How on earth is the #esports gambling product still this bad?
Morning.
It’s the day of IEM Cologne. LinkedIn and Twitter are abuzz with wide-eyed business development executives heading to the Cathedral of Counter-Strike for one last CS:GO hurrah.
$1,000,000 on the line, with six quality teams remaining.
In terms of CS:GO prestige and competition, it doesn’t really get much bigger than IEM Cologne.
CS:GO is (per my estimates) the largest esports betting market in Western markets. When heading more to CIS Dota will give it a run for its money, but CS has a long (and storied) history with gambling.
So I go to have a little dabble on the games, on the tournament, let’s have a little fun and use gambling in a responsible way; as a product that can enhance the entertainment value of a match.
365 actually have more markets than most and here’s what I can bet on:
Match W/L
Match Handicap
Total Maps
Rounds Handicap
Total Rounds
Map 1 W/L
Map 1 Rounds Handicap
Map 1 Total Rounds
Map 1 - 1st Half W/L
Map 1 - 1st Half - Rounds Handicap
Map 2 the same
“To win at least one map”
Correct Map Score
Team Total Rounds Over/Under
Rounds Even/Odd
Win Both Pistols and Map
To Go to Overtime
Over/Under Bombs Defused
“What you moaning about mate, that’s a plethora of great markets!”
Esports is data rich
Esports is data rich. Esports data comes through the API, it’s not a bloke with a PS3 controller sitting in the stands like you may get with Opta. Granular, good quality data. A wild amount of data points in often frenetic encounters.
A million potential markets!
Yet if you asked me to pull out the most boring markets you could offer on a game by game basis, I would probably populate a list similar to that of 365.
Esports isn’t making me any money!
IEM Cologne is going to attract hundreds of thousands of viewers sitting on a desktop computer with access to a second screen and a sportsbook at a click.
The official bookmaker sponsor of IEM Cologne is 1XBet so can’t expect to see any content (at least UK-wise) prior to the event.
But here we have a few hundred thousand “millennials” gathering in Cologne for a superb event (also a great betting event) and not a single website seems to have made an ounce of effort.
An operator’s not going to take £20k on a match-line at 1.26, and an esports bettor probably isn’t going to have too much fun betting on 2 bombs to be defused at even money.
Esports bettors are… LOW(ER) ARPU (until maturity, and cross-sell) but should also be LOW CPA. If you pay millions for data and then only offer the world’s most boring markets, to an audience that expects fast-paced entertainment, you’re going to be looking at the bottom line and wondering…. why?
Give the bloody product some TLC
If you hop on an earnings call for any operator they’ll bang on about BetBuilders, or “same-game parlays” or “parlay bet mix” (etc).
I understand in a tournament with now two confirmed fixtures left, the accumulator mix is going to be lower. But I refuse to believe that you can’t at least make a BetBuilder product out of the above boring markets.
I’d rather wager Over 2.5 Bombs Defused on Map 1 with Vitality to win the match at -1.5, even if it’s still an extremely boring bet - it’s at least a bit more interesting and the odds won’t be 1.26.
Did you know that CS:GO is played by players?
I actually seethe with anger that there’s not player markets to bet on, and thus no fun BetBuilders.
In CS:GO, you simply set the round cap at 30 for bets (like 90 min football bets) - thus removing the added difficulty of an ‘unknown time for a map to end’.
People working with esports data are smart cookies - you know what will work as a betting product and what won’t. Every single step of player activity is tracked through data.
You could offer SO many fun markets on players. It could be as obscure as kilometers covered by a player. Headshot percentages, different guns used, ADR, Entry over/under, bla bla bla bla I don’t even need to tell you how many markets there are.
I’ll have a nice theoretical BetBuilder on fictional Na’Vi vs Arsenal:
Simple Map 1 over 9.5 AWP kills
Na’Vi to lose Map 1
Gabriel Jesus to get 2+ kills while flashed
Over 43.5 flashes thrown
Over 2.5 knife kills
Over 100 damage done by fire grenades on T side
Price? Probably should be about 3000/1. I’ll have 2 quid on that. Bookmaker margin on that? It’s never going to win. But it’s fun. It’s an entertaining product. It creates talking points, and it importantly allows small wagers with high excitement.
It gets more complicated with Dota and League given the way a game ends, and thus justifying over/unders can be more difficult, but there’s also huge opportunities on Roshan markets, Creep markets, Item markets, Player markets etc.
Some of the very best products out there from tier one operators are free products that encourage platform sign-up at a low CPA. Esports fans would absolutely lap it up. 6 correct map scores to win £1,000 and you’d have thousands of entries, I don’t doubt it.
Stop overthinking and building shit P2P products
Hi, Boomer.
I remember the days when you had to send your pal Justin a note by Pigeon to remind him to bring his MultiTap and Memory Card over so you could play 3+ player games on the same screen together.
We’ve moved on and can play online versus pals at the click of a button. Similarly, having a casual game of FIFA for a fiver with a mate was occasionally fun but also not really that fun.
If you’re good enough to win money playing a video game, the game should have a competitive ecosystem and you should pursue that path.
Building a system that allows you to play FIFA with no insight over the skill of an opponent and absolutely no integrity measure is still an awful idea and why would I want to pay a tournament rake if I know top players in an underfunded ecosystem are likely to enter too.
Scrape this post and make some markets
To make this abundantly clear from the off, I am 100% for data integrity and REAL OFFICIAL DATA. But let’s shift the editorial budget and pivot from yelling about scraping to showing that esports can make operators money.
Build good products. Build entertainment. At the moment I’d rather wager on the Scottish 3rd division because esports is so turgid.
Microbetting is meant to be a ‘sportsbook innovation’. It should be esports bread and butter.
The esports product is being executed so badly, there’s little wonder we’re at the same point as six years ago. Sort it out.
Or email me. oliver.adam.ring [at] gmail [dot] com.
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