By this point in the NFL season, fantasy football fans can tell whether or not they have a realistic shot of winning their league. The ones who drafted well will soon gain bragging rights. Those that were not that fortunate, the remaining games represent a lost season. Then the overall user experience tends to tail off due to certain individuals not having the same level of interest as draft day.
This reality opens a gulf of opportunities to disrupt the massive vested interest in fantasy sports.
Over the past 15 years, Justin Bauer has noticed and played through the aforementioned trend as an avid fantasy sports player. A lot of his friends were dropping out of their leagues or no longer paying attention to them. Bauer believes fantasy sports is a “poorly designed game.”
At its core, users are expected to make significant commitments throughout a sport’s season; and the most important decisions are often made on draft day. These engagement characteristics signal drawbacks in the current system and Bauer wants to capture the potential at hand.
He along with Nathan Leland have Co-Founded Rivalry Games with the intention to provide casual fans a mobile fantasy sports experience fused with gaming elements in real-time. This past month they have closed their first tranche of fundraising.
Several angels such as Brian Elliot, Paras Maniar, YuChiang Cheng, and Nir Eyal share their same vision and have invested a total of $400,000 to build out an app platform. The combination of real-time fantasy sports dedicated to one game and catered more so to the casual fan over a mobile device poses the chance to penetrate this multibillion enterprise.
According to The Atlantic, there has been close to a 12 percent revenue growth in fantasy sports during the past five years. The bigger entities of ESPN, Yahoo! Sports, and CBS have managed to produce $1.2 billion this year alone, which amounts to triple the size of the market revenue pie since 2004. These organizations have leveraged their respective audiences to generate a significant source of income in the fantasy sports space for years. The popularity has risen to point where there’s virtually a fixed user base that’s renewed each season–without a pressing need for innovation.
The basic and traditional functionality of these games have started to become banal in some respects. Daily fantasy sports spearheads the fastest growing segment of the entire landscape. Upstarts like FanDuel and DraftKings have received capital as large as $11 million and $7 million, respectively. These monetary influxes and user adoption have forced CBS to now feature a four-week fantasy league to try to compete.
In light of this climate, Bauer’s objective with Rivalry Games is to create the easiest avenue to play fantasy sports. There’s a simple UI that users can instantly navigate through and welcome. Unlike conventional mechanisms that require full-season participation or credit card information, there are far less barriers here for point of entry. Once the app is downloaded, a user can assemble a team within 60 seconds and play for just a half or a single game. A Facebook login is all that’s required to initially do so.
Football is Rivalry Games’ first available sport to play. Rather than drafting by customary principles, users are eligible to select the same players based on whom they believe provides the best chance to winning within the context of a given game. A notable distinction, too, is drafting two defensive players instead of a team’s defensive unit as a whole. And users can swap out players drafted at the end of quarters depending on real-life injuries or matchup advantages that present themselves.
These features come together through the virtual currency that users play for. This currency allows users to enter challenges and pay for in-game items like touchdown boosts and substitutions. More can be attained after defeating other participants. In time, this currency will later be redeemable for exclusive contests and discounted merchandise.
“Rivalry Fantasy Football has a unique scoring system where each player scores a different amount of points per stat based on their historical performance. So, whereas Peyton Manning scores 20 points for a touchdown and two points per ten yards completed, Alex Smith scores 60 points for a touchdown and six points per ten yards completed. So, while Manning is clearly the better fantasy player in a traditional league, a knowledgeable user may very well select Smith based on the circumstances,” Bauer explained to SportTechie.
The gaming element, though, adds a unique twist that hasn’t been merged in fantasy sports games. Inspired by NBA Jam, a player can “Be On Fire” by producing a statistical streak pertinent to their respective position. The interface will light up and show flames as the event takes place. The same way NBA Jam stood out within the console gaming vertical, Rivalry Games hopes this feature translates into fantasy sports with the same casual and interactive experience.
“We want to make the games you watch exciting from the first minute of the game; and streaks play a big role in making that happen. Knowing that the next play could put your player on fire and deliver a big point bonus is exciting! Streaks add another layer of skill into the game as well; not every player is likely to go on a streak,” says Bauer.
In order to bring these number of features to life, the technological infrastructure had to be in place to support it.
They began with an alpha test of basketball before launching the current football iteration. The most critical learning from this experience was that users don’t necessarily want to be on their device playing the game all the time. These users’ habits suggested that they want their device to tell them why the game they’re watching in real life matters. The player streaks are directly a byproduct of the initial basketball testing.
Bauer further elaborated on the technological process: “The difficulty we faced making the game was to enable rapid development and quickly iterate on our feature decisions. The development team made some crucial decisions early that have paid dividends, with regards to supporting a quick development process.
For example, the vert.x java platform for developing the back-end combines Java’s scalability with node.js-style rapid development. And the choice for HTML5 on front-end allows us to support multiple platforms and screen sizes with relative ease via responsive design; so we can deploy successfully to a variety of devices.”
Having built the app as it currently stands, expect a college football, NBA, and college hoops version in the near future. MLB and the World Cup expansion of it will debut later next year. In the meantime, they’ve started to host events at local bars in Los Angeles to bring an offline experience that includes drink specials and prizes to winners.
Rivalry Games’ infusion of fantasy sports and gaming into one mobile experience looks to appeal to the masses. Its football app is now available to download on both the App Store and Google Play.
Maybe users might also want to shout NBA Jam’s renowned phrase while playing fantasy sports, “He’s on fire!”