With A Drive-By-Drive Focus, Locker Enters The DFS Fray
Even for ardent NFL fans, sitting down to watch the entire first half of last week’s Bears-Panthers Thursday Night Football matchup was a rather unattractive proposition.
But there I was last Thursday, my tush parked on a chair that doubles as a scratching post for my cats, positioned about five feet from an old Samsung set I refuse to replace and grousing about the extra steps it takes to toggle from Amazon Prime to college basketball on cable between sips of Space Dust IPA.
What had compelled me to devote my (almost) undivided attention to this objectively unappealing matchup of pro football bottomfeeders was Locker, a daily fantasy sports app that will enter its open beta phase during this week’s (much better) Thursday Night Football matchup between the Bengals and Ravens. Locker’s imminent launch comes at a time when regulators nationwide are more closely scrutinizing and defining just what DFS products are — and stamping out those that too closely mimic traditional sports betting apps or parlay wagering.
“When it comes to the DFS industry as a whole, that originated from an idea of gamifying live sports or just sports in general,” Locker co-founder Hugh Roberts told RotoGrinders. “The PrizePicks and Underdogs of the world with the pick’em strategies, those products were designed just to mirror sportsbooks. Once DraftKings and FanDuel took that big step toward sportsbooks, people saw DFS as just a loophole to sports betting and completely overlooked gamification and social.”
Locker has been approved as a Small Contest Fantasy Operator in Colorado and is seeking similar licensing in states where such contests are permitted.
In Locker’s app, rather than owning players for an entire game, you own them on a drive-by-drive basis. For instance, during the recent Monday Night Football game between the Jets and Chargers, Locker contestants were presented with a four-way market at the start of a Los Angeles drive, asking them to pick which player they thought would gain the most yardage on that drive. If they played it safe and selected workhorse running back Austin Ekeler, that stood to yield fewer points than if the more lightly used tight end Gerald Everett gained the most yards on that particular drive. (There are similar rounds featuring drive results, where predicting a turnover would earn you more points than, say, a punt.)
For now, Locker’s NFL contest is free to play and lasts for just the first half of a given game, with new rounds beginning during commercial breaks. At the conclusion of each contest, the top 20% of competitors are paid predetermined prize amounts, and once Locker’s contests shift to a flat-rate, pay-to-play format, the company will keep a fixed commission.
“We target commercial breaks to not interrupt the watching experience,” explained Roberts’ fellow co-founder, Noah Bernstein. “In the long run, we want to get some more engagement in there, but we want to be an innovative game studio for daily fantasy sports. We’re going to be releasing games for basketball, for MLB. The game mechanics are different.”
From random roommates to co-founders
Roberts and Bernstein met as college freshmen when they were randomly assigned to be each other’s roommates at Cal-Berkeley. They bonded over their shared love of entrepreneurship, and by the time they graduated this past spring, they had each helped found two startups and been named vice presidents of another.
Locker, then, is their fourth co-venture, the seeds of which were sown during the COVID-19 pandemic. With in-person contact limited, mobile games like HQ Trivia and Kahoot! became critical means of entertainment and social interaction — and gave Roberts and Bernstein an idea for how to do something different in the fantasy sports space.
“Sunday football was like a religious experience for us and our friends,” said Bernstein. “There’s a lot of connection in terms of socializing, but with sports betting, there just wasn’t really a social connection. It causes this big disconnect when everybody is doing it in a different way. Our product, it’s all about easy calls to action.”
“When HQ Trivia was at its peak, it was just a live quiz contest when office groups or friend groups would stop whatever they were doing and compete against each other on trivia questions,” added Roberts. “When it comes to live football, there are millions of Americans who share that experience each week.”
In a nutshell, Locker can be viewed as a more laid-back DFS equivalent of microbetting — a way to keep people constantly engaged by assigning value to outcomes within a game instead of just the end result. Locker also features a chat room for contestants that starts in the app’s “lobby” as the game is about to begin and continues within the app until the winners are crowned.
To start with, Locker will be available only during the aforementioned Monday and Thursday NFL broadcasts, with the company planning to expand its product suite in 2024.