The world’s largest esports organization is turning to Joule to transform how it manages the vast amounts of data generated in competitive gaming.
“There’s so much data; I would say in esports, too much data,” said Thom Valks, partnerships manager at Team Liquid, referring to the 1 trillion points of data his company deals with. “How do you figure out what the right questions are to ask? And then how do you get quick answers to those questions? That was the main problem.”
Founded more than two decades ago, Team Liquid has become a global powerhouse in professional gaming.
“We’re the biggest esports organization in the world,” Valks said. “Gaming is a huge industry, a billion-dollar industry nowadays. And esports is at the tip of the pyramid. People come to watch with thousands in stadiums like normal sports. And we are the best team in the world at it.”
Before partnering with SAP, Team Liquid relied on spreadsheets and manual analysis.
“We were doing everything in Excel and manually combing through the data, which turned out to be really not doable,” Valks explained. In 2018, the team began working with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), connecting directly to game publishers’ APIs for League of Legends and Dota. This allowed analysts to build dashboards and streamline data processing.
The impact was immediate: “Before we partnered with SAP, I think we had something like four or five analysts per game. If we can off source that to a tool and focus on really important data questions, that’s way more beneficial. And I would say the last year or so with AI, it’s really taken a next step.”
Now, Team Liquid is taking its relationship with SAP one step further by turning to Joule to sort through the data and make decisions even faster.
“Joule has taken the data that we have in our database and you can now ask it: ‘Find me the best hero to play against this team over the last six months.’ It will turn out an answer that actually makes sense. That’s revolutionary for us.”
Looking ahead, Team Liquid hopes to expand access to Joule across the organization. “If we can get Joule to everyone, it really innovates their gameplay,” Valks said. “That’s something our competitors should be really afraid of.”
Matt Dillman is a senior videographer at SAP.