Facebook Dipping Into Fantasy Sports, Predictive Games

Facebook, the large social media platform, is exploring fantasy sports and predictive games, introducing a variety of options related to popular culture, sports, and television shows.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, is pictured in the image above (Getty Images). While Facebook is entering the fantasy sports arena, they are choosing to stay away from betting. Their first offering is called Pick & Play Sports, developed in conjunction with Whistle Sports. Points are accrued by correctly choosing the winner of a game, points scored by star players, or match-specific events. Users could earn additional points by correctly predicting results over multiple days. In the coming months, Daniel Fletcher, Senior Product Manager at Facebook, said they will offer new games based on CBS’s Survivor, ABC’s The Bachelorette, MLB, LaLiga Santander, and BuzzFeed. With this platform, users can create and join public and private leagues or compare their rank to the public leaderboard.

Betting Combination is available in the US and Canada on the Facebook app for iOS and Android, allowing people to play games.

Facebook, Betting Combination

13 is a good example — FOX Bet’s F2P app offers a $10,000 guaranteed cash prize to the first-place winner and four other leaderboard prizes.

Despite the fact that it’s unclear whether cash or other prizes are being offered to top players, Fantasy Games on Facebook appear to be more focused on user interaction rather than Mark Zuckerberg’s company entering the gambling world. Several gaming companies have seen the potential of predictive sports and apply it as a tool to obtain data about customers and identify those who can legally gamble in certain states. F2P games are attractive to users because of their no-risk nature, and many have cash or additional rewards for winners. Prominent F2P apps with cash prizes, such as FOX Bet’s “Super 6” application, offer supervised games across a variety of sports like football, baseball, NASCAR and more. An example is the NFL Sunday Challenge of September 13th, where there is a guaranteed $10,000 cash prize for the first-place winner, plus additional prize rewards for leaderboard participants.

NBC Sports’ Predictor app, in collaboration with Australian gaming company PointsBet, is offering a top prize of $1 million to the winner(s) who are able to accurately predict the outcome of six NFL games, as well as the margins of victory in those contests. Apart from this, Penn National Gaming has Barstool Sportsbook’s Jackpot Races, which is a weekly NASCAR contest offering a top prize of $25,000 to users who are able to accurately predict the top finish in five groups of drivers, as well as the top three finishers in a particular race. Survivor and Bachelorette Games are also expected to be released soon.

Survivor, Bachelorette Games Coming

Facebook is expanding its free-to-play game offerings with upcoming predictive games for the MLB playoffs, Spain’s LaLiga Santander season, and popular TV shows such as The Bachelorette and Survivor. Fans will be able to create their own Fantasy Survivor teams, answering questions about upcoming episodes to receive points based on events that took place. This move away from sports is not without precedent; FOX Bet launched a The Masked Singer contest earlier in the year and regularly hosts a Quiz Show game with questions focused on sports, financial markets, and popular trends.