In January 2009, OneSeason announced that it closed a financing round of $3.5M. In December 2009, OneSeason shut its doors, $3.5M later.
The $3.5M investment was made by Charles River Ventures which is a firm with a very successful track record (heard of Twitter? yeah, that’s in its portfolio). It was definitely not for a lack of experience or trying that it failed.
Here is why OneSeason failed: Building a fantasy sports business is really hard. Building a multi-million dollar fantasy sports business is really, really hard. Throw in educating fantasy players to a whole new way of playing fantasy sports and the added pressure of investors who invested millions of dollars, and the odds have gotten incredibly slim.
OneSeason is yet another company that has failed to fully develop the fantasy sports market as a stock exchange game. ProTrade, now Citizen Sports, started with a stock market game, and has since shifted its attention to traditional fantasy games integrated into social marketing. RotoHog has also shifted its focus from its stock exchange game to producing white label games for a wide array of customers. This concept of an exchange is good in theory, but just does not get enough traction to support these businesses in reality.
In my article How to Start a Fantasy Football Business, I advise fantasy business to spend as little money as possible. The main reason why is that getting fantasy players to play a new game is hard. Fantasy players are creatures of habit and like playing what they have always been playing. If you are going to spend $3.5M on developing a fantasy site, you better have investors willing to wait five to ten years before they start seeing real return on their money. The less money your fantasy business needs, the longer and better chances it has for success.
Good news for OneSeason players, according to its site, is that whatever money you have left in your account you will be able to withdraw.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Alex
You forgot Playspex – another fantasy baseball/stockmarket game that failed. One Season was, by far, the worst concept out of the bunch though. It actually had no ‘fantasy’ component, since there was nothing to tie player price to performance – there was no reason at all that Alex Rodriguez would end up being worth more than Angel Pagan. Charles River Ventures is clearly clueless, because I exchanged two emails with he founder of One Season, and it was clear that he knows nothing about how hedge funds work, which was supposed to be what his background was. How they wasted $3.5m on this is beyond me.
Totally agree with you about keeping spending low and having a 5-10 year timeframe. Almost all of these games fail to meet their growth goals, and that’s the beginning of the end – spending on support and development is cut back, prizes are reduced, and eventually many of them close.
Jan 28th, 2010
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