Kambi’s esports betting volume has skyrocketed, with its esoccer product emerging as a top-five sport by both bet count and turnover. This milestone underscores esports’ transition from a niche interest to a key market driver, showcasing significant market maturity. With 50 million viewers tuning into the League of Legends Worlds in 2024, the cultural impact of esports is undeniable.
Anton Janér, founder and managing director of Abios, a branch of Kambi dedicated to esports, attributes this mainstream shift to a combination of audience growth and product maturity. Esports, he notes, has long outgrown its niche status. The surge in popularity is driven not only by consumer demand but also by operators and suppliers redefining the potential of esports betting products.
This evolution has elevated esports into a sophisticated and rapidly expanding vertical. A handful of data-focused providers are leading this transformation. While many sportsbooks still view esports as mere filler content, companies like Kambi and Abios are setting new benchmarks with advanced modelling and innovative market types. Their goal is to match the rich feature sets found in traditional sports.
The appeal of esports lies in its “always-on” nature, providing continuous engagement opportunities for sportsbooks. This dynamic offers operators a fresh avenue for sustained customer interaction. The short, high-energy formats of games like esoccer and ebasketball keep engagement levels high, filling calendar gaps and offering mechanics familiar to traditional sports fans.
Behind the rise of esports is a compelling technology narrative. Many operators have struggled to deliver competitive products due to insufficient data access and in-house expertise. Kambi’s acquisition of Abios in 2021 directly addressed these challenges, infusing the company with crucial esports DNA and aligning it with the vertical’s steep growth trajectory.
Abios brought established credentials, supplying data and infrastructure not only to betting operators but also to media companies and esports teams. Within the Kambi network, Abios’ technology powers a comprehensive offering that combines high-performance esports odds feeds with Bet Builder, player props, and diverse market types. Supported by real-time tournament data from all relevant rights holders, the platform ensures reliable live coverage and higher uptime. Data visualization further enhances customer engagement by showcasing live scores, historical performance, and pre-match statistics specific to each game title.
This robust system delivers both a core betting product and a constant stream of “always-on” content, with esoccer and ebasketball matches typically lasting around 10 minutes. Coupled with Kambi’s established licensing and operational infrastructure, this depth of offering provides a structural advantage, evidenced by a reported 300% year-on-year increase in monthly events and a rapidly expanding footprint across major titles such as Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, and Dota 2.
A critical aspect of esports betting is expanding beyond coverage to enhance product quality and customization, meeting evolving demands. Today’s esports bettors, primarily digital natives, expect the same interactivity and personalization found in mainstream entertainment apps. The Gen-Z audience, in particular, favors seamless navigation, mobile engagement, and integrated content viewing and wagering.
User experience increasingly defines operator success. Speed is crucial, and the ability to offer features that match the complexity of the live gaming experience is essential for capturing and retaining this audience segment. Kambi’s Counter-Strike 2 Bet Builder exemplifies its response to this demand, allowing combinability seen in other sports like soccer or the NFL, and setting a new product depth benchmark.
Beyond odds and live data, presentation is key. Abios has developed a unified product suite with consistent functionality across all titles, ensuring bettors experience uniform visual quality and responsiveness irrespective of the data source. This consistency is valued by digitally native users who prioritize usability.
Operationally, compliance and integrity are integral. Bettors need to trust in the integrity of events, and Kambi’s 24/7 sportsbook control team applies the same monitoring systems used in traditional sports to detect irregular betting patterns, thereby protecting events from manipulation. Abios’ extensive data sets support this process, enabling automated event filtering and jurisdiction-specific compliance checks, reducing manual workloads and scaling regulatory adherence.
Globally, the esports market is expanding beyond Europe. Latin America (LatAm) is emerging as a significant growth driver, with its large digital-native population and a strong culture of competitive gaming. Esports offers operators an immediate way to engage a vast, untapped audience. A partnership with Brazilian fantasy operator Rei do Pitaco highlights this reach, with Kambi’s esoccer product powering the fantasy offering. This collaboration underscores the adaptability of Kambi’s esports offerings, complementing diverse sportsbook models through a modular approach.
Esports’ popularity in LatAm predates regulation, with Brazil remaining a focal point. The country ranks third globally for active Counter-Strike players, with sports icons like Neymar and Casemiro investing in esports organizations and publicly backing their favorite teams.
Kambi’s influence in the region extends beyond Brazil to Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. While Brazil’s regulatory environment faces challenges, esports has been a crucial revenue driver for Kambi partners like BetMGM, BetWarrior, KTO, Stake, and Rei do Pitaco.
Data is pivotal in unlocking scalability. The era of adapt or fall behind is here, and esports presents a significant revenue diversification opportunity. Kambi’s foresight in acquiring Abios in 2021 shows it was ahead of the curve, with continued investment in product expansion and leveraging the Kambi network’s scale, which supports over 50 partners and processes over $17 billion in annual liquidity.
This scale confers a data advantage that continuously enhances pricing models and product development. Few competitors can access such deep behavioral and transactional insights to inform their strategies.
In the coming years, esports will evolve into a mature, data-driven vertical, offering betting experiences that rival or even surpass traditional sports. Kambi’s technology is designed to deliver an ultra-low-latency experience, allowing bettors to engage with confidence and precision.
For suppliers, the esports trajectory is clear. It is becoming a data-led vertical defined by reliability and innovation. By combining Abios’ deep data portfolio, proprietary modeling, and esports expertise with Kambi’s scale and infrastructure, the companies are defining how the next generation of fans will experience wagering.
The line between esports and traditional sports betting is blurring, and Kambi intends to stay ahead of this curve.
4.8/5
