Rudy Koch → Writing → The GreenPark Series
The Minimum Viable Audience
Lessons from GreenPark Sports: Part 5
Building deep engagement around sports has historically required scale.
GreenPark is a useful illustration of why. Adding a new league to the product meant coordinating design, engineering, art, data, content, QA, live operations, partner approvals, rights, store assets, marketing, and more. None of that work was unusual. It was simply what building and operating a licensed sports product required.
As we’ve integrated GreenPark’s experience into what we’re building at JOA, I’ve come to see a deeper consequence of those economics. Expensive products require large audiences. Large audiences require us to find enough people who want roughly the same thing. So the economics of building products didn’t just shape what we built. They shaped how we grouped the fans we built for.
The Economics Determine the Shape
Every product has some version of this threshold. If something costs millions to create, it needs an audience capable of supporting that investment. If it takes years to build, the opportunity needs to remain relevant long enough to justify the time. Licensed sports adds its own demands: rights clearances, partner management, asset approvals and content reviews, on top of the work required to build and operate the product itself.
All of that raises the bar for what is worth building. It doesn’t just shape which products make money. It shapes which ideas can become products in the first place.
You can see the effect particularly clearly in fan engagement. Creating the deep, persistent engagement we associate with games has historically required enormous scale.
EA Sports FC isn’t built around Manchester City or Real Madrid. Madden isn’t built around the Dallas Cowboys. NBA 2K isn’t built around the Lakers. These products aggregate an entire sport, league or ecosystem because the cost of building and continuously operating a deep game experience requires an enormous addressable audience.
The economics of traditional games have therefore pushed toward aggregation: enough audience, IP and content to support the investment required to build and operate them continuously.
Who Do You Build For?
But building for an enormous audience creates a different challenge: who within it are you actually building for?
GreenPark wrestled with that question for years. The team invested heavily in segmentation, trying to understand different kinds of sports fans, what motivated them and how they wanted to participate. But translating those differences into a single product meant making choices about which behaviors and forms of participation to prioritize.
GreenPark’s prediction game is a good example. In the team’s own post-mortem, it had become “too mid-hardcore.” The experience worked for a certain kind of fan, but wasn’t delivering the more inclusive, casual experience GreenPark wanted for a broader audience.
None of their decisions were necessarily wrong. The challenge was that optimizing for one way of being a fan could make the experience less relevant to another.
And that’s where I think the way we traditionally segment fans starts to break down.
There Is No Fan in the Middle
Segmentation is useful because it turns enormous, complicated audiences into groups we can understand and build for. We group fans around shared behaviors, motivations, interests and levels of engagement, then look for the patterns that distinguish one group from another.
But sports fandom is much messier.
One fan might watch every match but never play a sports game. Another might spend hundreds of hours playing EA Sports FC but rarely watch a match. Someone might follow a player more closely than a team. Two supporters of the same club might experience it completely differently because one grew up a mile from the stadium and another became a fan from halfway around the world. A transfer can be exciting to one group and infuriating to another. A rivalry, a player or even a single moment can carry years of history and meaning for one community that barely registers with another.
There isn’t really a single fan in the middle. There are millions of different relationships with sport, shaped by identity, culture, history and community.
But historically, understanding those differences didn’t mean we could economically respond to all of them. GreenPark still had to decide where to place its bets because, like every product company, it had a finite amount it could build.
We group fans because products have needed groups.
Segmentation is still valuable as a way of understanding an audience. But those groups have also served another purpose: they helped us identify a large enough audience to justify building something.
Below that threshold are all those different relationships with sport: smaller audiences that can still be passionate and valuable, but haven’t supported the economics of deep, dedicated engagement.
The Minimum Viable Audience
This is where AI changes the equation.
The obvious observation is that AI makes certain kinds of work faster and cheaper. That’s true, but focusing on cost misses the more important consequence.
What changes is the threshold.
How many fans need to want roughly the same thing before something becomes worth building?
AI doesn’t eliminate judgment, creativity, rights, partnerships or the need to understand the people you’re building for. But it can change the amount of human effort required to understand an audience, create experiences, operate them, learn from them and adapt.
As that happens, the minimum viable audience shrinks.
There’s a useful parallel in what happened to distribution on the internet. As the cost of stocking and distributing products fell, businesses could economically serve niches that physical retail could not. Demand that previously fell below the economic threshold became worth serving.
Something similar is beginning to happen to fan engagement. As the cost of creating and operating interactive experiences falls, so does the scale of audience required to justify them.
GreenPark spent years pushing against that boundary with better pipelines, more modular systems, faster live operations and more efficient production. Those innovations moved the line. AI has the potential to move it much further.
For the first time, we may not need millions of fans to want the same thing before a particular form of fandom becomes economically worth serving.
And when that happens, things that never qualified as products before begin to cross the threshold.
This is Part 5 of The GreenPark Series. Read Part 1: Acquiring $55 Million of Sports Fan Engagement R&D · Part 2: There Is No Off-Season · Part 3: We Had It Inverted · Part 4: What Data Can’t Tell Us About Fandom.
Written by Rudy Koch, co-founder of Mythical Games and co-founder & CEO of JOA. More: Homepage · Writing · Mythical Games · Media.