Esports & Education · Esports Tournaments
We built the MVP and then launched the fully fledged esports tournament platform integrated with Squid LMS system
Outcome
100+ tournaments run end to end without an administrator touching the standings: 4 roles, 2 bracket formats, one MySQL schema per school.
The competitive gaming world is served by dozens of tournament platforms, but nearly all are built for the general consumer. Educational institutions, with their unique needs for student management, security, and structured competition, have been left with tools that are not fit for purpose. This gap represented a clear market opportunity.
The client, an established esports company, identified this opportunity but faced a critical business problem. Committing to a full-scale platform without first validating market demand was a significant risk. They needed a way to test their hypothesis with a real product, capturing an initial user base of schools and organizers without overinvesting in features that might prove unnecessary.
They engaged us to engineer a focused minimum viable product. Our work centered on delivering the three essential pillars of the proposed service- a flexible user management system, automated tournament logic, and a multi-tenant architecture for schools. This approach provided the functional core needed to prove the concept and secure early adopters.
More than 100 tournaments have run on the platform since launch, by the academy’s own count.
The challenge
How we solved it
Technologies
This module gives each educational institution its own private administrative space on the platform. School administrators can manage student accounts, create official teams, and host internal tournaments that are visible only to their students. This provides a secure, controlled environment for scholastic competition, addressing a key need that general-purpose platforms ignore.
The platform's engine automates the most time-consuming part of tournament organization. It supports two bracket formats, single and double elimination, correctly seeds participants based on skill, and advances them through the bracket as match results are reported. This removes the potential for human error and allows organizers to manage larger events with less effort.
How we built it
Gave every school its own MySQL schema, so a tournament can be private to a campus by construction. Schools need to run events only their own students can see, and a shared table with a school column is one bug away from leaking that. Sandboxing each school in a dedicated schema makes isolation structural rather than a filter that has to be remembered. Above that, the Laravel backend enforces four mutually exclusive roles through role-based access control, and a custom bracket engine handles single and double elimination end to end, seeding participants and advancing winners as results come in without an administrator touching the standings.
In the client's words
“We wanted to test it with a few schools before betting on it. The MVP did that, and the platform grew from there.”
Tell us what you're building. We'll show you how we'd approach it and what it would take to ship.