On October 20, Gabriel Kolawale, Product Director at aggregation platform Hub88, gave an interview to iGB about their newly launched Tournaments organizing tool. The product was officially announced on October 8, and a group of operators had already tried it at the SBC Summit booth. The problem it solves is very specific: operators want to run tournaments, but most offerings on the market are tied to a single provider's game library.
Kolawale laid out the three pitfalls of the old approach plainly: running cross-provider tournaments requires juggling several sets of tools at once; back-office systems are fragmented, and prizes are handled manually; and the performance data available after the event is limited. Hub88's approach is to look downward from the aggregation layer—the platform can already see player activity across providers, so cross-provider tournaments require no new integrations.
The implementation is also lightweight enough: operators select countries, currencies, and participating games in the back office, build a prize pool (currently cash prizes are supported, with physical prizes and free spins to follow), then use CSV import or select players from their own player base, and publish for immediate effect. Leaderboards refresh in real time, and results can be viewed directly in the BackOffice. On the integration side, only a lightweight Tournament SDK is needed to mount leaderboards and entry components; prizes are settled through the operator's existing wallet channel.
For teams working on package-network platform solutions, this is a ready-made comparison question: for campaign engines such as tournaments, should you build in-house or follow the aggregation layer? The advantage of building in-house is that rules can be changed freely and all data stays in your own hands; the advantage of using the aggregation layer is that cross-provider support is in place at once, and launch requires only a few configuration steps. When writing this into the requirements list for a white-label solution, it is worth asking one more question: when switching aggregation layers, can historical leaderboards and campaign data be exported?
Do one more calculation. Running tournaments is genuinely useful for increasing session time and retention, but prize pool spending must be capped in advance, and prize payout records must be traceable and auditable—if these two points are not written into the operations SOP, the other side of a lively campaign is budget loss of control. Teams running multilingual operations across multiple markets should also note differences in how countries characterize tournament-style promotions; clear compliance before launch.