How DraftKings Succesfully Added Esports to their Popular Daily Fantasy Sports Platform
INDUSTRY
Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) and Sports Betting
EMPLOYEES
3,400
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RESULTS
Automated CS:GO product without manual scoring needed Saved costs and freed up limited internal resources Broadened revenue base by being able to cover more tournaments
Expanding Into Esports
DraftKings was established in Massachusetts, USA, in 2012 and grew rapidly to become one of the world’s largest Daily Fantasy Sports platforms in the world. Having succesfully built a brand and platform catering to a wide range of traditional sports and leagues, including NFL, NHL and soccer, DraftKings decided to expand into the fast-growing esports scene. However, setting up and maintaining the manual esports product proved to be a labour-intensive undertaking, bogging down resources.
DraftKings’ Fantasy Sports Operations Manager, Tyler Germond, explains, “During the start of the COVID pandemic DraftKings found ourselves trying to incorporate new e-sports titles and leagues. One of the sports we ended up taking on was CS:GO. We had a great internal team that helped set up the basics of the DFS product, but we did not have an official partner that provided us with stats and verification for the games we used. For DraftKings this meant that all live scoring, stat verification and roster manager was being performed in-house, which was taking up a great deal of assets to run the product. With no stat provider, we were reliant on hiring a team of live scorers that would input live stats. Also, since we were dependent on live scoring, we were limited on what we could offer and had to make sure we had scoring assigned ahead of time”.
Automating the Esports Product
As they started to look for a data provider to relieve the pressure on internal resources, DraftKings knew they needed to find a partner that could deliver all the data points to power their specific DFS ruleset combined with a flexible and reliable service. Germond says, “GSK was one of, if not the only, company that was willing to work with DK in order to give our operations team what was needed to have a successful DFS CS:GO product. Throughout the first year, GSK made the commitment to work with us and provide us with a product that ended up working out for both side, as we created an in-depth scoreboard and accurate live scoring API.“
A Long-Term Data Partner That Truly Cares
The partnership between DraftKings and GameScorekeeper further evolved as GameScorekeeper continously delivered on additional features and requests made by DraftKings.
Germond expands, “One of the best parts about working with GameScorekeeper is their commitment to working with our operations team. GameScorekeeper has continued weekly meetings with our DFS operations team where Felix [CEO of GameScorekeeper] brings valuable updates and information on future dev plans that affect our DFS product. On top of this, Felix and his team have done an excellent job with prioritizing updates/fixes for issues that we report throughout the week and ensure they are taken care of quickly as possible. Lastly, it has been very clear over the last two years that GSK does care about their relationship with us. We work with several different providers and we feel GSK provides some of the most personal, clear and informative support to our team; they truly care about the success of our product as well.”.
Asked if he would recommend GameScorekeeper, Germond replies, “Of course – GSK’s pledge to doing right by our business was very clear over the last few years. Not many companies provide as much support and promise to excellence as GSK does, I will gladly recommend them to anyone looking for esports data. ”.
