Daily Fantasy Sports Comes to Facebook
Now you can play Daily Fantasy Sports with your friends on Facebook! Phantasm Sports Inc., based out of Canada, recently launched a Facebook App called Daily Fantasy Sports that allows you to create a salary cap style team and compete with your friends every single day! The unique twist they bring to the industry is that all contests are free! Phantasm has adopted a free-model approach in hopes to bring Daily Fantasy Sports to the masses. Robert Wilson, the Director of Business Relations and Marketing at Phantasm told us that their new app on Facebook “is looking to work within the existing community to help bring more coverage to the great game of Daily Fantasy Sports. Right now Facebook is the ultimate way to market things quickly and effectively so I hope the pay sites see us as a tool that will help them and not as competition.”
As mentioned, the app is free to all users. Their business will monetize from advertisements on the site and also provide their users with free prizes from advertisers that the users can compete for in daily multi-player contests. Their App seems to me to be what Club WPT was for the Poker Industry (less the subscriptions fees) to the Daily Fantasy Sports world. As the user-base grows, I’m sure the prizes they can offer will grow as well, making for a viable spot for users to justify spending time competing for free on a regular basis. The app is still in BETA phase while they enhance the product and grow the user-base, but the advertisements are already prominent. While constructing my lineup I accidentally wound up registering for another app on Facebook called Cityville, and wound up a touch confused. Now that I am used to the ad placements however, they do not take away from the experience, and they are certainly justified for the prizes that Phantasm plans to offer for free. As far as what prizes will be offered, Wilson told me that “they are currently working on the prize tournament schedule for next month.” And that he “thinks there will be a load of interest once people see what they can win with out ever paying a cent to play.”
I’ve been playing the Salary Cap baseball game currently offered while the site grows, and I’m please with what I’ve seen so far. I was able to quickly and easily navigate the software to construct a lineup within a challenging but fair salary cap. When I finished my lineup, I was excited to invite my friends to compete against me. Being on Facebook, Daily Fantasy Sports really integrates the ‘challenging’ aspect of the game in a seamless and entertaining matter. Combining the invite system with their Rankings System and Leaderboards I think this aspect of the game will really help to expand and market the number of users in similar ways you’ve seen with other Facebook apps such as Farmville.
If you don’t want to challenge your friends directly, Phantasm also provides daily Multi-Player contests (the ones where they plan to offer free prizes for moving forward). You use Phantasm Dollars (PH$) to enter and compete in the contests while you grow your bankroll. Phantasm Dollars or PH$ are in-game credits that you use to pay the tournament entry fees. As a new member you start out with $1000 PH$. Each day you return to the site your account will be credited with $500 PH$. Phantasm Dollars have no real cash value, and are used within the App only. You will be able to earn more PH$ by competing and placing in the “money” in their daily Tournaments. Phantasm Sports calculates tournament Fantasy points based on our Fantasy scoring metrics. All of their live statistics are provided by STATS Inc. For baseball your roster consists of C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, 3 OFs, and 2 Starting Pitchers. Their unique scoring system is as follows:
Batters
Single = 2.1 pts
Double = 2.8 pts
Triple = 3.4 pts
Home Run = 4.2 pts
Walk = 1.8 pts
Hit by pitch = 1.8 pts
Stolen Base = 1.8 pts
Run Batted In = 1.3 pts
Run scored = 1.1 pts
Pitchers
Win = 1.1 pts
Strike Out = 0.4 pts
Earned runs = -0.7 pts
Complete game = 1 pts
Innings pitched = 1.1 pts
Overall, I’m excited for the potential of a free-play daily fantasy sports product offered directly via Facebook. I’ll be playing and rooting for Phantasm over the course of the next month. I think they have created an opportunity to grow the daily fantasy sports industry’s following by exposing the industry potential to a mass-scale through Facebook, hopefully leading to some conversion to the larger paid sites. Feel free to send a challenge my way if we’re friends on Facebook!
Cameron MacMillan
RotoGrinders.com Fantasy Content Manager