The people that brought you HubDub, the prediction site that effectively turns news content into a game, have had a new idea. FanDuel is a premium, paid-for game focused on fantasy sports. Running in private beta for the last month, the game opens up today. The site is totally focused on U.S. sports (baseball, NFL).
Although the competitive space for daily fantasy sports is fairly new, there’s clearly an opportunity there — some 20m people play fantasy games, making it a $2bn industry. Currently big players such as Yahoo, CBS and ESPN dominate the market.
But if you play Mafia Wars and other social games on Facebook, going back to playing traditional fantasy sports on CBS feels like going back to when dinosaurs walked the earth. There’s clearly a gap waiting for something better and more social.
The trouble is most fantasy sports require a lot of time commitment as you have to play for the whole season, meaning a long time to get anything out of it.
Full story at http://uk.techcrunch.com
