Tournaments drive engagement & retention.

Organised competitions can complement core game mechanics by introducing fresh engagement hooks and evergreen content to keep your players playing.

Drive retention with evergreen game content.

Establishing a competitive scene with recurring tournaments for your community is a great way to introduce fresh content that can be scheduled to help you drive key retention figures across different time horizons.

A source of fresh engagement hooks.

Running tournaments in your game provides excellent opportunities to complement your core game loops with additional engagement hooks to bring your players back into the game.

A natural evolution for your core PvP mechanics .

For PvP oriented games you can evolve your core competitive mechanisms by introducing layers of organised competition from friendly tournaments for your grassroots community, to global esports programs for your pros.

Diversify your monetisation strategy.

Athlos can also power pay-to-play tournaments, wallets, & real money prizing so you can use organised competition to unlock a new monetisation channel.

View In-Game Product Features

Use Athlos because running great tournaments is hard.

Here are some of the key questions to ask when getting started

What is the best tournament format?

Deciding what tournament format to run can be challenging, there isn't a single best tournament format, so the short answer is: it depends. Athlos natively supports Round Robin, Single-Elim Brackets, Double-Elim Brackets, Swiss, & Ladders which can be combined into multistage tournaments. Depending on a combination of these primary factors (and a couple more, smaller ones) Athlos' system will help you arrive at one that works for you and your goals:

(1) how long the average match takes in your game,
(2) how you want your tournament to last,
(3) how many matches you want your players to play.

How many tournaments should I run?

For individual event you can run a single tournament, or you can run multiple tournaments simultaneously - Athlos can handle both depending on what you want to achieve. In terms of establishing a competitive calendar you'll have to work out what works best for your community - our clients have established a range of competitive programs from highly seasonal global championships, to always-on leagues & tournaments, to one-off weekend competitions using the Athlos platform.

If you are struggling to know what will work best and how to get there Athlos offers Competition Consultancy services as complementary product offering.

Should it be for my top players, or my grassroots community?

Who you build your tournaments for can depend very much on what your objectives are. If you want to run events for your top players this could very much look like F1 - a global showcase of the best of the best in your game or community. At the other end, it can look more like football's Sunday League here in the UK - where passionate hobbyists play casual tournaments. With all new clients we advise starting with a relatively small segment, either from the top or from the grassroots level, and building from there.

How many participants should play in each tournament?

Setting the right amount of participants for your tournament can be challenging, and in fact some cases impossible and/or pointless. For example, what if 100 players register for a 64 person tournament, but only 53 end up playing? What happens then? The power of Athlos' tournament system allows you to specify ideal tournament formats & participation numbers, but flexes & auto-scales to adapt to uncertain numbers.

What if 100,000 more players turn up than I expected?

Athlos' tournament system allows you to specify ideal tournament formats & participation numbers, but flexes & auto-scales to adapt to uncertain numbers so if 100,000 more players turn up we'll automatically provision more tournaments for them all to play in, or we'll adapt the format to ensure the tournament runs smoothly.

What regions should I support?

Out of the box Athlos supports 7 regions that you can use to run different tournament divisions, but you can also change this to your needs.

How do I handle organising matches between players distributed all over the world?

Athlos' tournament system will automatically organise tournament matches around suitable playing schedules depending on your players' regions.

Should I offer prizing?

Cash prizes, in game currency, or virtual items? Incentivising your players and/or community to participate in your tournaments is a great way to boost engagement and create a compelling competitive program. Athlos can support any one of the types of prizes listed above; through our integration with you you can listen for a webhook to identify the winner of a tournament of a game, or we can credit a player wallet in Athlos with FIAT currency and they can withdraw that directly into their bank account.

Athlos has condensed 30+ years of esports & gaming industry experience into our tournament system so you can seamless run organised competitions without the need for deep expertise.

Enrich your player data with competitive play.

By running tournaments for your community with Athlos, you'll drive deeper insights into your player segmentation. Using our player intelligence features, we can in turn help you build more compelling game mechanics.