Building the future of esports brick by brick - literally

Explaining your company's vision to someone can be pretty tricky at times. It’s a dream you have of where you want yourself and the entire industry to be, almost like a fantasy, but one you are sure of is actually quite real.

As for us at Bayes Esports, our vision is to create an ecosystem, where everyone involved in esports data can come together, benefit from one another, and drive esports to new heights. In that future, we would be the ones that this ecosystem would be centered around. The ones who set up the platform and standards for others to be able to engage with each other. We would be the ones to strip away all the inconveniences players in the industry might have, from differing market definitions to troublesome integration of data and odds offerings. So that data and odds providers, regardless of their size, would be able to find a customer for their services and data consumers, and betting operators can pick and choose from whom they would like to receive their data from without having to worry about having to put additional effort into integrating that data into their services.

As I’ve said, things can get quite complicated trying to explain a vision. Luckily, we can use examples and metaphors to further elaborate on such complex topics. So if you are not quite sure about what we are gunning for, let me take you back to a time in our lives when building and creating things was actually quite easy.

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Imagine you’ve got a bucket full of bricks. No, not those kinds of bricks that you could build a house with, but toy bricks of various different brands. LEGO, DUPLO, maybe even some Playmobil or other brands of toys, all in that one bucket. If you wanted to build something with them, you would get frustrated quite quickly. All those different kinds of bricks don’t really fit together, perhaps they even have some distinctly different aesthetics to them. Just grabbing a handful and trying to make something happen would probably not work. You would either have to first sift out all the bricks that fit together and only then start creating something, which no one wants to do, or put a lot of extra effort into trying to make all these different bricks work together in one creation, which might actually not even be possible. Chances are you just leave that bucket of bricks where it is and don’t do anything with it at all.

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This pretty much resembles what it’s like for many to deal with esports data. There are a lot of different game titles, tournaments, and leagues in esports. For example, as a betting operator, you need to decide which games and tournaments you want to cover, as well as who you are getting your odds from. If you then make the decision to cover a new title or perhaps a smaller one, such as regionally important tournaments, chances are you would need to turn to specialized traders to actually get the accurate odds you would need. In all likelihood, these traders would handle the data differently than what you are used to. Different APIs, different ways of monitoring, different market definitions, etc. To make these odds work for yourself as the betting operator, you would be faced with higher maintenance to either adapt those odds to fit your needs and standards or to build something completely different from your previous services. It’s like getting a completely different brand of bricks to try and build with. So betting operators and data consumers very often don’t even make that choice to cover something new to begin with. They look at the bucket full of data offerings and only pick and choose those they know they can build their product with, which tend to be the major esports titles and tournaments only, or none at all, severely hampering the development of smaller tournaments and newer esports titles.

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This is what we want to change and what our vision is about. We want to take that bucket of bricks and make it possible for others to build with whichever brand they want. We want to make it possible for others to pick and choose which bricks they like best and allow them to build their brand with them. We want to take away that feeling of having to sort out the few data and odds offerings that you can work with, and that feeling of only being able to use a select few offerings because they fit what you already have. We will take that bucket and we will turn everything in it usable for everyone with no extra steps required. And If one day you happen to feel unsatisfied with the odds or data you were provided with, you would quite simply be able to find a different offering to try out without additional maintenance, because you would know where to look for it.

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It’s going to be right here with us.

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