One home for esports fans: discover, track, and watch every event in one place.

(02) The opportunity

A massive audience with no home base.

Esports rivals traditional sports in scale, yet the fan experience is held together with tabs and guesswork: tournament sites for schedules, Twitch and YouTube for streams, social feeds and Discord servers for results, a separate calendar to remember it all. The bigger the scene gets, the harder it is to follow.

We ran surveys and interviews with gamers and esports fans from all over the world, sourced through Discord and Reddit. When asked how they watched their team’s latest important match, nearly half of the fans had missed the stream: a quarter forgot the date and time, and a fifth never knew the team was playing in the first place. Half of the people interviewed say they watch every week, and more than half say they have been watching esports for over five years, so this is a committed audience losing matches to logistics. Almost eight in ten prefer watching with friends, which no schedule page serves at all.

(03) The viewer’s voice

Grounded in how fans actually watch.

The research asked three plain questions: what pulls fans in, what frustrates them, and what would make them show up more. The recurring themes were simple: fans want one reliable source, they follow specific teams as much as the games themselves, and they don’t want to miss the moments that matter.

“Sometimes I find out my team played after the match is over. By the time I hear about it, I’ve already missed it.” esports fan, research

Two more things came up in nearly every conversation. Following is selective: fans keep up with the major events and lose interest in the rest of the competitions. And watching is social: friends set up watch parties on private Discord servers, because the Twitch chat at big events runs too fast to take part in, and the conversation there is chaotic and meme-focused rather than match-oriented. Both shaped the platform, the calendar and notifications for the first, the viewing-party tools and community features for the second.

That single frustration set the north star: nobody should miss the moment. ReadyUP had to turn following the esports scene from active effort into something the product does for you.

(04) The platform

Discover, track, watch, and belong.

The product is organised around what a fan actually does, end to end:

Find every event

Discovery is one search across events, teams, and organizers, with live filters for game, genre, and event type. The magnified detail shows an ESL One event surfacing straight from search.

Never miss a match

Following a team is one click on an event card; the match lands in your own calendar, and the reminder reaches your phone and your watch before it starts.

Join in

Tickets live on the event itself. The buy action routes to the organizer's ticket page, so going to a match starts in the same place as discovering it.

(05) Two sides of the platform

Fans on one side, the people who run the scene on the other.

A hub only works if the events are real and current. So ReadyUP is two-sided. Fans get the experience above; event organizers and esports orgs get an admin layer to publish events, manage teams and rosters, run widgets, and reach an audience that’s actually looking for them. ESL, a major esports organization, partnered with ReadyUP and listed its events on the platform.

The Data API

The organizer side went further than a console. The ReadyUP Data API exposed the same domain model, collections, organizations, games, events and series, widgets and topics, so a partner could publish once and syndicate everywhere: their own site, mobile, social, a private instance, or another ReadyUP instance through federated syndication. Twelve services sat on top of it, from calendar and notifications to search, publishing and a global catalog index. ESL and Collegiate StarLeague ran their schedules on their own pages this way, with the ReadyUP cards underneath.

The organizer console

Designing for two audiences at once kept the work honest. Every fan-facing feature had a matching question on the organizer side: who keeps this accurate, and why would they bother to? Calendar sync only works if organizers publish schedules early, so the editor asks for dates and streams up front and the widget pays them back with traffic to their own site. A follow button only works if rosters stay current, so rosters live on the team page the org already promotes. Notifications are only welcome when they come from the source, so organizers send them from the same console that lists the event. Every fan feature was something an organizer wanted too.

(06) Design system & identity

A bold, consistent system for a content-dense product.

ReadyUP spans a lot of surfaces: feeds, event pages, profiles, an admin console, hundreds of screens in all. Keeping that volume consistent came down to a strict component library on top of the dark identity: every component designed in all of its states before any screen used it.

The direction was tested before it was locked. The type system was built out three ways, in DM Sans, Montserrat, and Inter, and compared on real screens; several colour themes were developed far enough to compare properly, and blue won. Only the winning direction went into the component library.

The match-fixture system

The clearest example is the fixture card: it has to read instantly whatever state a match is in, so it was designed once, with four states:

The same rule applied across the library, which kept new screens quick to assemble and hard to get wrong. The fixture cards also went out through the syndication program, so the same design, with slight colour changes, appeared on partner sites.

(07) The outcome

From a dozen tabs to one place to be a fan.

ReadyUP went live and was well received. ESL and Collegiate StarLeague came on board as partners and syndicated their schedules through the platform. After launch the work stayed fan-driven: an active Discord community formed around the product, ran user tests, and fed feature requests straight back into the roadmap. The community was managed by Greenskull, a well-known gaming streamer.

• A single home for discovering, tracking, and watching competitive gaming, built around how fans actually follow the scene.
• A two-sided product that stays accurate because organizers and teams have real reasons to keep it current.
• A distinctive, systematic design language: bold enough for esports, disciplined enough to scale across a content-heavy product.