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December 18, 2007
Why I Love The Industry I'm In
Humorous post at FSL's blog. It's always good when your competition writes at a fifth grade level. And when they're running a tech startup but can't even manage to host their own blog.
First there is this nugget "A live draft has always been in the plans for FantasySportsLive.com, but we feel that we still do not have the critical mass for that to work properly." Yeah, it's either that, or because you're outsourcing all of the design on a shoe string budget and programming a live draft is actually hard, and therefore expensive.
You're doing a bang-up job with the site there too. I love how your server returns an error unless you put "www." before the name. Go to just http://fantasysportslive.com and you get an error page. I know I'd want to deposit my money on a site after seeing errors that any third rate sysadmin could fix.
He goes on to say, quite sloppily, that one of the main advantages of a salary cap draft is that they can be done asynchronously. He's actually somewhat correct there. We've got a pretty awesome idea for an asynchronous game that we're working on as well. There is some benefit to having a game people can play 24/7, even if nobody else wants to. That's why we're going to make it incredibly easy and fun to do so many times a day.
But filling a site with people who want to pick players from a list isn't going to help if your long term plan is to have a site full of live drafts. That's the same as saying "We want to have the most hold'em action on the net, so we're starting off by marketing to 2-7 Triple Draw players." I guess that's not surprising coming from a site that wants to run fantasy sports contests but seems to market exclusively to poker players. It's pretty much the same thing.
In the long run, live drafts are where the money is, so that's where we're starting out.We've actually had a pretty good amount of people playing them too. In fact, since our competitors don't have a live lobby, just some static html list of tournaments, it's pretty easy to track their action. I won't go into details, but I'd be surprised if FSL is even in second place.
Then they have a last paragraph (that, were it written by anyone with a high school diploma, would actually have been three) that starts off talking about patents. Good luck. You can tell their legal budget is as low as their software development one. In fact, I'd go so far as to say (having spoken at great length to a top gaming law firm, another one that's done a lot of work with the bigger FS sites, and one of the lawyers who worked with CBC in their case vs. the MLB) that they are taking a huge legal risk by operating in a few states. If they're ever big enough to register on a few Attorneys General's radars, they're going to have some serious trouble.
And they're probably just plain wrong about the patents. Or wrong about what they think they could do with them even if they were successful. We've spoken to some top-notch IP lawyers as well, and it's not that simple.
My favorite quote of all, though, is definitely this one:
Our competition is just copying our ideas, but have no clue about what our intentions were or what direction the site is heading.
That or two of your three competitors started the process before you did. There's also the fact that you yourself are an uninspired clone of Game Day Draft and the now unsurprisingly defunct Weekly Fantasy Football. Way to copy a giant, steaming pile.
(Also, nice grammar there chief. Only three mistakes in one sentence.)
Our site is radically different, and better. We give a 100% deposit bonus, rather than 10%, and ours isn't sticky. We let people cash it out once they've met a pretty low playthrough. We have live drafts. We have comments, better design, friend functionality, a pretty kick ass affiliate program you can sign up for and use easily. We're kinda like ESPN.com meets Party Poker meets Facebook. You're kinda like Game Day Draft meets, well, Game Day Draft. Good luck with that.
It's hilarious to me that they make the originality claim, when they're just a slightly less lame carbon copy of another site. My dog leaves more originality than that in tightly coiled piles on my front lawn daily. And he's probably a better sysadmin than whoever is running their site too.
Posted by themaroon at December 18, 2007 5:45 PM