Hello viewers, Tim Pool here, editor of Gambling Insider. Welcome to the GIA Huddle. I'm with Amir from Baze Esports. Recently went from COO to CCO. Amir, tell us a bit about that and thanks for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Very excited to be here again at ICE. took over the role of chief commercial officer we had a third C-level join the company which we're very excited about it's an old colleague of mine from Google days spent about 13 years at the company joined to take over sales and marketing, basically externally facing commercial roles to support us to that extent. You can see that 2023 for us is all about going out big and making our message heard. Exciting times ahead with the appointments, but in esports betting in general.
You mentioned 2023. With the year ahead, what are your kind of plans? What's in the pipeline for you guys? Yeah, I think we're really excited that we were able to close a bunch of critical deals.
that were kind of left open in terms of question marks in the market. We secured our content portfolio for the next years. There were two big RFPs outstanding, one with the ESL Faceit group for a three-year exclusive match data deal, the other one with Blast. Blast, we were able to capture this year for a two-year exclusive deal, and we're just really excited of having a fairly stable multi-year period now where we can go out into the market and really foster it.
We're asking... the last two years were a lot of kind of building the content portfolio, building the product portfolio. We're now set in terms of our live match product. We have a new odds product, Bodex, the platform that we're driving into the market.
Basically, we spent a lot of time in the last year building out basically the universe around us, whereas for a very long time, you know, we were kind of the exclusive supplier to our joint venture partner, Sport Radar. We now kind of went out of that shadow and we... We basically built that whole product sphere and partnership sphere ourselves so that anybody that's looking for the relevant esports data can get it in any kind of way that they're looking for. Be it to build your own product stack from scratch or be it to have an odds product or a fully handled risk-managed product all the way to data visualization.
We have a one-stop shop now. Sure. So plenty in the pipeline for you as a company.
If I was to take the focus to more industry-wide, what are the kind of latest developments in traffic? trends in esports and can we start with the us because i'm interested to know how how quickly it's growing esports betting in the us i think you know esports betting in the us is is it continues to be a place with where where folks have high hopes you know the we we have to consider it as as you know a continent in itself right it's like europe it's basically state by state yeah i think we've made great progress uh 30 states i think allow for online betting out of those 30 i think we have nine states that allow for esports betting. I think the most known for that is New York, Colorado, kind of as a front runners-up. Ohio, we hear, is doing great in terms of volume, actually, and in terms of turnover, which might be surprising to some. Nevada is opening up.
You guys might have seen that we had the chance to talk to the supervisory board there of the gambling commission, for example. You see that these guys are working hard to maintain, basically, their position where it wasn't offering gambling. gambling, moving there to online gambling. But in general, it has to be clear. And I think actually the U.S. are turning more pragmatic in that sense that you need to lower the barriers of entry, especially for younger companies.
The market is still, the markets state by state are still structured in a way, even for suppliers of content and data and products, to go through very extensive screening, which it just kills any kind of... innovation at its very core. So until that is not solved and we're seeing this come bit by bit, I expect that once the regulations and the requirements drop for supplying, let's say, for example, us products or kind of visualization, whatever that is, we'll see the innovation pick up very rapidly. We'll see more companies get funded in that space.
And then also an influx of all the European companies. Right now, it's just select companies from the European or international space kind of testing the wall. waters and that has to do with the regulations sure you mentioned the international space if we were to look more internationally outside of the u.s and to maybe more mature esports betting markets you know what are the latest kind of developments uh sort of i guess more continentally in europe those kind of places yeah i think most notably we're seeing the whole space professionalized i think it's it's it's long overdue we're seeing it professionalized it was it was lagging a bit In any aspect, it was very fragmented.
We're seeing now big players emerge and just buying up other players. We saw the merger of ESL Faced Group and the buyout of a billion, billion and a half to the SEVI Group. We're seeing in that context, of course, the Saudi.
States taking a very large leadership role, I think with funds of over $38 billion attributed to esports investments over the course of the next few years. And it's quite interesting, quite fascinating that a lot of that innovation, a lot of that power. Power still comes out of Germany in particular.
You have ESL, which comes out of Cologne. You have us. You have our competitor, Grid, in the esports data space.
We're kind of pushing the envelope on that sense. You have Bitcraft as one of the biggest esports investors out of Berlin as well. And if we're looking at how that connects, you're seeing that there's a lot of influx of funds into larger entities that then go up buying.
other entities to cover more of the value chain in their respective fields be that img that buys open bet for 800 million which i find very interesting have img arena for example as a platform but missing kind of that that whole set in itself to go end to end then you have the merger esl facet group was basically the number one in uh running the tournament tournaments versus uh connecting with the number two that is basically providing the platform for it you know in that constellation we basically being the extension of that in terms of of data distribution is the narrative that we play. So you're seeing it in any kind of way. I think Entain buying Unicorn, for example. You see here still the Abios acquisition through Cambium. So everybody's trying to cover more.
Everybody's trying in a market that started five, six, seven years ago, maybe, to kind of pick up speed. You're seeing that the big players are now trying to identify those few players that actually make it work. That make it work sustainably.
And we'll see a lot more companies fail now, especially in hard times like that. It's always clean out phases, right? A bunch of them have a really hard time. And we'll see some of the unsustainable business models go away.
Now, central to esports and esports betting is data. And your CEO, Martin, he's been on GIA Huddles before and he's talked a lot about the importance of data. I wanted to ask you, initially from a very general overview, about data scraping. Tell us about that. Absolutely.
So I just ended my last sentence with unsustainable, non-sustainable business models, and this is one of the examples. So if we're looking back at history, it's not that long ago, four or five years, for any application to connect with what's happening within a match, live within a match, you need that data to be collected. You know, it's part of that magic that happens in our heads, whereas the actual infrastructure needs to be presented in a way that somebody collects the data, makes it.
it available right that sport radar for traditional sport that didn't exist for esports meaning sport radar has been around for 2020 for one years they go to the fifa they go to the uefa to the nba or whoever and they license that content it's it's a process they're working and then they're distributed this kind of official data offering in particular also betting purposes hasn't existed in esports so what what these guys went to is to develop technologies to scrape data off of any kind of video feed sure that they they would see right so any kind of visual manual kind of they call it ai based uh mechanisms to collect data and then to sell it but without the knowledge or without the permission of where they're going to so you have a disconnected ecosystem whereas there's the game publisher they have their ip their game titles the esports leagues and so on and then somebody that's not related to them collects that data without the consent yeah and an incomplete way it has to be imperfect right if you if you know no esports titles, Counter-Strike, 5-on-5, League of Legends, 5-on-5 action. There's some stuff that's not even on the screen. You can't even collect that, like a certain gold count per player and so on and so forth. And then they take that to sell it.
I mean, it already sounds crazy when I say it. To sell it to betting operators. And I'm not talking small betting operators.
I'm talking Flutter. I'm talking William Hill. I'm talking the massive companies. I'm talking a genius.
genius, a genius force that go out and they sell this great product. And based on that, you run into several kind of issues. One of us is most obviously is integrity.
I mean, you don't know what's happened. There's something happening in this match, something changing. Nobody will know down the chain. You have changes of players and whatever it is. You have kind of your odds changing, your probabilities changing because something happens you don't know.
You don't know whether matches got recorded or not when it gets put on. Maybe that match took place yesterday and you're seeing it now on Twitch and you're scraping it off of it. of there. People know what the results are.
Just you're the only one not knowing as a betting operator. It's a horrible scenario. So integrity-wise, you know, you have a big issue.
That leads to regulatory issues in the U.S. in particular. Right for that reason, for resulting in particular, you need to have... In most states, you need to have the data straight from the source in some kind of way. It needs to be connected so it can be validated that the score that you're settling on is actually correct. If you don't do that, you just lose your license.
It's as simple as that. It's illegal betting. of folks don't know and then of course it's it's it's this part of not being future proof you know we start talking more and more about use cases about about generating you know whereas traditional betting operators would take a football betting experience and turn it into esports it's a different generation yeah they want something more interactive fast-paced and so on our infrastructure is arguably the most performed in the market right now we took that we basically we couldn't use with what sport radar had so we built our own own as the most established player we build our own live data infrastructure and we're still adapting it for example to a product that sports flair has built in terms of flash markets which takes the positional data and offers bet basically in a very rapid succession based on on the data we provide impossible to cover if you if you run off a scraped data product in that kind of way that that delivers the data and in a fairly unstructured very incomplete manner a final topic for you a final question eSports betting, there's a lot of benefits to players.
There's a lot of things that traditional, say, sports betting maybe can't offer. But my question to you is, to try and get the industry to grow and get bigger, how do companies like yourself and maybe operators push those benefits and kind of market them en masse to players? I think at this particular stage... What strikes me, you don't need to have that conversation with Pinnacle, for example, or with Bet365.
It's one of their top revenue bringers, right? I think in the top five. It's a C-level matter. We're not even, I think, on the C-level of companies, of groups, somewhere in there, people still haven't gotten around to, it's more than people playing video games.
I think it's as simple as that. To really sit down and see. see what do we want to do with that right the products are there the content is there the turnover is there you just need to take it seriously that's all that i mean and find folks that educate you on the topic everybody in this space is more than willing to do so and then find the right product mix have somebody help you with user acquisition and then set up the strategy i really think i really think we have a lag in terms of esports specialists rising in the ranks of companies yeah i think most of them were fairly young and they're still still not at an age where they would influence the bigger companies, the bigger groups on that level. If I talk about a Flutter, and I need to come back to that example because it's mind-blowing.
There is a massive group that has no esports strategy, right? And they go around for one, for part of the group, they're our client. For another part of the group, completely disconnected, they're buying from Pandascore, right?
I mean, how does that go together? Well, Amir, thanks very much for joining us. Some really good ideas there.
And good luck for the rest of the year at BayZ Sports. Cheers. Thank you so much.