SimWin Sports: Virtual Sports Powering 24/7/365 Fantasy Sports Contests Live From The Metaverse

How can you provide a fully immersive experience for your fans? DataArt met with David Ortiz, Founder and CEO, and Tom Goedde, CMO at SimWin Sports, to discover how they built the sports metaverse. Together we explore next-gen fan engagement along with live simulations and fantasy contests available 24/7, NFT collectibles, celebrity coaches, and more.

Speakers

Russell Karp, Senior Vice President in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice, focusing on sports betting.

David Ortiz, Founder and CEO at SimWin Sports. SimWin Sports is the virtual sports metaverse that fuels fantasy sports and sports betting with NFT players and Hall of Fame owners, coaching virtual teams in live simulations streamed to any connected device, anywhere in the world, 24/7/365.

Tom Goedde, CMO at SimWin Sports.

Kevin Twitchell, advisor in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice.

Watch the full video or read a shortened text version below.

Russell Karp: Tell us a little about SimWin. What is this company all about?

David Ortiz: Sure. We look at SimWin as a sports entertainment company, as the core of what it is. But the way we express that and we looked is kind of the psychology around gaming. We look at the psychology and the play patterns around how people interact with content. And content is now digital and bingeable. That’s pretty much how everyone experiences a pastime, whether it’s Hulu, Netflix, movies, music, video games, online poker, online slots, etc. You name it.

People want content on demand and they’re able to get it. There’s no business out there where in the entertainment space you can’t get content on demand. However, the sports business, which is wildly popular, I think the last numbers I saw said it’s growing to be a $700 billion business in the next two years, it only operates a fraction of the time.

And so, probably about 32% because human athletes have to rest, and the fantasy sports industry and the real money gaming industry it’s all built around people kicking a ball, throwing a ball, catching the ball, slapping a puck, and they can’t do that all the time. They’re human; they have to rest. And there’s seasonality in sports. So, we looked at that.

We said, “Well, we could have digital sports leagues where we own the content entirely.” So, we build our own football, our own basketball, our own soccer, our own hockey or cricket, boxing, baseball, etc. And we could have these digital teams with great AI, where the players get bigger, stronger, faster, and they atrophy, they have real salaries, and they have real owners.

We could build out a sports league that could run all the time for every sport and have digital athletes. We could have populated these teams and let the fans own the players and let interesting people on the teams. That’s what we’ve got. So, essentially, the most succinctly I could put it after that long ramble is we’ve built the sports metaverse where we’re allowing the ecosystem to find different ways to be a part of that.

And, ultimately, our goal is to be able to have sports running all the time and everything that happens around it from fantasy sports, real money gaming, sports collectibles, video games happen around our confidence emblem.

David Ortiz

Founder and CEO at SimWin Sports

Russell Karp: And how would I consume the content? As a fan or an observer, where can I watch these simulations? Or these simulations are just end results? How does that work?

David Ortiz: The games are coached. So, we have these digital teams and the best way for people to think about this is everything you know about the major professional sports leagues for football, basketball, soccer, and hockey. So, you know about the NFL, the NBA, MLB, FIFA, etc., Premier League.

We’ve basically done our digital version of sports; and the owners, operators of these teams, rather than it being about how good they are on the sticks and pressing buttons and controlling, it’s about them setting the strategy.

So, drafting the right team, signing the right players, and then being able to improve their growth, improve their development. But on game day, rather than just being a pure SIM, they’re calling the players and setting the strategy, or they preset the behavior they want their team to do and then the AI plays it out.

But there’s no human influence on the physical controller of the player. It’s all like beating Bill Belichick or Mike Tomlin on the sideline, setting the strategy on the plays, building the team, and then off it goes. And so, they’ll be able to see that on our site simwinsports.com. We’ll go live here in a few weeks and they’ll be able to go over there and as far as being able to consume it, you can consume it on your mobile device, on your desktop, and pretty much anywhere you have a connection. We’ve optimized for both. You don’t need to go through the app store. You can just go to our site and consume anywhere you are in the world on your device.

Kavin Twitchell: And that’s 24/7, right? So, when we’re live and I want to watch Magic Johnson’s team, Tom, from the marketing side, is there a schedule? Am I jumping in live and I’m just hoping to see it in this 24/7 environment? It’s really cool because program TV is what you wait for Sunday, for your game. Will I be waiting for Magic’s game and watching another cricket game? How’s that going to work as far as a programming-the-clock as I would do in traditional?

Tom Goedde: Sure. These games run 24/7/365 so you can get American football action on Tuesday at 2 a.m. in July.

No off seasons, no pandemic shutdowns, no labor stoppages, none of that good stuff. So, you tune in any time you want. We will run separate channels for each individual sport, so that all sports will be running 24/7 as described.

Tom Goedde

CMO at SimWin Sports

Now, when you drop it, there’s only one game going on at a time. We don’t stack games, you’re not choosing an instance to view. Everyone, whether you’re playing fantasy sports or your sports betting through partnerships or you’re playing our end-game fantasy contests. We’re all watching the exact same game run at the same time, but we’re pooling the liquidity from all these different partners all around the world into these different contests that were running.

So, yes, you would need to note the schedule if you want to very specifically watch Magic Johnson’s L.A. Magic take the field with him at quarterback. But you can tune in any time of day or night again and get live action.

As I said, we’ll run these basically as individual channels. So, once we’re built out and we have all eight of the sports that we have planned running, then you just choose which sport you want to watch and go in. But it makes for interesting programming from our side because we’re encouraging. Eventually, there will be a layer over the top that is going to be encouraging players to go to where the hottest action is.

So, we’re chasing time zones around the world. Obviously, cricket isn’t going to be the most popular in North America, to begin with, but we’re chasing those time zones as well as the individual sports interest. So, the ability to red-zone cover across all the sports eventually is going to be a really interesting dynamic.

Kevin Twitchell: We talk a lot about sports betting, obviously, in this and technology. Now, where does this other angle come in with sports betting? And who are your partners in that world?

Tom Goedde: We own that, we run it ourselves. From a regulatory standpoint, we cannot be the house and run the league, obviously. So, we partnered, we licensed our data streams and our content out to a partner sportsbook in fantasy companies, in which then they’re allowed to run lines and do that. The one big advantage they have there, there’re a few big advantages, but we always partner our content and our data together.

So, whatever device you’re on anywhere in the world, as long as it’s a legal, regulated territory, you can watch the games and be making your picks all from a single stream. And, depending on what the partner wants, that can look very different. So, for brick and mortar, at the end of Sunday night when the last NFL game shuts off, we can click over and continue that sportsbook partnership there.

We can run them on their platforms. So, we could be embedded into the Caesars app. We would even go so far as gray labeling. So, whatever FanDuel wanted this to be the FanDuel Football League powered by SimWin, we’d be happy to do that as well. But the most interesting thing we do as far as those partnerships are concerned, as I described earlier, is regardless of where the players are coming from onto the platform, they’re all watching the same instance.

Everyone is watching one game, which is a massive advantage from an advertising standpoint because we sell advertising just as traditional sports leagues do, making shorter liquidity stays high through all different time zones and places in the world, all that good stuff. So, there’re a lot of new challenges with running 24/7 sports leagues, but we’ve got some sensible answers and pretty smart people involved paving the way for us.

Russell Karp: How has the emergence of technologies like Chat GPT affected your strategy in terms of technical approach and even the approach of the product itself?

David Ortiz: One of the biggest things we did with that and we’re looking at that additional tech beyond AI we’ve been building was storytelling. So, one of the things we want to do to bring to life is we got to tell the stories of all these players. So yeah, we’ve got Jerry Rice’s, the Magic’s, Iverson’s, and Marshall’s Fox, those guys.

But then we’ve got all these other players that they’re playing against and you don’t know. So, how do we tell their story, and how do we report on all these games without having to have a gigantic army? So, we started looking at AI solutions there, and we ran some tests around being able to feed information in about the teams, about the players, and about the outcome, and see what kind of stories it can be written.

That’s the side, and I probably shouldn’t be saying this to journalists, but that’s probably the side where we’re going to get a lot of run and traction in the short term. How we approach the product, we have the back story and report on what’s happening in volume, leveraging AI to do that.

Are you looking to elevate your sports betting operations to the next level? DataArt is here to empower you with cutting-edge solutions that can boost efficiency, expand your market reach, and provide a technological advantage over your competitors. Our team covers every aspect of sports betting software development, from scalable and secure platforms to advanced analytics. Explore DataArt’s strategic sports betting solutions.

By Russell Karp,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt

Originally published at https://www.dataart.com.