— Sports & Gaming
ESPN Sportsbook Mobile Platform
Penn Entertainment
Penn Entertainment’s ESPN Sportsbook had to win on product quality while operating inside strict state-by-state rules. We helped build mobile experiences that verified users’ exact location before every wager, enforced jurisdictional requirements, and held up under traffic from millions of sports fans during live events.
- Millions
- Users served
- Precise
- Geolocation
- Multi-state
- Compliance
The challenge
Legal sports betting depends on knowing precisely where a user is—not approximate GPS, but confidence that a bet is placed inside an authorized state and outside restricted zones. Regulations differ by jurisdiction, product availability shifts with legislation, and peak load arrives in bursts around major games. Any compliance gap is a business and legal risk; any performance slip during a marquee event costs engagement.
Our approach
We integrated precise location verification into core betting flows, with clear user messaging when someone was out of bounds or needed to re-verify. Compliance rules were modeled per state so features, markets, and account actions respected local law without hard-coding every edge case into the UI. The mobile stack was tuned for real-world event scale—fast odds updates, reliable session handling, and resilient behavior when location services or networks wavered at stadiums and bars.
Results
ESPN Sportsbook shipped as a polished, high-trust product that could serve millions of users while staying aligned with state requirements. Fans got a seamless path to browse lines and place bets where allowed, and the platform could carry championship-weekend load without sacrificing the compliance checks that keep the product on the right side of the law.
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