There’s no denying the success of S2 Games. Having first come to peoples’ attention with the release of their debut title Savage: The Battle For Newerth, it was clear that they had big ideas and weren’t afraid to try them out.

The game, released in 2003, was a hybrid of genres, blending first person shooter, role playing and real time strategy elements in a way that hadn’t been attempted before. The sequel was five years in the making and both, now available as freeware, still enjoy strong followings.

Perhaps the game’s most significant contribution was the creation of the Newerth universe that provided the perfect backdrop for their most ambitious project to date. The 2010 release of Heroes of Newerth, effectively a re-imagining of the world’s most highly played mod Defence of The Ancients (played through Warcraft 3) with a stand-alone platform, was met with a lot of excitement and quickly gained a large number of players. A smart marketing campaign and the limited ability to acquire beta keys only added to the buzz, and even before the game went on to be officially released, it had a strong community behind it.

The game itself has one of the steepest learning curves of any title and its depth and complexity make it both suited for e-sports and casual play alike. S2 Games are aware of this and look to cater not only to the thousands of players who play the game simply for enjoyment but also look to make sure that those who wish to play the game at the highest level, with both prestige and prizes on the line, have a platform to do so. It’s a balancing act at times but anyone who has used the Heroes of Newerth interface and seen S2’s commitment to putting up prize money for tournaments around the world will be able to testify that they have delivered what both factions of the community want.

Tasked with care for the e-sports side of things is Shashi Singh, a name that probably won’t be immediately familiar to anyone but the most hardcore of e-sports historians. He currently operates as the e-sports community manager for S2 Games. This is no idle appointment either. Shashi has been involved with e-sports for years, starting as far back as twelve years old where he looked to cut his teeth as a staff writer with one of the biggest American brands in the industry, compLexity.

Sashi Singh, S2 Games' Esports Community Manager

Working his way up to head of staff and mentored by Jason Lake – “He pretty much taught me my work ethic and the importance of meeting deadlines and such,” Shashi explains while we shoot the breeze before the interview begins, “...and he also indirectly taught me about the e-sports dream.” Shashi quickly found himself wanting to know more and more about how he could get involved across a variety of titles. A competitive Quake player, with the alias “DetonatoR,” his involvement through compLexity quickly opened his eyes to the wide range of titles out there and the differences in each community.

What followed reads like a tour of all the great phases in e-sports history. Shashi was involved with GiantRealm, WSVG, Dell, AGP, the National ESL and the CGS, during which time he continued to work with compLexity. After that died, he was installed as the Editor In Chief of the Evil Geniuses website before moving to Loaded – an organization that would later be bought out by his previous employers.

During his spell in Loaded, he started playing the HoN beta and liked what he saw. Although not a top player in this discipline, his e-sports experience made him a perfect choice to manage the Heroes of Newerth team for the organization. When Evil Geniuses made their swoop to absorb Loaded, rather than go with them, he pursued a job with S2 Games. His experience made him a perfect fit for what they needed – someone who knew the e-sports landscape and understood what was required from the game if it was to appease the competitive community; a significant number of which were sceptical that it could match DoTA. S2 Games had gotten their man.

Ahead of some big developments for Heroes of Newerth, Shashi was kind enough to take the time to speak to me about what the future had in store and how he saw S2 Games progressing ahead of the upcoming battle against DotA 2, amongst other things.

OK, so we can get the questions rolling. I guess the first thing I should ask is what your work with S2 entails. Being focused on the e-sports side of things probably sees you doing a wide range of tasks... What would you say are the most important of those?

Since the Heroes of Newerth scene is still developing, we do quite a lot of work in a broad range of areas. However, I've found that there are some areas that are more important than others in each stage of this scene's development.

At this point we're in the middle of two different stages. The first stage is all about quality. We want to better organize and revamp our current e-Sports scene so that the quality of the various aspects of it is a lot better than it currently is. While the scene has been described as both strong and successful, there are better ways in which a lot of things can be done. This includes working closely with all elements already involved with the scene, from tournament organizers and the e-Sports media to the gamers themselves. We are also working on the way we actually structure, present, and treat the scene on our platforms (forums, website, social media, in game, etc.).

The second stage is expansion. Our scene, as it is now in our niche of a community, is very strong and can be considered sustaining to some extent, however we want to break out of that niche into the 'mainstream' of e-Sports to become a true e-Sports title. The main thing is expanding and being successful with collaborations between various big companies and partners. Expanding can mean anything from taking a more aggressive stance on how we treat our presence at events (the upcoming Dreamhack Summer and Winter events are good examples) in terms of event planning, opening up discussions with big companies and organizations (tournaments, media, teams) that aren't already involved in either the scene or working on interesting initiatives with them.

So, to answer your question, prioritizing certain tasks over others really depends on our goals and at the current situation. These can be things like being involved in all aspects of the scene to some extent to promote and guarantee quality, working on partnerships with various companies, working on collaborations and initiatives with current partners, etc.

Working in e-sports is a tough job but someone has got to do it

Would you yourself see Heroes of Newerth as a refinement of an existing e-Sports genre / franchise? Obviously it owes more than a huge nod to the DotA mod. What do you feel especially proud of that makes HoN more e-Sports viable than its predecessors or competitors?

Yes, I do see Heroes of Newerth as a refinement. No matter how people feel about certain aspects of the game, you can't argue against what the game offers to the e-Sports scene. In terms of its features it has a pretty good list of features that other e-Sports titles, or titles that are vying to become e-Sports titles, do not.

Heroes of Newerth has a working replays and spectator system. Not only can you watch matches live, but you can also download and watch the replay. Our spectator mode's interface, and subsequently the replay mode's interface, are both very detailed. Just by looking at the screen you can see everything happening in the match, even who is leading in gold and experience per minute. On top of this, our spectator interface can be customized by casters and organizations for a better streaming and shout casting experience if need be.

The game also has a reconnect feature that allows players who have disconnected a match to reconnect in a certain amount of time. This feature actually hits close to home as I noticed that even StarCraft 2 had problems that could have been fixed with this at MLG Dallas. Players had trouble keeping a connection to the game and this ruined some awesome matches that I looked forward to. Not only this, but also while other games like StarCraft 2 might not have LAN mode, we are able to provide LAN when appropriate at events.

All of these features, including in-game VoIP and the ability to pause are in the game because we developed Heroes of Newerth to be a competitive title. Can a lot of these features be improved on? Yes, and that is exactly what we plan to do. These features are awesome for an e-Sports scene, but we plan to add a lot more to these features to offer more as a competitive title.

Outside of the game, as someone who has been involved in e-Sports for quite a while, I've actually been thinking a lot about this. I find that we are at a very interesting time in e-Sports. S2 Games, and companies like us are actually taking a very hands-on approach to e-Sports. Few companies can say that they've developed a game title and were as involved in e-Sports. These few companies are setting a very interesting precedent in e-Sports today that will set the tone for this coming era of e-Sports, and I for one cannot wait to see what this precedent does for e-Sports as a whole.

Well, the next question would have to be with DotA 2 looming large are you still feeling confident that you can continue to be at the forefront when it comes to this genre of game? Would you agree with some people's assertion that a large number of HoN users are treading water until its arrival?

We're pretty confident in Heroes of Newerth and what it offers competitive players. As I mentioned above, we have a lot of features in the game that we are proud of and plan to improve on a lot more in the future. We aren't too concerned with the competition, mostly because it's better and more productive to focus on and improve our game title. Competition breeds quality.

Has the appearance of rival products got you thinking about any new developments that would keep HoN not only fresh and interesting for long standing players but also would help separate it from the others?

We do have a lot of cool things that we want to do to offer more as a competitive title. This isn't really because of the appearance of rival products, but mostly because we're all very passionate about the concept of a competitive title and about e-Sports. These new developments will add on to e-Sports because we love e-Sports. We already have a great list of features in the game that work hand in hand with competitive play, but that's just the beginning. We're constantly fleshing out ideas to make these features more robust. So, yes we are always working on ways to keep HoN fresh and interesting, with our constant updates and all of the features we plan to add and improve on.

In terms of the competitive community, do you listen to the top teams and players when planning what direction to take the game?

Yes, we do value the opinion and feedback we get from our top teams and players. Internally, we have some very talented former professional DotA players working for us. Externally, we definitely encourage players to give us feedback as we do take that into account.

As I mentioned before, we take a very hands-on approach to e-Sports and so we interact constantly with these players to provide a better experience for the competitive community.

Vowing to make Heroes of Newerth the number one game in its field

A lot of people have talked about Starcraft 2 as the definitive e-sports title. Certainly the amount of money and the level of competition it has generated would bear that out. Where do you see HoN in terms of the e-sports hierarchy and in particular what do you think are the limitations - if any - for a title like HoN?

Since its release, StarCraft 2 has definitely gained huge traction as an e-Sports title. StarCraft hasn't really picked up in North America as it did on the other side of the world, but I definitely see StarCraft 2 changing that over here, to some extent, as a lot of companies have started getting interested and involved in e-Sports, because of StarCraft 2.

This is good news for e-Sports as a whole because this could change the mentality and ultimately the exposure e-Sports has in the mainstream (coverage and support from IGN, G4, even Giantbomb already being good starts). This is definitely a blessing for Heroes of Newerth as well since we've been in very good discussions with and managed the support of a lot of these big mainstream companies who became interested in e-Sports because of StarCraft 2.

As far as the hierarchy is concerned, we would hope that Heroes of Newerth gets the support of the e-Sports community as we continue to develop the game to be a competitive title.

How actively involved are you with tournaments? For example, we see a big push from LoL with some massive prize funds, which is why it's been involved in some big tournaments. HoN is more reserved but has had some big ones, notably DreamHack. What plans are there for big tournaments in the future?

In the past we've been pretty conservative with the way we treated tournaments because we wanted to look at the cost-effective way before dealing with a ton of money in all directions. We did obtain interest from a lot of big organizations but at that time we wanted to look for options that would benefit the scene the most.

There were a lot of factors that went into our decisions, from looking into how events were run, how organizations treated their admins, divisions, and the teams in that event, if there was any real benefit to collaborating with that particular organization, and if the scene was really developed enough to take advantage of a collaboration.

Presently, though, we are taking a more aggressive stance on e-Sports as our niche scene is better developed than it was in the past. With that said, we have a lot of exciting announcements to make in the coming weeks and months.

And finally are there any scoops or exclusives that you can give the Cadred readers, or any final thoughts?

Yep, we do have a lot of exciting new things in the works, which will be taking shape this summer. The Dreamhack Summer event will be the start (and continuation) of an awesome collaboration with a few different companies to really push the Heroes of Newerth presence, and this mentality will continue into an even bigger Dreamhack Winter event. After that we have a couple of great things to announce for the Heroes of Newerth e-Sports scene that will make some jaws drop.