Wawa’s Boot Camp is celebrating the beginning of spring with the launch of its redesigned website.
Almost a year after The Daily Walkthrough first spoke with Won Joon “Wawa” Choi about the Overwatch training company, he brought us up to speed on the upgrades his team has made not just to the website, but the program as a whole. Wawa’s Boot Camp’s purpose is to provide a training ground that brings together average gamers and professional players.
Joon admitted “the last year hasn’t been the most efficient” but he’s proud of what they’ve accomplished in the last few months. The primary focus has been creating a user experience that encourages people to click away from Reddit or Discord and actively engage on the site.
Human resources manager Brock “Nubcake” Bagnell described the revamp as nothing short of a “huge improvement” which includes the new website, expanding to games beyond Overwatch, a coaching application, user logins, content feedback, separated game loading pages, forum improvements, coach rating, tipping and coach profiles and live events.
The most noticeable change involved Wawa’s biggest selling point, its training sessions: They now come with a price tag.
“It’s still going to be the free coaching model, but we’re limiting it to one free coaching session per month,” Joon explained. “We made a premium model of $5.99 for unlimited access to coaches, however, you can only book one at a time.”
A “good percentage” of the money students pay will go “straight back to coaches,” according to Joon. The remainder he intends to invest in development.
On top of monthly payments, students will soon have the option to tip and rate their coaches.
Student and coach applications no longer go through Discord, and they’re pivoting from releasing full guides on Reddit to small teasers. “Students loved our content but they didn’t want to read it on our site,” Joon said. “They preferred to read it on Reddit. That doesn’t benefit us in any way.”
They’re in the final stages of testing out their educational Twitch channel, too.
“The idea behind our Twitch channel is it’s educational but entertaining,” community manager Allison Paige Brier told TheDW. “We get streamers who come on and do maybe a two-hour segment … [It’s] a place where you can tune into the stream, watch, ask a question and get an answer and maybe see it demonstrated to you.”
The end goal of the Twitch channel is to give viewers “a little taste” of what Wawa’s Boot Camp has to offer and entice them to book a training session.
With the launch of the website, Joon told TheDW he aggressively wants to push into coaching for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. They have “big ties” in the scene and it’s “definitely the next game we’re going to go into.” They’re also looking at coaching for Fortnite and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
“The next few months are make it or break it for us. We need to make sure we’re making enough progress. We’ve committed a lot of time to this,” Joon said. Investors have approached Wawa’s Boot Camp, but Joon insisted they “only want enough to keep moving forward without giving away too much of the company. We’re looking for investors and are currently speaking to a few.”
Joon hopes in the long run that the companies producing the games they teach — Blizzard Entertainment, Epic Games, Valve and Bluehole — will look to Wawa’s Boot Camp for “the feedback we’re giving.”
Katie Frates is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Walkthrough. Follow Katie on Twitter and Facebook, and signup for The Daily Walkthrough for the latest on gaming and esports.