(light upbeat music)
- Farming Simulator has its own competitive eSports scene and over the last several months, I've followed it across
Europe in order to answer the following question,
how is that even possible? Isn't this a game about,
you know, tractors? (upbeat music) Following this rabbit hole would lead me to three different countries. I'd experienced my very own
rocky-style training montage. I talk shop with a
variety of actual farmers and eventually, without
any sense of irony, I find myself getting really quite into pro-Farming Simulator. I'm as surprised as you are honestly. My journey began at Gamescom
last year where hundreds of thousands of people come
to shuffle around its halls, hoping to play the most anticipated games before anybody else, but not me. I was here for something
a little more rural. That's an actual tractor. I was here to spectate the
second tournament of season five of the Farming Simulator League. - Ah, such a (foreign word) moment. - Unfortunately, the live
commentary was in German and so it was a bit tricky to follow what was going on at times. However, this bit did seem quite exciting. (speaking in foreign language) Okay, here's what I actually do know. The Farming Simulator
League was established by Giants Software, the
creators of Farming Simulator in 2019, and today it consists
of a dozen or so teams, many of whom are sponsored
by real world farming brands. There's no phase clan over here, folks. We're talking about Trelleborg
tyres, Lindner, and Helm, a German chemical company
which makes things like fertiliser and there's money too. More money than you might be expecting. This year's season has a total
prize pool of 200,000 euros. So how does it actually work? What even is a competitive
game of Farming Simulator? Let's start with the basics. This isn't about managing an actual estate like you do in the cool game. Instead it is a bespoke, almost speed run adjacent
setup in which two teams of three players compete on
uncannily symmetrical farms with the winning team being the one that racks up the highest
score at the end of each round. How do they score points? Bales into barns, baby. I tried, I really tried to
make that sound exciting. Here's one of the team's barns, right? You'll notice it has two entrances, a big one at the bottom,
and then this one up here, which can only be reached
via a conveyor belt. Bales that get dropped off
at the bottom typically net a team 10 points a piece,
but get your bales up top and a multiplier gets involved. How does that multiplier work? Well, to answer that
question, we need to consider for a moment how a straw
bale actually gets made. It's not funny. If we jump over to the wheat
field on one of our maps, you'll see a player cutting through it with a combine harvester leaving
a nice plump line of straw in its wake. A second player can then hoover this up using something called a baler. And hey presto, you've got
yourself some bales of straw. However you know this, I know this, wheat is not just farmed for straw. If anything, that's the byproduct of the real star of the show. We're talking about
bread's best friend, grain. As that combine has been
pottering around the field, chewing up everything in its path, it's steadily filling its
mechanical gullet with grain, which can then be poured
out into a trailer. Ideally this is done on the move, like some kind of cool
stunned from "The Fast and the Furious," but slower and calmer. Take that trailer to the
silo, empty it there, and you've got yourself that all important multiplier
bonus for your bond. In fact, it's even better than this because as your multiplier goes up, your opponents is going
down by the same amount. And so with proper communication, you can ensure that your
team's bales are being scored when your multiplier is at its very peak. And ultimately by the time
we reach the mid to late game where both teams have
dropped off all the grain they're gonna harvest and
now are focusing on bales. Whoever collected the
most will just end up with a significant multiplier advantage, which may make all the difference. But wait, there's more. Competitive Farming Simulator has, I kid you not, a pick and
ban phase for tractors before the match begins. There are team and
player perks to consider, mid game power ups, the
speed of the conveyor belts can be increased or even
totally stopped in their tracks. And the bridges leading
to the barns can be raised and lowered, which is just
a Smash Brothers-ass feature that will hopefully see
your opponent losing 150 grands worth of agricultural
machinery into a moat. (water splashing) But to give you some idea
of why this all actually might work as a spectator sport, let me tell you about one of
the most hype moments in a game of competitive Farming Simulator. The first bale or as I like
to call it, the barnstormer. You see when a match begins, each team spawns into a
starting area that spends in and after a short countdown,
its gates will spring open and it'll be time to farm. To really make the most
out of that countdown, each player should have been using it to build a momentum ready to fly out of their respective gate at
a whopping top speed of like, I don't know, 40 miles
an hour or something. They are tractors after all. Now most of the game
is about getting bales into that perception of the
barn* like we talked about. But for the very first
one, that's not the case. For one bale only, you can
sling it in by the main entrance and get a gigantic
multiplier for doing so, a multiplier that has
been steadily ticking down from the moment the game began. And so this means players
have needed to perfect the art of scoring exactly one bale
as quickly as possible. Here's how they do it. You've heard some of this before. Someone on the team will jump
into a combined harvester and begin forging a path
through one of the wheat fields, leaving a tight trail
of straw behind them. While that's happening, a second player couples
their tractor with a baler, races over to them and follows the path they've carefully sliced
through the field. Once they've sucked it
up in of straw to create that first bale and no more, they pull off and absolutely hoon it towards the barn. And now here is where things
get a little bit spicy. As the player approaches the barn at exactly the right moment,
they activate their baler, which begins slowly excreting
its bale out of the back. And if timed correctly, if the driver gets the angle just right, they should drop this load
just as the tractor hurdles past the barn at full speed depositing it the maximum points. But if you get that timing
anything less than perfect, if your angles are off by just a fraction, the bale will instead fall
limply outside its desired home and you'll need to slam on the brakes, turn around and nose it back into place with your tractor costing you points and just so much dignity in the process. It's not exactly the 2006 FA cup final, but it is something. So I enjoyed quite a bit of what I saw during my Gamescom trip, but to properly get into a sport, I need a team to root for,
someone to get behind, you know? That's what was missing. And so I turned to one
of the games media's most often overlooked print publications for some inspiration. That's Farming Simulator,
the official magazine. As I flick past some of the very latest Farming Simulator hardware and a rather provocative
article on Weed Control, I have to say, I found this, a profile on one of the
league's up and coming teams, New Holland, previously known
as Fermiers Flamboyants. This plucky team is credited here with disrupting the league's metagame. In the last season, thanks to, and I quote, the grain centric strategy, built around something
called the Big Hall. I wasn't totally sure why, but there was something about
this profile that just... It spoke to me. And so I arranged to
meet these likely lads at a training session
they had planned in Paris. New Holland, it turned out
was actually going through some big changes just as I arrived. It's core team had been playing together for a little while now, but one of their more
experienced players, Joseph, would not be able to compete
in their next tournament. And so he was being
subbed out for a brand new member of the team, the 21-year-old Theo. Now Joseph and Theo both played baler, meaning it's their job to
create as many straw bales as possible and then shun
them over to the barn and good time allowing the stacker to put 'em onto the conveyor
belt and start earning pints. But it's also the baler's job to land that crucial first bale. Intrigued to get a sense for
what that actually means, I asked Joseph to coach me as
I played alongside the rest of the team and tried this
elusive manoeuvre for myself. - Full speed.
- Full speed. - And I will tell you when you press Y. - Okay, I approached the
barn with my heart racing. Could I pull this off? - Full speed, full speed,
full speed, full speed. (both cheering loudly) - Okay, okay, okay, okay. - And you have to go to the truck. (group laughing) This was perhaps one of the
greatest sporting moments of my entire life. Unfortunately, the rest of
my session with the team didn't go quite so well
as I struggled to follow Joseph's seemingly
straightforward instructions. - Oh, this is bad weed. We to-
- Bad weed? What you mean bad weed? Bad weeds?
(Joseph laughing) What is bad weeds? (Chris screaming) - So go left, go left. Left,
left, left, left, left. Yeah, go.
- Can I just put out that this keyboard is not designed to- Oh! No, no, no, no.
(Joseph laughing) (indistinct) What I wanted to play out, I don't, I'd hate for this to sound like an excuse. - But the keyboard-
- But that keyboard layout is like.... Wildly though, it's quite similar. It's quite similar, but like... - The A.
- Its not aim A. W's down here? - Ah! Because yeah, it's French! - But it was genuinely such a pleasure to play with these guys. And in fact, if you're a PMG patron, you can watch the full training
session in all its glory as a thank you for supporting our work. And if you're not one already,
you could be one if you like, head over to patreon.com/peoplemakegames
to find out more. New Holland also showed
me their big haul strategy in action, which involves
essentially amassing a dragon's hoard of grain
to build a higher multiplier than their opponents even at the expense of other parts of their game. Big haul is the name of a team perk that they'll usually select,
which gives them access to this massive trailer, which
they'll then look to fill with grain using not one, but two combine harvesters
at the same time. Quins let me know that in French, this is actually referred
to as a (foreign word). I doubt would've said that right? I haven't run through Google translates, but I'll take his word for it. Does it work? I have absolutely no idea. But we'll soon be finding out as we follow them into their next event. Before I left Paris,
however, I had to ask, what do other people
make of them being pro farming simulator players? Like eSports is one thing,
but what did their friends and family say when they
told them they harvest wheat at a competitive level? - They lost. They lost a lot. - Yeah. - We say well tractor player.
We play tractor. (chuckles) - At the beginning when
Sinny send me a message to play in the team and to
substitute Rodes, I was like, no. (Rodes laughing)
No, no, I don't want to play farming. - Usually when you talk about
farming simulator eSport, to people who know eSport, they're like, "There is eSport and Farming Simulator?" Yes. "And you do tournament?" Yes. "And you travel to Europe?" Yes. "And you earn money?" Yes. "What is this?" - And then we start to explain
the multiplication, the bale, you have to harvest, you
only have 10 minutes. There is bonus. We didn't... (laughing) There is a draught. The draught is always like the crazy part. And actually it's... For people it's actually
a good date thing. When you talk it... It breaks the ice. Always. - Reeling this insight into the love life of farming sim pros. I left New Holland to
their practise session and headed back home. I may have arrived in
Paris as a journalist, but I left the city as a New Holland fan. These were my boys. I'd followed them anywhere or more specifically, I'd follow them to an event they'd be
competing in at an upcoming agricultural machinery
show in the West Midlands. Nestled away within this
labyrinth of tractors and real life farmers
drinking real life pints was the next round of the
Farming Simulator League. This was easily the strangest place I'd ever watched live eSports. In fact, before I caught
up with New Holland, I was keen to hear what the
British farming community made of this strange
addition to their show. Is this anything like farming? - No, it isn't. - Yeah, the tractors and
the equipment we know, yeah. - Is that a good harvest?
- A good modern fleet. - Yeah, they're all good.
Yeah, they're all modern. - I mean, the challenges
that you have on a farm, whether it be safety, whether
it be certainly agronomically. - Does any of this look
recognisable to what you do in your real life? - Oh absolutely. Yeah. It's... - Apart from that, but yeah.
(indistinct) - That looks like what's
happening in Germany right now. - Yeah, right. What's happening in Germany right now? - There's protests. (alarm blaring) - Oh ****. - What makes it so difficult, I think the distance between
the consumer and the producer. - Right. Are you familiar with New Holland? - Yeah, we know New Holland, yeah. (indistinct) - Is it a good... - It's a good brand.
Yeah, it's a good brand. - I don't know much about tractors. - No, New Holland's good. Yeah, no, don't worry about that. - It's okay.
- Yeah, I mean. - Oh, okay. - It's... - Mid range? (chuckles) - Yeah. - But I wasn't just here
to look at big tractors and pretend I was driving them
like a real grown up farmer. I met up with the guys
as they arrived outside. Okay, we're outside the NEC. It's very cold so we'll
try and keep this brief. You're about half an hour away
from the tournament starting. How you feeling? - I'm really excited to play
like I really want to play. Yeah, I'm confident.
Like I think we can win. So we'll do our best. - Who's up first? Do You know
who your first opponent is? - We face Vultra.
- Yeah. - Who are tied with us
at the second place. - Did they just walk past them? Is that them?
- Yeah they just walk past us. We can see them on the background. - They look scared to me. - I think they are scared.
- Yeah, like at 'em in their big coat's, warm. No, I'm just talking about myself. - 2-0, 2-0.
- 2-0. Okay, cool. Yeah. So your first tournament,
you're still feeling good? Where's your mind at? - If I do a really good first bale, it'll be very important for me. Yeah, first bale.
- No pressure. - It'll be so important for
me because I can snowball. - Okay. - So I think it's the
more important for me. - They seemed calm enough sort of, I mean they were saying
all the right things, but you could feel some
nervousness in the air. Doing well in the tournament
today and tomorrow meant points for the league table, but it
also meant the winning team walking away with 15,000 euros as well. As the tournament began, Quins
and I settled into our seats and were absolutely delighted to be featured on the official
Farming Simulator League broadcast within moments of doing so. - I mean the last game tomorrow, so we had this like a double final, but now we have changed
at the best of five final and the team that is coming
from the upper bracket's gonna be getting like a one
match advantage on that one. So you wanna stay in the
on the upper bracket. We system our audience
pictures there as well. We do have some Farming Simulator
magazines in their hands. - Alright, my, my sweet
French lads are about to play their first game of the show. They're up against
Vultra, which is the team, they're currently neck
and neck in league tables. They both got the same points. So if they win this one,
it's a pretty big deal. In fact, I would say they
really, they have to. And yeah, where the thing
that I'm particularly like most nervous about, maybe more nervous than the team, is I really wanna see Theo, the young Burke, the
new member of the team, land that first bale. I feel like he needs the
confidence boost, he needs the hit and it'll be plain sailing after that. So first bale Theo. The game started well for New Holland as they pinched a combine harvester just before Vultra could get to it, leaving one of their players scrambling to find an alternative and
wasting valuable seconds. Our lads, however were perfectly primed to lend a really quick first
bale with a hefty multiplier. It was all up to young Theo now, or Fatou as he's known in game. - [Commentator] Points out of it. - Oh yeah.
- So let's see, Fatou. Yeah, it's not gonna be one, it can be one 40 actually
easily, 145 is still doable if you're just gonna swing that in. - Yeah and it's 146.
- It's gonna be 146! Yeah, it's gonna be good one.
- Fantastic! (indistinct)
- The 146, that is the highest first bale of today. So even Helm wanted able to do better. - Vultra's first bale was
a disaster by comparison. They even got the baler
stuck, it was that bad. New Holland couldn't be
off to a better start. The remainder of the
round was really defined by the two team perks
that had been selected. Our guys were of course
running their trademark big haul play, but Vultra had grabbed something called Unstoppable. Now unstoppable is all
about the conveyor belt. If you have it, your
team's belt runs faster than the other side and on top of this, your belt can't be stopped. It's... Well, it's unstoppable, I suppose. If you deliver too much too quickly before the other team
has unloaded at least some grain on their end. You can end up slowing down and eventually even
disabling your conveyor belt if you are not paying
attention to what's happening. And yet this is exactly
what New Holland did next. I don't quite understand why when you're going up against unstoppable, you deliver enough grain
to stop your own belt. - And so here they are
with a 3X multiplier, which is the highest it can go, but no clear way of getting their bales up to the top entrance to
actually score any points. But let's not forget
that this team, my team, used to be called Le Fermiers Flamboyants. At that point, you've got to do this. You then have to drive your tractor up and score point this way. - [Commentator] Gonna get
all in. All three of them. Yes.
- Yes. - [Commentator] With the multiplier, that's to be 42 times 3. - [Chris] Oh, with the bale multiplier? - Yeah, that's like a
126 points right there. - [Chris] Okay. I stand correct. Vultra ends up dropping
some more grain eventually, which, I dunno, might not
have been the right move on their part because it
means New Holland's belt does at least start moving again. Although at an outrageously slow speed, again my lads find a way. - [Commentator] 72 points right there. So yeah, Peter's doing a good job, actually a very good job to be honest. - [Chris] And there's really
no coming back from that. Vultra would go on to
deliver just one bale less than New Holland. But look at the difference in points. - [Commentator] So New
Holland, they will claim the first match of the series and Vultra, they had a
difficult start to be honest. - For round two, both New Holland and Vultra are forced
to select new team perks as you're only allowed to
use each perk once per game. And so both sides instead
select something called bottleneck, which permanently raises some of the other team's bridges. But really what this means for
New Holland is they now need to prove they can win
games without just relying on big haul. Theo lands another
strong first bale at 139 compared to Vultra's 122 and then, well it was a
pretty slow start to the round after that with both sides
concentrating on grain and in fact neither team even
attempted to score a bale for the first two thirds of the game. A viable strategy but not
necessarily a crowd pleaser. Anyway, my guys don't need to be flashy. They were here to win - [Commentator] Two
minutes to go New Holland. They have, let's say a pretty,
I mean, it's not that big, but I would say it's still
comfortable lead to be honest. I mean because they have
been performing pretty well. They have the bales. - And that was the story
of the game, really, a comfortable victory if
a little less exciting to spectate in the previous round. But with that win under their belt, New Holland continued
in the winner's bracket of the tournament. All right lads, you just smashed the first game 2-0. First bale both times as well. I don't think I've ever been... It was like you were my son. Okay.
(Theo chuckles) I've never been that proud. Yeah. 146 on the first one.
- Yeah. - What was the second
one? Do you remember? - 139. - This guy.
- Because it was against bottle neck so don't have
the middle bridge and the... - Right, this guy. You gotta pretty pleased with him. - Yeah, for first tournament is perfect. We come ready, he show that he's ready because when you have a
newcomers on the team, you can be like, "Ah, maybe
they are not strong enough because this is a new player." - Yep.
- But he shows that he's better than the previous one. - Sure. (group laughing)
- Wow. I just took that. Who was it who drove the three bales up when there was the three times multiplier? - Yeah, it's...
- pretty sick man. Pretty sick. - It's a technique like all
players should know to play it but few teams don't know. - Guys, this game is easy. You've got it. If you just keep doing exactly
that for the rest of the day, like it's Helm next as well, right? - Yeah.
- So Helm is the... They're the league leaders.
- World Champions - World champions from last time. It's almost the final before
the final. Is that right? - Yeah, it's final before final,
but it'll be a close match. Everything is possible.
- Yeah. - We know we can beat them. They know they can beat
us, so we'll do our best and I think we can, we are ready. - Helm, are the clear, clear favourites to win this tournament,
it needs to be said. They're German team and
while I'm not wild about the stereotype that I'm
going to reinforce here, but they're just... They're really, really efficient. There is no single part of their game which they specialise in really, like we have in New Holland. It's just, well it's everything. They consistently make more bales and score more bales
than all the other teams. - They press bales for us
than anybody else does. - Now interestingly, both teams have opted for Big Haul in this first round with near identical tractor setups too. I think Helm is sending
a message to my boys here that reads, we can play your
strategy better than you can. Honestly, I respect the flex. Now both New Holland and
Helm start off a little shaky with players on both sides getting picked to a vehicle that they need. Meaning those first bales
come in a little bit late and in fact Theo misses his drop and needs to go back and nudge in. There's only three points
between them in the end, but mentally I worry that
that could have left a mark. - [Commentator] Both teams having a surprisingly slow start. - But it's New Holland
that eventually wins this tug of war in the end,
thanks to a somewhat fortunate power up that drops leading
them with a final multiplier of 2.1 compared to Helm's 1.9, a mishap from either side here would likely decide the round. - [Commentator] Even getting
caught on a bridge, you know, even having the bales fly off the front.
- Whoa! Something like this, you mean? - Despite this my guys
managed a 100 point lead with a minute or so left to go and it seemed like they
were about to pull off the biggest upset of
the tournament so far. But then Helm did what Helm do. They simply had more bales on the field and in the final moments that's
all that really mattered. - [Commentator] How have they done that in the last seconds?
- Five seconds to go. - [Commentator] And it's
going, oh it'll be Helm! They will come back and they
will get the first game. For a while it seemed that
they can't pull that off, but they did. And that's what I'm talking about. It's the fact that they just press so many bales in the
dying moments of matches that it overwhelms other teams. It's incredible. - Round two began with a
successful home first bale and then this... - [Commentator] Oh no, he's missed. - Both teams ended up neck
and neck when it came to grain and their multipliers but
elsewhere an enormous gap was starting to reveal itself. - [Commentator] I'm looking at this now and going how have Helm
got five more bales than New Holland have at this stage? - [Chris] And things just got
worse and worse from there. Watching the game live, it was difficult to pick a specific moment where Helm had suddenly wrestled control of the game away from New Holland. But it had happened quietly and somehow inevitably they
played the better game. - [Commentator] Helm are
going to take this match. Two games to nil and we have
another straight victory. - Yeah, two zero. So Helm, they will keep their
plays on the upper bracket. It means that also New Holland's
gonna be dropping on the lower bracket at the same time as well. - [Chris] My team spirit had
been broken with that one and it was hard to see. They'd been knocked
into the losers bracket, which meant they could
still win the tournament but it was gonna be a
difficult road to get there. And if they lost just one
more game, that was it. They were going home. You get to lift their spirits. Quins and I took to the show floor in the hopes that we could find something, anything to give them
a bit of a morale boost before tomorrow's games. Now what was meant to be a quick will around the convention
soon got very, very silly and I don't wanna derail
this video too much, but well we filmed the whole thing and if you're a PMG
patron you can also watch that whole thing unfold. Whatever it is. - There were a variety of
reactions I was expecting to have from drinking
the free convention milk. This was not one of them. - But eventually we found just
what we'd been looking for, the New Holland trade
stand as in New Holland, the actual farming machinery
manufacturer worth billions and billions of dollars. I approached their front
desk to let them know how their team was getting on. We're doing a documentary
on the New Holland Farming Simulator team. The New Holland... - Farming Simulator team. - Right?
- Honestly, it didn't seem like anyone here knew what I was talking about, but that did not stop me from getting them to record a motivational
video message all the same. The following morning we shared
this video with the lads. - Hello, I'm Steven Luckman, I'm the UK product
demonstrator for New Holland. - Hi, I'm Emma Bradley. I'm the Browns communication
and marketing intern. - And we are proudly
backing the New Holland team in the Farm Similar league. - Good luck tomorrow! - Bye! (group laughing and speaking
in foreign language) - Is that good? And you know what? They'd win their next game to zero They'd win their next game 2-0. And the next, cruising
through their opponents in the losers bracket like
a (indistinct) combine through so much normal wheat, which brought them face to
face with Trelleborg tyres in the semi-final of this tournament. they would get another shot at Helm and a chance to win
that 15,000 Euro prize. You know already by now You know already by now
but round one saw the team pick up Big Haul and go for
their preferred game plan. Fatou lands the first bale
stepping up once again just when his team needs him the most. While Trelleborg's baler
has what I would personally describe as an absolute mare. New Holland noticed he'd
not delivered first bale yet and picked up a power
up to raise the bridge at the end there, it's worth noting. Incredibly disruptive play. Love it. - [Commentator] Blocked
from getting back out there. So that slowed him down as well. This is a horrible start... - [Commentator 2] (indistinct) How close is the other one.
- For Telleborg. - [*] And then of course
Team Big Haul does its thing. - [Commentator] Masterful
play from New Holland. That is New Holland
getting that 2.7 multiplier and holding it there
to score as many points with as big a multiplier as they can. - [*] This was maybe their best round of the entire tournament with some very confident control of the multipliers throughout. Just one more win and
we'll be in the final. - [Commentator] And New
Holland will be happy to claim the first game of the series. And of course that's gonna be
one more obstacle taken away from the past to go to the grand final. - [*] But something had changed, even from the first bale
of the second round. You could feel it. Everything had suddenly shifted somehow and our multiplier kings
somehow end up at just 1.8 as the end of the end game
compared to Trelleborg's 2.2. - [Commentator 2] And
the the gap is pretty big for Trelleborg to be honest. I don't know if New Holland
can still catch that up. They will try to do everything they can. There's gotta be a couple more
bales, five seconds to go. - Oh no! (indistinct)
- (indistinct) gonna fall down and that one belt is not gonna go in and in the end with a very,
very small gap difference. - [*] That was one
each, taking New Holland and Trelleborg tyres into a final decider. I was breaking it. Things didn't stop perfectly
with Fatou being picked to his baler, losing valuable
seconds in the process. But somehow he does still manage to squeak in the first bale just before Trelleborg can get there. Now it's Trelleborg's turn to
use big haul this time around, meaning they do get an
early lead on the multiplier and they're actually able
to take advantage of that before New Holland can really claw it back with one player driving up the belt with a full set of bales. - [Narrator] Now they've
got six bales sitting there, have Trelleborg and New Holland
have yet to score any bales. - With three minutes left on the clock, Just four points separate the two teams. A misplay from any player
could see their team's chances of receiving a novelty check for 15,000 euros disappear
like grain into a silo. New Holland grab the bottom boost power, meaning they're able to score
bales on the ground level and still get the multiplier, which they take full advantage of. But still the points gap is so, so close. And then I hear it, the
words you just never want to hear in this game. - [Commentator 2] Yeah,
it is looking a bit scary how many bales actually
Trelleborg has around the belt and they're still leading
on the points as well. And we are almost
starting the last minute. So this is looking actually
very good Trelleborg. But they don't have the bales.
They don't have the bales. - [Commentator] It looks
like New Holland going out. - [Commentator 2] Will be
going to the grand final for sure, we still have 10 seconds to go but there's just no chance at all that New Holland can do it anymore. - [Commentator] The
bales that have come in for Trelleborg in the few
seconds has been immense and it's gonna be a hundred
points that they take it by. And there we go. - And that was it. I was
gutted, genuinely gutted. But that I think is the sign
that something had changed during these two days in Birmingham. When I watched the previous
tournament at Gamescom. I was curious, sure, but I didn't really feel
anything about what I'd watched. Not something deep down, anyway. That was no longer the case. (melancholic music) So first of all, the thing
I want to say the most is I came into this video and learning about
Farming Simulator League kind of sceptical that I would get it. It felt very outside of the
stuff that I usually watch. You three lads have
made me love this event. I've had such a good time watching you. And so like outside of the result itself, it's been personally so fun
watching you three compete. I just wanted to say that
before anything else. (Theo laughing) How are you feeling? - For me, it was my first tournament, so I'm a bit disappointed
and confused about the losing in semifinal of course. Because I want to win.
- Mm-hmm. - But I think I am pretty proud of my tournament because
it was my first one. - Yeah.
- And I'm with two beautiful teammates. (Chris chuckles) So it's incredible. It's an incredible experience. - There's an inside joke we have on the People Make Games team
usually about Quins' videos, honestly, in which we like to joke, they'll often pitch these
stories about the most unusual left field communities and games, whether that's sex work in Second Life or the smorgasbord of things
happening inside VR chat. And without a doubt, after a
few weeks of speaking to people and immersing himself in their world, he comes out the other side a convert. I am so glad I got to
experience something similar with Farming Simulator League, this incredibly niche competitive scene that's as much speed running
as it is a traditional eSport. Yes, Helm may be on an
entirely different level to everybody else, and
in case you're wondering, of course they won the tournament, but my lads, they've got heart, an awful lot of heart. Thank you so much for watching. And don't forget, if you're a PMG patron, you can right now watch
my full training session with the team as well as Quins and myself being really weird about
farming machinery in Birmingham. So let the content continue. I could plough through with
these people. (chuckles) That's such a weird thought to have. (bright upbeat music)
