https://twitter.com/IAmGrza/status/1202692218735120384?s=20
They've been pretty dodgy lately with their providing of information regarding fantasy league. I really hope this is something they end up delivering unlike a few months back when they further delayed it. They said that today would be the today they give information, so I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt that they will.
External link →We didn't forget.
For Spring 2020 the LCS doesn't have an official/endorsed/affiliated fantasy product. We expect to be connected with some really cool stuff for summer split, but none of those are ready for announcement.
In some of those prior updates we talked about creating a third-party ecosystem through our partnership with Bayes (who provides our live game data to third-parties). The goal was to make sure that fantasy fans had an LCS fantasy experience for Spring 2020 (even if Riot wasn't associated with it). So, I've got three of those for you:
EsportsOne has created a fantasy platform that covers the LCS. It is free to play and lets you build a dream roster against a budget in a daily fantasy style. https://esportsone.com/fantasy/
ThriveFantasy lets you make pick’em style selections around player stats (more than 5 kills, less than 3 deaths, etc). It is free to play and you can make your picks on a daily basis. The format is set up around giving you stats on ten players and you can pick the over/under on five of them. https://t.co/Vi3ZjnA3j6
ESX provides a stock-market type game (like the segment we ran on LCS this year) where you can buy and sell teams based on prices that change in connection with their performance. They ran a beta during Worlds, are free to play and will be live for the upcoming LCS season. https://esx.gg/
[Edit] Gamepedia is running a pick'em game where you can select the winner of each LCS game. https://t.co/m1bBu2bCkD?amp=1
If you've come across other cool projects, let me know (tag me here or tweet at me at IAmGrza). 2020 is going to be a fantastic year for fantasy fans (which is long overdue considering how bad 2019 was for fantasy).
Not a single one of those "third party products" are actual fantasy leagues...
Can we NEVER let Riot try to pretend they give a f**k about Fantasy ever again? They've just been lying right to our face for years, and it's really getting pathetic at this point.
EsportsOne is pretty close to the old fantasy league - season long fantasy leagues where you have to be organized by your friends and you can only enter at the start of the season don't work well (we know that from our own data). The others are not fantasy leagues, but hit different audiences.
I think the problem with season long fantasy leagues with friends (and what Riot's data likely shows) is that a very niche group of people would use them.
Season long means a long term commitment for everyone involved to play and stay active. If people lose enthusiasm/become inactive in those groups, eventually it will hit a point where not enough people are participating to make it worth participating anymore (ie. the entire league becomes inactive).
Season long means that only on season start can people really make the groups and so that shuts out people who might want to participate in fantasy leagues but aren't aware at season start (or become fans of the lcs/league after season start).
Fantasy leagues with friends runs into the problem of having to have a good group of friends that are also invested/interested in competitive league enough to want to join some fantasy league style system.
All these issues combined mean that the actual active player-base of a season long fantasy league with friends becomes very small (and since league esports isn't that large outside of China, is just not worth it in terms of time/money) which is most likely what the Riot data says.
Yeah, pretty much this. I think in one of the older posts about fantasy when we talked about user numbers we identified season-long and playing with a group of friends that requires an organizer to be the two biggest contributors to the death spiral of the old product. There are still some providers that are out there running successful season-long fantasy products (and we're still talking to them), but keeping engagement up week over week is hard (even for the NFL and NBA that have really successful fantasy leagues associated with them).
There is no blame for people not playing - I've talked pretty candidly about how we didn't make any changes to the fantasy product for a long time - it isn't surprising that people stopped playing - but the nature of the game (needing an organizer and being season-long) provided limitations on the ability of people to pop in and out.
We weren't great fantasy operators - but there are a lot of companies out there that are. Some are entering the space in Spring (see above) and some have plans targeted towards Summer. Like I said in another post in here somewhere, 2020 is going to be a really good year for fantasy fans. If the only fantasy LCS you want is season-long with your friends, I'd encourage you to try some of the options for Spring 2020 (most if not all allow you to create custom groups with your friends) and let me know what you think.
Edit: English.
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