We run the pack economies, design pipelines, and player lifecycle behind leading trading-card and digital collectibles brands. That same always-on engine now serves sports betting, DFS, and fantasy platforms.
Collectibles and sports businesses run on an event calendar. That calendar creates the same three gaps in every operator we meet.
Pack odds, rarity tiers, and pricing are set by gut, not modeled. Revenue gets left on the table, and you cannot tune fast enough between drops.
Every drop, season, and campaign needs fresh variants and assets. The design team becomes the bottleneck, and quality slips when volume spikes.
Engagement spikes on event day and falls off afterward. Without a lifecycle and loyalty engine, you re-acquire the same users you already paid for.
Both case studies are fully anonymized per client confidentiality agreements. The metrics are real.
A leading global trading-card publisher partnered with [x]cube LABS to run its pack economy, gamified collector lifecycle, and engagement ops end to end across its digital apps. The engagement has run for a decade and continues to compound.
A global sports and entertainment leader in digital collectibles needed an embedded live-ops partner that could absorb its growing portfolio without disrupting existing pipelines. [x]cube LABS stepped in and grew in lockstep across three years.
SLAs cover the full pipeline from brief to publish. Every ticket is peer-reviewed before handoff. We do not ship and hope.
The pod model and AI-assisted production tooling mean that volume growth does not require a proportional increase in team size. Output grows faster than cost.
Pack odds, rarity mechanics, virtual currency balancing, and LTV analytics are inside the pod. Most ops vendors execute against specs we help set.
Institutional knowledge compounds over time: live questions logs, CMS certifications, client cadence rhythms, platform-specific edge cases. We build it in. A new vendor starts at zero.
Start with the pillar that hurts most, or embed the full pod alongside your team. You buy throughput and outcomes, not headcount.
Pack and set algorithms, rarity and odds engines, drop mechanics, SKU and pricing design.
Base design to variants, flavors, and parallels: a creative production pipeline and brand systems.
Segmentation, messaging, upsell, cross-sell, retention, and win-back, powered by Upshot.ai.
Seasonal and event content, drop calendars, challenges, and in-product engagement.
Economy balancing, A/B testing, LTV and cohort analytics, and live dashboards.
One squad runs your program end to end. Scale by adding pods, not vendors.
Live-ops programs live or die on what happens between events. Upshot.ai, our proprietary omnichannel engagement platform, is the layer that keeps players and collectors active when there is no drop on the calendar.
It runs the behavioral segmentation, gamified loyalty mechanics, and lifecycle automation that turn a well-run drop calendar into compounding retention and LTV. The same platform powers engagement programs for Panini, Puma, Sony, and Amway, with documented lifts in revenue, daily active users, and retention.
The mechanics that grow a pack economy are the same ones that grow a promo calendar. We speak both.
We design the pack economy, produce variants at scale, and run the collector lifecycle that keeps drops growing.
Who we work with Physical and digital card makers, TCG publishers, blockchain collectibles, live-commerce and breaking, marketplaces.
We run the seasonal live-ops, gamified loyalty, and promo cadence the calendar demands, with retention as the metric.
Who we work with Sportsbooks, DFS and pick'em apps, prediction markets, fantasy platforms, sports media and streaming.
Most partnerships begin with a low-risk paid pilot and grow into a managed program. You see throughput before you commit.
A fixed-scope design sprint or pack-economy audit, 4 to 8 weeks. Fast, low-risk, proof of throughput.
A full economy, design, lifecycle, and analytics squad operating your program at cadence.
Multi-pod programs across titles and regions, with performance-based upside.
Two anonymized case studies. Real before/after numbers. Or book a 30-minute discovery call and we will map the opportunity in your economy.
Real before/after numbers. Two programs. Fully anonymized. We will email them to you right away.