Gfinity (AIM: GFIN), a world-leading esports and gaming solutions provider, today announces the launch of a new website, Mtgrocks.com.
The new site is a platform for all things Magic: The Gathering (MTG), the popular collectable and digital collectable card game.
It will cover the traditional trading card game, Magic: The Gathering Arena (the online video game), and all other areas of MTG, providing the latest news and guides to the community.
Gfinity Digital Media
Mtgrocks.com joins Gfinity Digital Media (GDM) that currently comprises five wholly-owned gaming websites, Gfinityesports.com; Realsport101.com; Stealthoptional.com; Epicstream.com; Racinggames.gg, which attract 14 million users per month combined.
The new site will build off of the success of EpicStream’s MTG Facebook page ‘MTG Rocks’, which has over 280,000 likes, and its network of MTG Facebook groups, which have over 80,000 members in total. It will also utilise the Company’s new content management system and Gfinity’s Google backlinking strategy that links GDM pages together to help fast-track user growth.
Mtgrocks.com will benefit from the existing relationships the Company enjoys with Venatus and Connatix for programmatic ad delivery, site takeovers and video serving.
Mtgrocks.com will be fully designed, developed and delivered by the internal team behind EpicStream, which has grown its user base to over 1 million users since joining Gfinity Digital Media and now has an MTG community of over 375,000 users a month, including social channels. The content will complement and support EpicStream’s existing MTG coverage, delving deeper into the game and its peripherals.
Why Magic: The Gathering?
Magic: The Gathering has been around for over 25 years and yet the community continues to grow. More recently, MTG Arena was released in 2018, a new premier way to play the game on PC and Mac, with a mobile release arriving in 2021.
According to Bloomberg, nearly three million active users were playing MTG Arena in 2019, a number which is expected to grow to nearly 11 million gamers this year. There’s a market of around 250 million people who are into collectable or trading card games, and MTG’s total community spanned across 35 million players in 2018 (Business Insider).
The release of MTG Arena brought a new dimension to the game – esports.
Following the release of Arena, MTG Twitch channels jumped from around 30 concurrent streams a month in January 2018 to 165 in September 2018. By 2020, over 62 million hours of MTG was watched on Twitch across the year (TwitchTracker).
MTG’s standing as an esports title proper was cemented by its total prize pool of $1.6 million in 2020, making it the 17th highest game in esports earnings across the year (EsportsEarnings).
MTG’s surge in recent years is only getting bigger. Hasbro, the popular toy and boardgame brand, is the parent company of ‘Wizards of the Coast’ which owns MTG. Hasbro has big plans for the esports side of MTG, as they look to capitalise on the huge growth of the sector, which they consistently mention in their quarterly reports.
Upcoming expansions to the world of MTG include an online action RPG, Magic: Legends, and a new Netflix show directed by the Russo Brothers, as MTG looks to attract to new audiences with a wider appeal.
With MTG set to be available across gamer’s phones, tablets and computers, all with a beautiful UI and a renewed focus on esports, Gfinity Digital Media is primed to take advantage of this growth opportunity.