Hub88: How cross-provider tournaments became the new retention strategy
In this article, brought to you by Hub88, director of product Gabriel Kolawole explains why differentiation lies in the experiences around the games rather than the games themselves, and how the real power of tournaments can be found at aggregator level
Ask most operators what separates them from the competition and the answer is usually quite vague. Game libraries overlap, welcome offers fail to land and so their players show little loyalty.
Why tournaments underperform
The problem with tournaments is not their concept but how they have been delivered by operators in the past. Most are linked to a single supplier’s catalogue, so a cross-provider event means configuring separate tools and reporting. Their management is often spread across multiple dashboards and manual processes, and prize payouts can turn into an administration nightmare. Meanwhile, operators can rarely access the performance data they need to judge whether a tournament impacted retention, session frequency or lifetime value.
The result is tournaments get treated as an occasional promotional extra rather than a core part of the player proposition.
The aggregator fix
Hub88 already processes player activity across every supplier on our platform, meaning we can run tournaments across multiple studios without any additional integrations, and give operators a single place to configure, run and track them.
This was the thinking behind Hub88 Tournaments, our unified gamification tool. Operators can place games from different suppliers into one competition with zero operational friction, defining eligibility by country, games and currency before building the prize pool. The tool supports cash prizes and physical prizes, and free spins follow in the coming weeks or months. Players can be added by a CSV, or selected directly from the operator’s own player base, and performance is tracked live in our back office.
Start with an objective
The most effective tournament strategies start with a business goal. Is the aim to acquire new players, retain existing ones or reactivate dormant segments? With the flexibility to run multiple tournaments concurrently, a headline event with a strong prize pool can draw new players in, whereas a tournament for high-value players can reward loyalty. Because operators can target specific cohorts, Hub88 Tournaments becomes a precision tool to replace wasteful blanket offers.
Cross-supplier events allow players to discover content they might never have tried before. When players move between games from different studios in one promotion, they are exposed to more suppliers, and this proves positive for operators, too.
Built-in social play
All tournaments are made more effective by their social dynamic. For a player, seeing their name make the leaderboard and watching their position change turns solo play into active community experience.
The live leaderboard updates as players play the game, alongside clear information on prizes, eligibility and terms. With Hub88 Tournaments, operators not only take the promotional features to the next level by using multiple studios’ content, but they can use our ready-made banners and widgets or build their own interface for greater customisation.
Building a tournament roadmap
The operators that get the most from tournaments will be those that treat them as an ongoing schedule rather than a one-off campaign. That means testing different formats, targeting different player segments and using our performance data to refine what works best.
That is where an aggregator-level approach cuts ahead of single supplier tournaments. When tournaments, supplier content and player data sit in the same ecosystem, operators can act on what they learn without exporting data into external systems and stitching together third-party tools.
In an industry where many platforms offer the same games, the ones that stand out most are those that give players something to play for. A well-run tournament programme is one of the most practical ways to do that.
Gabriel Kolawole is the director of product at Hub88, where he oversees the product and engineering strategy across infrastructure, integrations and AI. Since joining the platform in 2017 as a software engineer, Kolawole has leveraged over 15 years of experience to rise through leadership roles, eventually spearheading the transformation of the HubConnect ecosystem. He currently leads HubAI, Hub88’s intelligence layer, focusing on converting operator data into measurable revenue impact and driving innovation within the igaming aggregation space.