The Path: Parth Naidu and the Birth of SIDO

The Path Parth Naidu - Founder, SIDO. Credit: Parth Naidu/SIDO

Origin Story: From Smash to League

Parth Naidu grew up in India, and moved with his family to the United States when he was a teenager, putting down roots outside of Boston. Parth always had a fascination with gaming, though it wasn’t quite as popular as it is now in India when he was growing up.

“I’d played on the Super Nintendo maybe for a year or two before I moved out here,” Parth told The Esports Advocate in an interview last week. “But obviously by the time I came out here, I think the PS2 was first coming out.”

Nevertheless, he had his taste of console gaming back in the day, and as a young man in a brave new world, Naidu found that gaming was a wonderful way to build friendships and socialize.

“I moved to the U.S. in 2000 from India. It was a huge culture shock, and gaming was my way of bridging the gap between things that I loved and the friends that I made back then. So for me, gaming was a way for me to meet a lot of other people and grow a lot of the friendships that I did back then.”

Around 2003 – 2004, Parth got his first taste of competition with Super Smash Melee, and fell in love with the idea of social competitive gaming. He would often sneak out of his house to watch competitive gaming events—much rarer than they are now—like Major League Gaming in New York. It wasn’t until college in 2009—while studying engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh—that he found one of his true loves in Riot’s recently released MOBA, League of Legends. League was Parth’s entry into competitive PC gaming, and also served as another way to make friends and build connections.

“Everyone in my college dorm was playing League, and so I was like, ‘Okay, this is something that I have to give a shot.’ I played League a lot through college, for fun.”

In 2012, he graduated from CMU with a Master of Science in Materials Science Engineering with a 3.86 GPA, and soon found himself working at the multinational corporation Boeing in Seattle, in September 2012. Parth stayed at Boeing for almost two years before taking a break in late 2014, but his interest in League didn’t wane and only grew as he, his friends, and the rest of the world became increasingly interested in watching people play the game professionally.

Parth had always had a fascination with research, statistics, and analysis, and even though he wasn’t really thinking about a career change at that point in time, he started digging into the data of League.

That early research led to being noticed by the Reddit League community from time-to-time in 2014, and eventually, he caught (or rather, solicited) the attention of someone at Riot.

“Before Riot actually released their own back in 2015, I wrote a white paper on the third-party fantasy leagues that existed, [and pointed out that] these are the flaws in them, and this is why I think it’s really valuable for you to implement one [of your own]. Back in 2014, I actually ended up interviewing at Riot for a nebulous role that didn’t exist, basically talking about some of my ideas, their philosophies, and where they wanted to take esports. That was my first foray into the idea that ‘Hey, I have valuable insights into what this thing can be in the future,’ and so at the end of 2014, I took a break from Boeing. I was exploring the fields of education and esports because those were my two interests—I wanted to end up in one of those two industries if I could.” 

Team Solo-Mid

At the end of 2015, after nearly a year away from Boeing, Parth knew that he should probably go back to work and took some interviews here and there, including SpaceX. At around the same time, Parth had made some friends at TSM, and they told him, “Hey, if you’re in LA you may as well stay with us at the team house.” He met the team and the coaches, and spent some time with them during the Spring playoffs that year.

“I also traveled with them to MSI in Florida where the team didn’t perform as well and I think that’s when they decided, ‘Hey, would you want to join us full-time as an analyst?’ I was at a crossroads, but I was also pretty young, so I was like, ‘okay, well I can,’ but the pay wasn’t that great. I would have to share a tiny room with one of the video guys at the time and just see what it was like. But I was really curious and just wanted to see where it went. It was just something I decided to try, and then I got stuck there.” 

Parth admits that those early days of research that led to him securing an interview at Riot and landing at TSM were limited and rudimentary compared to what can be done now:

“Obviously, all of the analysis that we are doing now versus what was happening back then was completely different. It’s like night and day. I’ve always had an analytical and research background just through my education and how I think normally. I just think it’s a unique perspective that can help change a lot of the things that we’re seeing today.”

He spent more than seven years at TSM, wearing many different hats. From starting out as an analyst, to assistant coach, to head coach, Parth would help try to guide the team to victory in the LCS until he ultimately left the organization at the end of 2021. 

A year into the role, Parth was taking over some of the more managerial duties, such as sponsor management and coordination. At around the same time the coaching staff “fell through” and the players asked him to fill in during the spring run. Ultimately, he continued from there serving in the role (while doing lots of other things at TSM) because the players liked working with him, but Parth admits that he learned a lot on the job.

“I didn’t have a lot of coaching experience. I knew what my skill set was, which is looking at a system from a fundamental point of view and breaking it down and helping the players who had their own expertise in the game, to come together. The way I look at coaching even now is you need four aspects for a competitive team to work well. You need someone who understands game knowledge at a high level, you need someone who can understand systems, how to set goals, and how to teach people how to prioritize. You need someone who has some level of leadership skill, someone who can essentially be able to change the strategic direction of the team, and help guide players when needed. And then finally someone who has a good understanding of [player] health.”

Parth says that his game knowledge at the time was good, but it wasn’t perfect, and that he acted in more of a “PM role for a team of specialists,” rather than being the person who understood the game at a high level. 

“That’s how I tackled my role, and then I slowly learned all of the aspects of the job, the other parts that I was weak at, through relationships that I built and the people that I hired.” 

The Birth of SIDO

At the end of 2021, Parth left TSM to pursue some bigger goals (that he hoped) would help the esports ecosystem get better—something he felt he couldn’t accomplish by being part of a professional organization. This was the catalyst for his new company, SIDO.

“I had a lot of ideas about the industry and where it needed to go, but I knew that I couldn’t solve a lot of the problems by being on a professional org, just because the resources, the goals of a professional org are very limited. Most orgs are still trying to figure out how to be sustainable, let alone push the boundaries of what’s possible. And so I wanted to do something as a third party. I had a few offers for C-level positions and other roles in the industry, but they didn’t really appeal to me very much, so I started consulting and exploring the space to see what I wanted to do.”

While consulting for this unnamed group, Parth was asked if he could do anything he wanted to in this space, what would it be? 

“One of the groups I was consulting for asked me if I could do anything that I wanted in this space, what would I do? And I said, ‘Well I’m really passionate about working with analytics and doing research in this space and that’s kind of how SIDO started as an idea.’ It’s the idea of ‘how do we have a broader impact’ by taking it one step at a time and looking at the esports ecosystem from a long-term point of view, rather than the yearly cycles that most organizations operate on.”

The definition of SIDO, from its official website:

“We study how people learn, train, and perform through competitive games. Our research division uses gaming analytics to investigate the relationships between player performance, team dynamics, physical health, and more. Anything we discover is published and shared openly.“

The company claims to use that knowledge to also “tackle a variety of projects in the broader gaming ecosystem by building, collaborating, and consulting on a variety of products and programs,” working alongside “investors, game developers, universities, professional esports teams, and more.”

“I think of SIDO as a passion project. I want to do full and interesting research in this space, and so that’s basically the foundation. How do we learn, how do we study how people learn, train, and perform through the context of games? It has everything to do with how we study the impact of sleep on people’s training and performance. How we do communication is a big part of the industry, but it’s not really studied, right? How do we look at cognitive load, and see when you are learning, what are the things you can focus on? Do we look at a declarative pathway versus a procedural pathway when you’re trying to learn skills and trying to perform? And so these are the questions that I’m really fascinated by and interested in. So this is kind of what I’m trying to study.”

Anything gleaned from its research will ultimately be shared publicly, but it will also be used to “build products or programs for a variety of groups in the space,” Parth tells us. SIDO is also doing some consulting with stakeholders, colleges, and high schools in the U.S. 

“We did a project with Riot last year on their Game Changers program, and we’re working with a few collegiate programs to build out their competitive programs, as well as some colleges who want to build out club level programs, and engage their student body because they’ve recognized that everyone is into gaming now. 

“We’re also working with a group of high school organizations to build out standards, see how they can ask for funding, and if there’s ways that they can use people’s interest in gaming to teach them soft skills and lead them towards STEM careers. With a lot of these projects and programs, any profits we get from them is just pushed back into our research. It’s just a loop of what cool things that we want to research and how much money we can make on a lot of the projects and programs that we build out that then governs what we do next.”

Parth acknowledges that deep research requires funding, and some of that early financial support comes from backing by the ownership group of esports organization Dark Zero.

“We are funded through the same group, the same parent company that owns Dark Zero, Raven, and a few other groups in the space. We are just proving out this model over the next few years to see if we can make this research into a product building loop sustainable. And for us, it’s been fairly straightforward so far and we think in three to five to 10-year scales in terms of what we can build, grow, and do, and as long as we keep our costs low and reasonable, I’m happy to operate SIDO with a pretty low burn rate.”

Player Value

Given Parth’s background as a coach and analyst, one of the first things SIDO wanted to tackle was related to player performance and all the variables that can impact it, such as sleep and nutrition. From that research, SIDO has found that the way teams evaluate players in League of Legends may need to be adjusted in the future to improve overall performance.

“The first project was built on the idea that if we want to study the effects of sleep on performance or communication or anything then we need to have a metric for performance that makes sense. And right now, for most competitive gaming titles, that doesn’t really exist in a way that is reasonable and profound. So we went out and created our own; we looked at League of Legends solo queue data and built something. We basically started looking at what constitutes how well a person performed and created a metric for that.”

But sifting through that data revealed some interesting insights. Is winning, or the amount of gold collected and damage dealt to the enemy the most important factor to win matches?

“The entire industry, especially for League of Legends individual statistics, are really important for how much value players have. How much a person earns in terms of gold or how much damage he or she deals is a very important metric that usually people look at to judge players. 

“One important insight that we learned from our research is that when a player is playing the game, if they want to win, they aren’t trying to maximize their stats. They’re trying to do everything they can in order to win the game. And in some cases, they may have to sacrifice some of their individual stats, like their own gold earned or damage dealt in order to help their allies do it in a more efficient way, or prevent their enemies from doing the same to their allies.”

SIDO built its model on the premise that a person’s individual performance is a combination of “not only their own skill in the game, but how well they leverage and enable their teammates, and how much they can inhibit the enemies.”

Parth believes that using these insights, they can now look at a “reasonably objective measure of a player’s performance” that can be tracked over time. Currently, SIDO is in the process of validating these models.

“One thing we did is built out a tool for a lot of professional teams to use that allows them to look at their practice data, competitive data, and solo queue data all in one place and we’ve also introduced a few factors.”

They have also added integration with wearables to track player sleep habits and gather data on how much sleep they are getting, if they are experiencing stress, and how they perform in practice, on stage, and in solo queue. 

“Right now our application, the research we did, we’re validating our models by partnering with professional teams to help them get this tool, and then, it helps them run their programs better and gives us data back in return to help us validate our models. That’s kind of our loop right now.”

When asked if this research could help organizations build better, winning rosters, Parth said that the data seems to prove that, and illustrates why building all-star rosters sometimes falls flat on its face:

“That’s one of the applications of this. Right now a lot of teams build a base; they basically say, ‘If we want to build the best team possible, let’s take the best player in each individual role and put them together.’ That’s how a lot of these super teams are formed. But what we’ve seen in League of Legends in the last couple of years is that most super teams fail because the things that they don’t take into account is that each individual player on their previous teams was the star and the way that team worked around them was very specific. There were sacrifices that were made from the other members in order for this person to succeed. 

“But if now all five of those players are put together in the same team, if no one understands how to balance the way they play, that team is always naturally going to fall apart. So team-building now has to account for the idea that a player’s influence on their teammates and enemies has to be in a relevant way that you build cohesive rosters. And that’s one application of what we’ve built right now.”

On a related note, Parth thinks that if Riot presented different data illustrating success beyond “gold earned” and “damage dealt” it could help teams, players, and coaches understand these other factors as “winning” performances:

“We just want to add more nuance and context to how people look at performance, because it’s only when you do that that you can start studying the impact and change over a period of time. And that is the most important thing in terms of learning and performance. You have to be able to track reasonably, objectively, what a player’s performance was at Tier One and what it was at Tier Two, because that’s the only way you can study and measure change, and correlations, and all of these things. If you don’t have a reasonably objective measure without that nuance, then it’s really pointless. And that’s one of the few things that I feel like has held the industry back from creating sustainable practices both from the health and knowledge perspectives.”

Beyond League Research

While validating the data on League players, Parth hopes to start creating similar models for other games. The first move towards that will involve Valorant, but this will expand into other games, and the data gleaned from Riot’s shooter (and League for that matter) can be applied to other games such as Dota 2 or Counter-Strike, where similarities exist.

“Our goal this year is to build up similar models for Valorant, because obviously contextually, the game information is very important. Then we can be like, ‘Okay, this is the difference between how sleep affects players who are trying to learn and perform in League versus people who are learning and performing in Valorant. If Valorant is more about mechanical ability, aim, and reflexes, whereas League is more about contextual knowledge and teamwork, we want to be able to show those things, but obviously, we can’t do that until we build our models, validate what they’re doing, and then do a comparative analysis. We’re still on step one.”

Ultimately, SIDO wants to build out models for other esports titles, starting first with specific genres such as MOBAs (League and Dota 2), shooters (Valorant, Counter-Strike), strategy games (TFT, Legends of Runeterra, etc.), and eventually fighting games, over the next four years. 

“Our goal is to look at the major competitive gaming genres that exist and build models out for each one. I think League of Legends is a very specific genre of MOBAs, so the things that we learned from League and what people have learned from Dota 2 can be applied to each other because the mechanics, the strategy, the gameplay, the communication involved, is very similar. This idea that you start from zero with a set of resources and every game state after that depends on the one before. So the way you analyze and build teams and how you train is contextualized for how that works. 

The models for FPS titles would be very different, he says, but if they can glean some good research from Valorant, he’s sure that the things that are learned from that “can be applied to Counter-Strike and vice versa.”

As for why SIDO is an important player in researching this data and creating solutions for teams and stakeholders, Parth notes the diversity of expertise within the team.

“I think that we have a unique advantage compared to other people in the space because our group is made of people from the industry (I’ve coached and understand this industry inside out) and we also have scientists and researchers with a lot of credibility. Two of the people we have– one has a PhD in statistics, and has applications in health and biotech. Another one has a Masters in data science who’s worked with Fnatic and built out their programs for the last couple of years. We have a good mix of understanding what the issues in the industry are, what is needed to change the direction, and what the specific details of the science are to allow us to bridge that gap. I wanted to build a company and research group that focused on applicable outcomes rather than just pure science.”

You can learn more about SIDO’s mission statement and how to work with the company by visiting its official website. You can also see the kind of research it has been conducting recently, in this white paper.