, it will always be an ongoing project where we will constantly improve the CMS and the service in any way possible.

We are also be aiming to offer a centralised online community at one point, where Nexus clans/teams can easily sign up to our giveaways, hosted competition and cups.”

And in addition to all that the project has even provided the platform for the two old-school managers to start supporting a team again, Team Sypher, who gave their new partners a taste of the podium once more with a third place finish in the LoL competition at the Intel Extreme Masters New York.

It only seems to fair to give Mark the last word. He understands that weary cynicism that people in e-sports have from time to time because he’s felt it too. Still, he hopes people will see this as a solution to an existing problem as opposed to a creation of another one. “We would like to make it clear” he finishes “that Nexus is a service for gamers and not a product we want to sell to gamers.”

To get your free team website go to rizenexus.com


Source
Richard Lewis on Cadred.org