Rudy Koch → Writing → The GreenPark Series
Where Fandom Happens
Lessons from GreenPark Sports: Part 6
There was a concept used at GreenPark Sports that I keep coming back to: “Closed world.”
GreenPark had built a 3D “theme park for fandom,” where fans could represent their teams, meet other supporters, play games, make predictions and compete. It was deliberately a destination: a richer, more interactive alternative to experiencing sports through a social feed.
At the time, there weren’t many alternatives. If you wanted to build something deeper than a feed, you largely had to build somewhere for it to live. Social platforms were places to reach fans, not places where you could deliver much of the experience itself.
Two things are changing that equation. AI is making it possible to create far more fan experiences, for far smaller audiences than could ever have justified the cost before. At the same time, platforms like TikTok, Reddit and Discord are opening up new ways for those experiences to happen inside the places fans already spend their time.
Together, those shifts create a choice we didn’t really have before. We can use AI to create more experiences and keep packaging each one as another destination. Or we can distribute those experiences into the places where fandom is already happening.
The first path creates a new problem. If every new experience becomes a new destination, each one needs to find fans, acquire them, onboard them and convince them to come back. Fans end up choosing between dozens of places built around the same fandom, all competing for their attention.
The opportunity isn’t to create more places for fans to go. It’s to make more of their existing fandom playable, wherever it is already happening.
GreenPark had correctly identified part of the problem
GreenPark recognized that Twitter, Reddit and similar platforms hadn’t really evolved beyond the feed: posts, comments, photos and videos. You could describe the experience as something closer to “yelling at the Internet.”
I still think they were right about that. Sports fandom is incredibly rich. It’s identity, rivalry, humor, history, emotion, tribalism and community. Reducing all of that to a feed leaves a lot on the table. GreenPark’s answer was to build a better place for it.
At the time, that was a logical answer. If the existing platforms couldn’t support the experience you wanted to build, you had to build the experience somewhere else.
The tension was that a fan’s fandom already lived somewhere: in group chats, on social platforms, in conversations with friends, and in whatever app they opened when something happened during a match. Building something richer meant asking them to leave all of that and come somewhere else.
Not everything wants to be a closed world
That tension started showing up in the behavior itself. GreenPark’s 3D environment worked well when someone wanted immersion, but sports fandom contains lots of interactions that aren’t immersive at all. You check something, react to something, or open something a friend sent you. A player gets traded. Someone scores. A call goes against your team. A clip starts spreading. You want to participate, but you don’t necessarily want to enter a virtual world to do it.
Over time, the team learned that not everything was ideal for a 3D world. Some parts of fandom benefited from immersion. Others were much more utilitarian.
GreenPark responded by trying to remove friction from the world it had already built. “Frictionless Access” and “Frictionless Communication” became explicit product goals. The team built ways for people to jump directly to their friends through notifications and invites, and pushed toward something they described as a “social sports bar in your pocket.”
Those efforts made it easier to get fans back into the experience. What’s changed is that increasingly, the experience can go to them.
The funnel was a product of its time
There’s an irony here that is much easier to see now. GreenPark was getting increasingly good at finding sports fans on platforms like TikTok. But social was primarily an acquisition channel. The experience itself still had to live somewhere else.
That shaped the funnel: find the fan on TikTok, Instagram or another social platform, then convert them. Download the app. Create the account. Enter the experience. “Meet fans where they are” really meant meet them there, then bring them here.
Until recently, there weren’t many alternatives. But that’s starting to change. TikTok Mini Games, YouTube Playables and other emerging distribution models are turning platforms that were previously acquisition channels into places where the experience itself can happen. A fan can increasingly move from watching or talking about sport to playing something around it without first being pulled into a completely different destination.
That changes what “meet fans where they are” can mean. It shouldn’t just describe your marketing strategy anymore. It can describe your product strategy.
More experiences can’t mean more destinations
This is where AI changes the problem.
For most of the history of digital sports, building an interactive experience has been expensive enough that it needed a sufficiently large audience to justify its existence. AI changes that equation. A single club can justify something. So can an athlete, a rivalry or a community. Eventually, maybe even a moment can.
That creates the possibility of a very different kind of fan engagement: many smaller experiences, built around whatever fans care about right now.
But if every one of those experiences becomes another destination, the economics quickly work against us. Every new product has to find an audience, convince them to come somewhere new and give them a reason to return. As the number of destinations grows, they all compete to acquire and reacquire the same fans.
For fans, the problem is fragmentation. Which app, game, site or experience are you actually supposed to pay attention to? Your fandom gets spread across a growing collection of destinations, each trying to become another habit.
If AI allows us to create a thousand economically viable fan experiences but we turn them into a thousand destinations, we haven’t solved the distribution problem. We’ve multiplied it.
The distribution model has to change with the economics.
Fandom is fluid
GreenPark described their ambition as combining the rewarding mechanics of games with the “topical fluidity of a social platform.” That idea has stuck with me.
Fandom moves. A supporter can spend months talking about a title race, a week talking about a transfer, an afternoon talking about an injury and twenty minutes obsessing over a ridiculous goal. The center of gravity constantly changes.
That makes fandom a strange fit for traditional product development. Products want structure. Fandom wants to follow whatever just happened.
Once you accept that, the form of the product starts to change too. Maybe the goal isn’t to build one enormous experience capable of containing all of fandom. Maybe you build experiences that move with it: a challenge around a player having an incredible match, something playable when a moment starts spreading, a competition between supporters before a derby, or a tiny experience for a community that would never have been large enough to justify one before.
And those experiences increasingly don’t need a destination of their own. They can happen wherever the fandom around that moment is already happening.
Where fandom happens
That history has influenced the choices we’re making at JOA. As I told Sportico earlier this year, “We’re not asking you to go to an Xbox, we’re not asking you even to go to the App Store. Go to X, we’re going to be there. Go to Discord, we’re going to be there.” And we launched inside social platforms rather than as an app.
Participation should travel to the fan, rather than requiring the fan to travel to the participation. Platforms will change, moments will change, and the experiences around them will change too.
Fandom doesn’t need another world. It already has one. The opportunity is to make more of it playable.
This is Part 6 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 · Part 5: The Minimum Viable Audience.
Written by Rudy Koch, co-founder of Mythical Games and co-founder & CEO of JOA. More: Homepage · Writing · Mythical Games · Media.