By Niccolo Cassettari, Chief Business Development Officer, Logifuture
Ask any sportsbook operator what their busiest hour looks like and they’ll tell you instantly. Ask what happens at 4am on a Tuesday or the two hours between the early kick-offs finishing and the evening fixtures starting, and the answer gets vague. That gap isn’t quiet time. It’s the moment a player closes your website and opens someone else’s.
Off-peak isn’t a small problem—it’s most of the clock
Sportsbooks are built around events. Real football, real tennis, and real matches with real start and end times. The commercial model works brilliantly for the hours those events are live and says nothing about the rest of the day.
Do the math, and off-peak isn’t the exception, it’s the majority of the schedule. Early mornings, weekday afternoons, the dead zone between leagues. If the live section goes quiet, so does betting activity, and a player who leaves during that gap doesn’t automatically come back when the action resumes.
Habits break. They find something else to do on somebody else’s site.
This challenge is particularly relevant across many African markets, where operators often navigate different sports calendars, extended off-peak periods, and an increasingly mobile-first audience that expects engaging entertainment at any hour of the day.
That’s the real cost of off-peak: not empty hours, but a retention leak. Every moment you’re not offering action is a moment a competitor can poach a player you already earned.
Players rarely think in terms of “off-peak hours.” They simply expect entertainment whenever they open an app. If engaging content isn’t immediately available, switching to another platform takes only a few seconds.
Fixing the schedule: Zoom Sports
For operators, the question is no longer whether off-peak hours matter but how to transform them into an opportunity rather than a retention risk. Creating engaging experiences beyond live sporting events is becoming one of the industry’s key competitive advantages.
This is the problem Zoom Sports was built to solve. It’s a 24/7 virtual football and tennis product designed specifically for sportsbook users, not the traditional virtuals crowd. It recreates the structure and rhythm of the world’s most-watched leagues: full-length matches running to realistic timings, lookalike competitions built on the same formats players already follow, plus turbo fixtures at roughly ten minutes for the moments when a faster result fits better. Same market depth as a real event throughout, pre-match and live, full odds boards, no shortcuts.
The point isn’t novelty, it’s continuity. There’s never a gap in the live section, which means there’s never a natural exit point for the player. Operators running Zoom Sports have seen +20-30% turnover uplift on their sportsbook, not from replacing real sport, but from filling the hours real sport doesn’t cover.
Distribution matters here too. Zoom Sports integrates via Sportradar’s OneFeed and other standard aggregation routes, so it’s not a six-month build, it’s weeks. That’s deliberate. A product that fixes off-peak has to be fast to deploy, or the business case erodes before it goes live.
The adoption pattern backs it up: Zoom Sports is already live across 25+ African markets, and the same logic, always-on content, low integration friction, is now extending into LATAM and Europe. The problem isn’t regional. Off-peak exists everywhere there’s a sportsbook.
Read Also: Logifuture’s Simulate goes live in South Africa with Hollywoodbets
Volume isn’t the same as engagement
Here’s where a lot of the industry gets it half right. The instinct, when off-peak comes up, is to add more: more markets, more leagues, more promotional pushes around the events that already exist. That solves a supply problem. It doesn’t solve a boredom problem.
Sportsbook players don’t want a longer list of the same thing at 6am, they want the format that fits what they’re in the mood for right then. Sometimes that’s the immersion of a full match unfolding in real time, which is exactly what Zoom Sports delivers. Sometimes it’s the opposite: no waiting at all, just an instant result on a market they already know. That’s what Simulate is for, real teams, real markets, instant outcomes, with turbo mode for players who want the answer now rather than in five minutes.
Operators see +5-10% uplift in sportsbook GGR/turnover from adding it, small individually but incremental revenue sitting in dead time that was previously worth nothing.
The lesson underneath both products is the same: giving players more of the main event isn’t the same as giving them content they actually want. Off-peak needs its own design, not a diluted version of peak.
Cross-sell done properly is retention you don’t pay for
The other conversation happening across the industry right now is bonusing, and increasingly, how unsustainable it’s becoming. Chase the same acquisition and reactivation tactics as every competitor and the only lever left is spending more on bonuses than they do. That’s a race to the bottom, and everyone in it loses margin.
There’s a cheaper way to keep a player on your platform: give them somewhere else on your platform to go. That’s what cross-sell is supposed to do, and it only works if it’s built for the sportsbook user specifically, not a generic casino lobby they never asked for.
Swipe Games is built for exactly that handoff: mobile-first, swipe-in/swipe-out casino mini-games, designed for players who’ve never touched casino before and aren’t going to sit through a slots catalogue to find out if they like it. No disruption to the betting journey, just a natural next step. It’s already generating 10-15% of total casino GGR on operators with sportsbook-heavy bases, with strong new-to-casino conversion.
That’s retention without a bonus attached to it. A player who cross-sells into casino because the product fits how they already behave isn’t costing you anything extra to keep, they’re just staying on their own terms.
The actual question operators should be asking
None of this is really about content volume, and it was never really about bonuses either. Both are ways of trying to buy attention instead of earning it. The operators pulling ahead right now aren’t the ones offering the most, they’re the ones offering something built for how their players actually behave, hour by hour, vertical by vertical.
That’s the real competitive gap. Not who can run the most markets or the biggest promotion, but who evolves the platform fastest around what players actually want. Off-peak coverage, content that fits the moment instead of padding the schedule, cross-sell that earns its place, none of it is complicated on its own. What’s hard is doing it better than the operator next to you, consistently, while they’re still trying to out-spend the problem.
Ultimately, the operators that succeed won’t necessarily be those offering the largest number of markets but those delivering the most engaging experience throughout the entire player journey. Keeping players entertained when live sports slow down is becoming a competitive advantage rather than simply an additional feature.
That’s the shift worth making now: stop competing on more, start competing on better.
