Hull City stars took their silky soccer skills from the pitch to cyberspace when they accepted a challenge from online gamers
City stars Jarrod Bowen and Jordy de Wijs recently dropped in at Hull’s Game, in Prospect Street, to take on youngsters at new footy release FIFA 20, inside the store’s high-tech Belong Arena.
Damien Clarke, Belong Arena manager, said: “For the launch of the standard edition of FIFA 20 we organised to have some of the players from Hull City come in and play with the fans, which was really incredible to see. I think a lot of people had a good time and got to meet their heroes.”
The Belong Arena is one of 22 Game arenas around the country that enables teams to take part in tournaments and online gaming leagues.
Damien, said: “Game is a place where people can come and try loads of different games, consoles, accessories and basically anything they need as a gamer.
“As an Arena manager I get to meet so many different people who have so many different passions in different games and I get to help them meet other people that share their passion. It’s been a fantastic journey for me so far and I can’t wait to see all the different people that keep coming to Belong.”
“There’s no need to be isolated when you’re gaming online. You can come to a Belong Arena, you can meet your duo partner, your squad, we’re all here waiting for you.
“Our biggest competitive event that we run as Belong is called Arena Clash, which is where our 22 arenas around the county play each other at various different games.
“Recently we’ve recruited our Humber Hunters, a really diverse group of people. We have young and old, various different countries of origin. They’re all gamers and they all share a passion in a game that brings them together. It’s incredible to see and we’re hoping to prove we’ve got the best team out of all of our Belong Arenas.”
One advantage Hull’s gamers enjoy is the ultrafast Lightstream broadband which allows players to react quicker than the competition. It also means Hull’s Belong Arena store always has the latest games and updates.
“When a new game is released we need to be at the forefront of it with the Arena,” says Damien.
“We like to stay up-to-date with the newest content so we have to download it on 12 stations normally for people to be able to try it out. Being able to do that in a quick transition with a good download speed is really helpful.
“Bandwith has to be really good to share between 12 people playing simultaneously and we’ve never had any problems in here, which has been really great.”
Having ultrafast fibre also means Hull players have no “ping” problems.
“Ping is basically the amount of time it takes a signal to get to the server and come back to you,” says Damien.
“We need to have good ping because that’s to do with your reactions and how quickly you can actually react online when you’re gaming.
“For League of Legends, for instance, we normally run at 20 milliseconds ping or less – which is really good, it’s good for that game in particular.
“I’ve actually seen Fortnite running at zero ping in the Arena which is really impressive.”
