Whether you‘re a gamer looking to compete, a brand looking to enter the gaming community, or streamer looking to engage your fans, eFuse is the place for you. Through our proprietary suite of products we have something for everyone to change their life through gaming.
eFuse’s mission statement is to allow anyone to change their lives through gaming. Ranked the #1 startup in Columbus, they began with the mission to become the linkedIn of gaming. They would post scholarships, job positions, and competitive team recruiting all focused around the video game industry. Then they started to organize, promote, and run competitive gaming tournaments. During an internal hackathon, a new product called eRena Leagues was created. After seeing the capabilities of Leagues, they decided to pivot away from the linkedIn of gaming, and focus more on tournament/event organization. The Leagues platform became the core focus of the business.
The Leagues platform is intended to allow event organizers to create an organization, who could then host tournaments for specific game titles. Players can create their account and join teams. Registration for Leagues-hosted events is also handled on the platform, and advanced features such as match rescheduling continue to be built out.
eFuse also has a product called Sidekick that is designed for live streaming. It provides tools for the content creator to interact with their viewers and other streamers by adding an overlay to their stream. Different widgets can be added to the overlay, such as polls, shout outs, etc.
when and why
The eRena platform was built as a POC, and would then gauge user interest from the organizations they were already running events with. Requests for new features were made and quickly built out. There were already other esports tournament organization companies in the market, but general consensus was that the platforms did not have a great user experience. Gaining more interest and complexity, eFuse reached out to augustwenty for assistance in building their platform in a scalable, maintainable, and performant way. This involved direct developer contribution to the product as well as team and organizational uplift.
During our time there, a large eSports game publisher’s contracts for tournament organization was coming to an end. In order to determine who the next tournament organizer would be, the publisher decided to hold a trial with four platforms during the latter part of 2022 and early 2023. eFuse was chosen as one of the four, and is on path to becoming the official tournament platform for this publisher.
2023 is going to be a big year for eFuse. Not only are they positioning themselves to take the contract mentioned above, but there are several other major eSports publishers that have contracts expiring. eFuse has positioned themselves to be a major competitor in winning these contracts.
early stages
In early 2022, augustwenty was brought in to eFuse for three main reasons, helping with the registration process for teams and players, addressing performance issues for bracket and match generation, and an overall uplift of the engineering team.
The deadline was met for the registration process. The data models for bracket and match generation were redesigned, which led to significant performance improvements. Team members were worked with to teach best practices and advice given on how to approach problems based on past experience.
As well the page load times were reduced through improvements and increasing the consistency of production deployments. This meant that it was easier to address problems in production, and by having everyone have a production mindset, there was a reduction in the number of production outages.
the big push
Due to the success early on, eFuse decided to bring in a couple more engineers around mid-2022. During this time, some big changes were dropped on the teams. In order to have a chance to win a contract with a large eSports publishing company, some features needed to be pushed ahead of schedule. With about two weeks to get the changes in, eFuse and augustwenty were able to get all the work completed and pushed to production.
latter part of the project
During the later part of 2022 and early 2023, there was a heavy focus on new features and overall improvements to the Leagues platform. With the help of a newly added QA team, we were not only able to add more robust tests, but made it a standard across the entire development team.
Some of the more notable features the augustwenty team had a large impact on delivering include automated college student verification, automated match scoring for specific games, organization and event administration experience, team chat, application notifications, and match rescheduling.
throughout the journey
During our time at eFuse, we focused on uplifting those around us. We spent a lot of time working with junior developers, teaching them best practices, and sharing approaches on how to solve complex problems. We made sure to focus on testing practices as well.
During one of eFuse’s tech talks, one of our employees gave a presentation on how to improve the quality of pull request reviews. He had received a lot of feedback that his pull request reviews were very well done.
We wanted to help improve the stability of their platform by encouraging better testing practices, better QA practices, prioritizing tech debt and bug resolution, as well as pairing with the other eFuse developers.
Augustwenty provided elite engineers to augment our staff at a pivotal time in eFuse's growth. eFuse was scaling quickly, but unable to onboard engineers to keep up with the development needs of our customers. Augustwenty brought top-quality talent to the team that was able to push our product to the next level while we continued to grow our in-house team. We wouldn't be where we are today with them.
— Shawn Pavel, VP of Development, eFuse