Kwok Leung Ng
Analyst · Alliance Global Partners
Thank you, Lasse, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon.
I'm extremely pleased with the resiliency of our business and the solid performance we delivered in the third quarter despite the significant challenges we faced in the first half of 2020 arising from the COVID pandemic that persisted throughout the quarter. While strong results in the in-person total of our business was our primary growth driver for the company prior to the onset of the pandemic, operational restrictions, including extremely limited social gatherings mandated globally, impacted this part of our business model for both Allied Esports and the WPT during the third quarter.
In light of this, I continue to be very pleased with our team's ability to adapt to the challenges by successfully pivoting our operational focus to our Multiplatform Content and Interactive Services pillars.
Solid third quarter revenue growth in Multiplatform Content and Interactive Services pillars significantly mitigated the impact of the pandemic on our businesses as we continue to serve the esports and poker community. In addition, as Tony will discuss further, we made aggressive strides to pay down our convertible debt principal to $3.1 million.
As we look ahead, we believe that the strategic pivots we made as a result of the pandemic has accelerated our ability to monetize all 3 pillars of our strategy. Importantly, we believe this has put us in a great position to better serve our customers in the future and take full advantage of the significant growth opportunities as the economy continues to recover and the environment normalize.
Despite the near-term impact the pandemic has had on our financials, we do see a longer-term silver lining for Allied Esports and WPT. As gamers abide by stay-at-home restrictions and with fewer entertainment options during the pandemic, gaming is filling the void, and its popularity is clearly on the rise.
On the esports side, more time is spent on gaming. The proportions of gamers who spend 5-plus hours per week gaming jumped from 63% to 82% during the pandemic. Similarly, more money is being spent on gaming. The gaming industry has experienced a 39% increase in gaming spend when compared to pre-pandemic levels and expected to increase an additional 21% post-pandemic relative to spending before COVID-19.
And finally, gamers are watching more esports content. Audiences watched 7.5 billion hours of content across all live streaming platforms in the third quarter. Year-over-year, the live streaming industry is up 92% compared to Q3 2019.
With that, let's shift gears and review our third quarter results. Total revenues for the quarter of $5.9 million declined just 2.5% from $6 million in the third quarter last year. Considering the significant restrictions we had in our ability to operate our in-person events for both Allied Esports and WPT, we are pleased with the results.
During the quarter, we generated a strong year-over-year growth in Interactive Services revenue as well as a solid increase in revenue from Multiplatform Content. However, this was offset by sharply lower revenue from in-person experiences as a result of COVID-19 that persisted throughout the third quarter.
As announced earlier in the year, we took significant actions to reduce our expenses and minimize the negative impacts on our financial position results from the pandemic. These actions, which included salary reductions and other cost savings measures, reduced our G&A and selling and marketing expenses by $1.7 million this quarter versus the same period last year.
At the bottom line, our adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.1 million improved significantly from an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2.1 million a year ago, marking the third quarter as the best quarterly adjusted EBITDA results since we entered the public market 1 year ago.
Overall, we remain confident in our ability to capitalize on the valuable positions we created in the [ burgeoning ] esports marketplace, while WPT continues to steadily build its business and we believe has been promising outlook. As we have stated previously, our goal is to maximize the potential of these complementary businesses through a model built around 3 strategic pillars: in-person experiences, Multiplatform Content and Interactive Services.
With that, let's turn to our third quarter operational highlights as well as an update on the previously announced strategic partnerships, beginning with in-person experiences. Similar to most businesses in the live entertainment and event industry, in-person experiences for both Allied Esports and WPT continued to face significant operational headwinds during the third quarter.
Looking first at Allied Esports. After being forced to completely shut down due to the pandemic on March 17, our flagship HyperX Esports Arena Las Vegas at the Luxor Hotel & Casino successfully reopened on June 25 with certain restrictions and a modified schedule for daily play and weekly tournament. To ensure the health and safety of guests and team members, HyperX Esports Arena has implemented extensive sanitization protocols throughout the venue and have deployed reduced operating hours.
Furthermore, enforced physical distancing remained in effect throughout the quarter, lowering customer capacity by approximately 35% of pre-pandemic levels, with food and beverage service also limited. We believe we have earned the trust of our customers to provide a safe place to play with our enhanced safety and sanitization protocols. That said, since the reopening, the demand we have seen for our weekly tournaments is very encouraging.
Third quarter highlights included a weekly event at HyperX Esports Arena, Friday Frags, featuring Fortnite; and Saturday Night Speedway, featuring Mario Kart. Both have shown considerable growth across all viewing matrix in the third quarter by comparison to the first quarter pre-pandemic levels. Most notably, unique viewers increased 1,144% with Friday Frags and 136% with Saturday Night Speedway as compared to the pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2020.
While in-person events continued to be limited by the pandemic, during the third quarter, we are pleased to execute 2 events with the HyperX Esports Truck, including an outdoor event with local Saturday Night Speedway sponsor, Findlay Volkswagen.
After a 5-month hiatus, the WPT also resumed the in-person pillar of its business during the third quarter. In August, the WPT returned to live poker with the record-setting WPT Japan event in Tokyo. The event drew 726 players in WPT's first live event since March 2020 and marked the first time WPT secured a mainstream sponsor for WPT event -- WPT Japan with Sega Sammy Corporation. In September, the WPT hosted a second event with partypoker US Network that featured another record-breaking prize pool in the New Jersey market of more than $432,000 for the WPT Online Borgata Series Main Event.
With the ongoing restrictions of in-person events during the quarter, we remained focused on Interactive Services and Multiplatform Content. Not only did this help recruit nearly all of the in-person revenues loss as a result of the pandemic, we are confident our efforts here will also help strengthen the pipeline of new fans as potential attendees at our live events when the pandemic subsides. Similar to last quarter, the shift to holding events online continued to strengthen our Interactive Services pillar.
In the third quarter, we saw strong growth in our proprietary offerings. We extended the Legend Series brand in tournament format to VALORANT, completing 5 online VALORANT Legend Series tournaments sponsored by Switzerland-based, Home of Esports.
Our community building efforts in VALORANT led us to a partnership with Riot Games on a VALORANT Ignition Series, where we launched Allied Esports Odyssey, a 6-day event featuring the top teams in Europe. The event set a company viewership record with 1.6 million live views and 1.1 million hours watched on Twitch. The success of our events in the third quarter grew our Twitch followers by 358%.
We also became a member of the Esports Integrity Commission and forged strong partnerships with Esports Entertainment Group and GRID Esports that have begun to generate monetization opportunities through esports betting via the licensing of video and data rights.
The Vie.gg CS:GO Legend Series ran for 2 weeks in September and delivered 1.7 million unique viewers across multi platforms while driving a 400% increase in new users and a 300% increase in deposits on Esports Entertainment Group's Vie.gg platform. The event was historic for Allied Esports, its partners and the state of New Jersey, as the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority announced its regulatory approval, allowing our events to be the first to offer legal esports wagering in the state. In addition to Vie.gg, the event was carried on several other sportsbook platforms, including DraftKings, PointsBet, bet365, Pinnacle, Uwin, Yabo, ONEworks and Funbet.
We also laid out our vision for continued growth of our online tournament offerings in North America, where we will be hosting combinations of month-long series and single-day pop-up events to drive participations and viewership. The VALORANT Strafe Series and Rocket League Combustion Series both ran throughout the quarter with more than 1,700 players participating online.
The Interactive Services pillar of the Allied Esports business continues to mature. Importantly, the platform we built to host online esports tournaments represent an important foundational building block. In the future, we expect to further develop the platform as an always-on subscription-based online service, where esports player and fans can watch, play and win with other members of the esports community along with esports personalities and influencers. This online platform will be closely integrated with our off-line experiences to create a help-comprehensive and authentic esports tournament experience for fans.
Turning next to WPT. We demonstrate further online success during the third quarter. From July through September, WPT hosted the first-ever WPT World Online Championships on partypoker. The series was phenomenally successful with $100 million in guarantees in the festival and 5 WPT champions crowned and their names added to the Mike Sexton WPT Champions Cup. The $10,000 buy-in, $10 million guaranteed WPT Main Event drew more than 1,000 players and became the largest WPT prize pool of Season 18. In addition to being one of the most successful events in WPT history, this festival underscores the growing brand value of WPT Online globally.
In addition to the online events, the successful World Poker Tour Interactive Services strategy includes ClubWPT, our online membership platform that offers a subscription-based poker club with no purchase necessary. Earlier in the year, ClubWPT launched its $100,000 ClubWPT Diamond Championship promotion, which has proven very popular with members. Qualifiers ran from June through October, accumulating in a $100,000 prize pool event in November. This became the largest single-day tournament prize pool in ClubWPT's history with first place taking home $25,000.
We also continue to be pleased with the new premium level of ClubWPT membership, ClubWPT Diamond, which successfully launched in June. Diamond subscribers have exceeded our expectation and comprises a meaningful portion of the overall ClubWPT revenue. Thanks in part to these activities, ClubWPT can point to some impressive growth statistics through the end of Q3, including: new registrations increased 29% year-over-year; total subscription revenue increased 105% year-over-year; daily active users on average increased 41% year-over-year; and virtual currency sales in ClubWPT are up 171% compared to the prior year.
Rounding out our business model pillars in Multiplatform Content, where we generated content that is livestreamed, post-produced or packaged for consumptions on the 24/7 basis and retain optionality and monetization of content via direct distribution and sponsorship, use of third-party distributors or other various hybrid solutions. World Poker Tour has executed this successfully for many years.
Overall, we continue to experience strong demand for our poker television product. During the third quarter, WPT Online sponsorship revenue from ad sales grew 23% over the prior year period, which is a promising sign as more content opportunity moves online to a global audience. Moreover, WPT Studios began the process of securing syndications for Seasons 13 and 14 of the WPT television series in 2021. With a forecasted 80% clearance, this puts WPT in the position of selling national advertising buy-ins in 2021 and pushing for upfront revenue.
I think it is also important to note that linear household viewership in the third quarter was up 77% year-over-year, while OTT household viewership grew 368% over the prior year period. In fact, OTT third quarter viewership of 22 million households surpassed linear television viewership of 17 million households for the first time.
Before turning it over to Tony to discuss our third quarter financials in more detail, I would like to provide an update on our strategic relationship with Simon Property Group and Brookfield Property Partners, who we are working with to deliver esports experiences at select Simon and Brookfield properties.
Earlier in the year, Simon's Mall of Georgia, located in the Atlanta metro area, was selected at the location for an Allied Esports venue. While the Simon project is currently suspended due to the pandemic, esports remains a key strategic initiative for Simon. And to allow for this, we are talking about further extending the milestone date under our partnership agreement until the COVID-19 crisis has ended.
With respect to our similar strategic relationship with Brookfield, we are following a similar path to open an on-mall venue concept at Brookfield retail location once the COVID-19 crisis has passed. Although the pandemic delays our time line with expansion to malls, we remain confident in the prospect of this business initiative, and we'll continue to update you on our progress in future calls.
With that, I would like to turn the call over to Tony Hung, our CFO, for a more detailed update on our third quarter financial results. Tony?