Valued at USD 24 billion in 2021, the global fantasy sports market is expected to keep growing in the following years and reach a whopping USD 78.5 billion by 2030. The industry owes its growth to technologies like blockchain-based apps, secure payment platforms, and specialised chatbots. With more innovations on the horison,  it’s a great time to enter the market.

To ride the industry growth successfully, you need the right technology partner. We’ll show you how Rival succeeded by partnering with Newage for fantasy sports app development work.

Challenges of developing a fantasy sports platform

Fantasy sports platform development is complex and resource-intensive. Companies venturing into the scene have many challenges to confront:

  • The discovery phase. To create a system with all the right features and functionalities, your development team must fully understand all the complexities of fantasy sports games.
  • Data integration. Fantasy sports platforms have large user bases that tend to surge during peak periods. Software developers must create a system capable of integrating enormous amounts of data.
  • Optimizing app performance. Nothing makes platforms lose users faster than a system that hogs storage space, drains device batteries, and decimates monthly data plans. Development teams must devise ways to keep apps light, including optimizing the code and accelerating APIs.
  • Hiring the best experts. You can’t build a high-performance platform if your development team lacks experience and expertise. You need access to a talent pool that’s often elusive, especially in countries like the US, UK, and Sweden, which currently face a shortage of tech specialists.
  • User engagement. The challenges of building a fantasy sports platform go beyond just the development process. After launching a product, companies face the gargantuan task of attracting users and keeping them engaged.

Fortunately, Rival found a technology partner ready to confront these challenges. 

Ingredients of a successful fantasy sports platform

Gamers love that on fantasy sports platforms, they can organise virtual teams with proxies of their favourite real-life sports players. Rival ups the ante by offering multiple fantasy games on a single platform, including Challenges, Fantasy Bingo, and Fantasybook. It has just the right mix of games to attract players of all levels, from newbies to seasoned gamers.

Rival is particularly remarkable for its unique offerings, like Fantasy Bingo, which allows players to check off squares when their virtual teams unlock an achievement. The platform now attracts 1,700 players daily.

Rival’s road to success started with forging a partnership with Newage. That partnership yielded twenty microservices and three distinct products in just six months. Let’s examine the two main ingredients of successful product development.

Advanced tech stack

Newage knows the value of advanced technologies and uses a tech stack that includes Node.js, React (Next.js), Docker, AWS, SQS/SNS, ECS Fargate, Postgres, and Terraform. 

We also banked on powerful cloud-native technologies, such as AWS and Postgres, to create a user-friendly fantasy sports platform with intelligent matchmaking algorithms (allowing gamers to quickly find matches in multiplayer games). This ultimately resulted in a robust system with fast load times and secure payment options.

Reliable technology partner

Newage brought to the table their mastery of custom development and their specific expertise in the iGaming industry.

We’ve demonstrated our expertise with our own product, ErtiTech, which is a powerful iGaming platform that offers turnkey casino software to online gambling businesses. This API-driven, micro-services-based platform makes it easy for gaming companies to build their own highly secure and compliant gaming solution.

Thanks to our extensive experience in the iGaming industry, we were equipped with the tech stack and expertise for fantasy sports platform development. We ultimately delivered the following results to Rival:

  • A highly scalable fantasy sports platform capable of maintaining high availability and performance, even during peak periods with a sudden influx of users
  • Robust security features that protect user data and minimize the risk of cyberattacks
  • Seamless third-party integrations, such as data feeds from sports leagues and from analytics services, with no data duplication or loss of functionality
  • An intuitive navigation, engaging graphics, and advanced features pave the way for great user experiences, player retention, and word-of-mouth recommendations

More than just an expert in iGaming, Newage has another product in its arsenal that contributed greatly to Rival’s success, which we’ll discuss in the next section.

Getting the word out about Rival fantasy sports products

Newage is invested in the success of its partners. Beyond just creating Rival’s platform, we ensured that Rival had its marketing and client engagement sorted out. To this end, we leveraged another powerful Newage product, Retainly.

Retainly is an omnichannel engagement platform that automates emails, SMS messages, and push notifications, making it easy for businesses to keep customers engaged and coming back for more. 

An example of reactivation campaign workflow for iGaming companies in Retainly app

Using this platform, Rival launched tailored marketing campaigns to boost their customers’ retention and lifetime value. The user-friendly and efficient Retainly tools also allow fantasy sports providers to focus on high-level marketing strategies, such as improving brand recognition and building new revenue drivers, that keep their business entrenched in the marketplace.

Read here the insights from Retainly experts on how to build a brand, improve awareness and nurture customer journeys through marketing, in the context of today’s gaming landscape.

Conclusion

Businesses with big ideas can realise their vision by working with a technology partner with an impressive track record and an advanced tech stack. Rival showcased this with their productive, successful partnership with Newage.

Newage’s custom fantasy sports development prowess complemented Rival’s visionary ideas, resulting in a platform bound to remain a formidable force in the fiercely competitive online gaming industry.

Are you looking to carve your own space in online gaming? Reach out to the Newage team to learn how you can get your own fantasy sports website development rolling.