Esports World Cup (EWC) 2025
bright! studios’ returns to the Esports World Cup with SP Grid
The Esports World Cup (EWC) is an annual, multi-game, international esports tournament, taking place in the Saudi capital of Riyadh across six weeks between July and August. With a club championship format, the tournament hosts thousands of gamers across 25 esports titles, with matches taking place at several stage in the SEF Arena, a purpose-built esports complex of over 34,000 m². 2025 marked the fourth consecutive year of bright! studios’ creative and technical support of the event, which included several years at Gamers 8 before its rebrand to the larger, more globally focused EWC. Across four large stages and three smaller venues, the bright! team utilised the powerful feature set of Stage Precision’s latest release: the experience platform SP Grid, to make light work of complex, multi-zone media playback, content development and control.
“2025 included more stages and tournaments than ever before, and our scope was largely on the media server control side of things,” explains Leon Herche, Creative Producer at bright! studios. “We worked across a total of seven gaming stages, building the complete video and lighting control backbone, as well as content creation for screen graphics.”
The bright! team worked within a one-month pre-production schedule, requiring complex workflows and automations to be created and tested for all seven gaming stages within the timeframe. Each stage has large LED walls for media playback, plus dynamic lighting to help create the atmosphere demanded by specific gameplay events. Having used SP by Stage Precision on past EWC events, bright! was enthusiastic to put the new features of SP Grid to the test for this year’s activation.
“From the initial building and development point of view, the visual development tools within SP Grid were very helpful,” confirms Herche. “Because of the low-code development environment offered by SP Grid, connections between input data and output commands can be made within the drag-and-drop interface. This makes things a lot easier, as everyone on the production team can build the logics they need as and when they need it, sharing the creative responsibility across the team and eliminating the need to go through hundreds of lines of code to create new experiences.”
SP Grid’s intuitive workflow development environment makes it quick and simple to make changes on the fly, without the need for expert programming, and opens up the experience development workflow to a wider group of production team members. In practice, this means that when endpoints are changed, it takes just a few clicks on the SP Grid UI to make new connections, whereas traditionally, custom coding would be required. Nevertheless, full support for Python scripting within SP Grid means that custom coding is available if required.
This ability to build logics and blocks of actions has the effect of aligning cross-department functions. For example, bright! built timelines in SP Grid to action multiple triggers simultaneously, such as activating stage hydraulics, playing corresponding media on the LEDs, starting an audio track and activating lighting modes. When a particular game event happens, such as a match win or elimination of a player, with a single trigger, a chain of events is put into motion, eliminating the need for manual communication between departments in order to facilitate multi-effect moments. Of course, this has several benefits in terms of accuracy and timing, as well as helping with physical operator staffing needs.
For each of the games, bright! leveraged SP Grid’s custom user interface design tools to introduce branded elements to each workflow, enabling easy identification of, and switching between, workflows. Into each custom UI, bright! built several logic bricks for activating specific game scenarios, such as in the case of player elimination or a match win by a specific team. In these cases, a quick touch button allows for the sequence of related content playback and lighting effects to be triggered instantly.
“Another key advantage of using SP Grid is the new SP Grid Viewer app, which we had on a tablet for EWC,” recalls Herche. “During the event setup, it was great to be able to watch the project coming together from different positions wirelessly via the app whilst walking around the stage, without needing to go back to the media server station to trigger different actions.”
SP Grid introduced a new approach to licensing, with a credit system that scales depending on the number of devices connected to the platform. For bright! this allowed them to offer their client a competitive service, with smaller stages demanding fewer credits on project files as they require fewer external device connections.
Having had extensive experience with Stage Precision’s software tools, the bright! team have found the evolution of features in SP Grid to offer a more advanced and powerful solution that made light work of the complex multi-zone production at EWC.
“All the changes in SP Grid have ultimately made it easier for new people to use it, and the events system and logic system offer many more advanced features,” says Herche. “With the custom UIs, you can recreate anything you want, with creativity. Every button, every slider and every element can be designed as you need them to be, and the ability to incorporate branded elements is very helpful on a large-scale event covering several unique gameplay universes.” Furthermore, the SP Grid plug-in library, which allows for custom plug-ins to be shared in a plug-in marketplace, opened up opportunities for connection to even more devices.
From eye-catching LED visuals to lighting effects and custom gameplay experiences, such as the new-to-2025 Totem ritual, SP Grid formed the reliable and flexible backbone of technical control across all six weeks of the EWC experience. With powerful updated features that put the user experience at the forefront, SP Grid unites sophisticated control and automation within a highly customisable platform. “SP Grid is a new, improved experience for SP users, and a completely accessible tool for those completely new to these kinds of workflows,” says Herche. “Achieving the experience we created at EWC 2025 would have been beyond challenging without it.”