Online game environment Fantasy Sports Network is going mobile. In its current online incarnation, the site garners about 100,000 unique visitors a month who pay to play fantasy hockey, golf and other games. Now Toronto-based FSN is turning its sights to mobile.
GM Steve Hulford sees cellphones as a great medium for such features as polls, trivia and letting people see how they rank. Within the, say, 20,000 people playing, a group of 20 friends can form a league and Hulford is hoping they will use SMS to ‘trash talk’ each other, saying things like: ‘I passed you in the golf pool last night.’ FSN is partnering with Toronto-based mobile game development company Magnet Mobile in the initiative and is looking for a major sponsor in the telecommunications space to help get things ramped up for a summer go.
Another mobile game in the preliminary stages is similar to the highly addictive ’90s game, Tamagachi, in which players had to keep a toy egg alive. In this case, players would have to keep their team alive, managing within a budget, dealing with strikes and broadcast deals, maybe winning the Stanley Cup.
Players on the Web site are 70% male, 18-34, with a sweet spot of about 26 – a hard-to-reach bunch. Hulford anticipates the same sort of demo for cellphones. He says for the first year he’s going to bundle the sponsorship elements into a package. For one price an advertiser might do a promotion online and possibly on TV and get mobile as an extension of that. On the site, golf and a champ car game are currently among the sections seeking sponsors. Meanwhile, a CFL suite of games is being sponsored by Wendy’s.
