The International is one of the biggest events in esports. For the last five years, the Dota 2 tournament has boasted the largest prize pool outside of traditional sports. Right now, 18 teams are competing in Vancouver’s Rogers Arena for the lion’s share of nearly $25 million.
Every year the winner of The International vaults to the top of the list of the highest earners in esports history. In 2017, that was Dutch organization Team Liquid. This year, as Team Liquid aims for a repeat, it has turned to SAP, a business analytics company that has previously worked with Manchester City and the German national soccer team, for help.
“Really cool to be associated with the other partners SAP works with. Looking around at the rest of the partners, it’s a very proud moment,” said Victor “Nazgul” Goossens, the founder and co-CEO of Team Liquid. “We are proud to be SAP’s first entry into esports.”
The company is able to use its Hana platform to run analytics on movement of in-game avatars, on interactions between those heroes and spells and many of the other small areas that can provide an edge.
“Just like any other sport, we need to find small improvements in percentage,” said Goossens. “Every improvement you find is not the direct reason for a win or loss, but statistical analysis and digital databases will make you win more on average.”
Many of SAP’s 90,000 employees are esports fans themselves. According to Milan Cerny, technology and innovation lead for SAP Global Partnerships, when the company jumped into the industry, the internal response was enthusiastic.
“It’s really nice to see what kind of momentum a topic like esports can also cause in an enterprise like SAP. We are a software company but esports for us is a great platform to innovate,” he said.
“[When we met with the team in Utrecht] we learned from the team what they wanted to see but didn’t have the tools for,” Cerny said. “Our developers sat down that night and implemented the changes the team wanted to see and we presented it back to them the next day. That reconfirmed their belief in the partnership and that we understand the game and can employ things in the platform quickly.”
While its past work in traditional sports helped SAP adapt to esports, there are key differences between the two. In physical sports, just putting statistics on aspects of the game provides value. The digital nature of esports means a lot more data is readily available, and is also already made public by Dota 2 developer Valve.
“Dota 2 is super data driven, super complex, it’s a whole different ballgame than many traditional sports. The amount of data at your fingertips is so much bigger so the challenge there is very different,” Cerny explained. “In Dota we get to work with 30 data points every second. That gives you so many more possibilities, you can do anything with it.”
Without the need to digitize the sport, SAP focused on trying to leverage the data to determine actionable changes. But the company discovered parallels between its work in traditional sports.
“What we realized in the last few months is that top athletes are not that different from top gamers,” Cerny said. “They are the best at what they do, and our task is to get their trust and unlock their knowledge to be able to use it for the software so that the software can help them become even better. It helps for us to have worked with top athletes in other sports because it helps us interact with these people.”
Team Liquid will face American team OpTic Gaming in the first round of The International’s Main Event on Monday at 1 p.m.