Fantasy Sports App Development Complete Guide
With the increasing fan base created by mobile apps for real-world games like cricket, football, basketball, and several others, the impact of fantasy sports app development is already too well known. Fantasy sports apps' vast and exponential popularity has already inspired many businesses and startups to invest in these app projects.
According to the latest report by Industry Research, fantasy sports app development will have a market revenue of 32,078 million USD by 2025. From its market value of 15,680 million USD in 2019, this amounts to a year on year growth rate of 12.67%. Right now, there are hundreds of fantasy sports apps across the App Store and Play Store.
How to go about your dream fantasy sports app development project? How do these apps work? How do they fetch revenue for the developers? What are the key features of these apps? Let's provide here a complete guide on fantasy sports app development.
How Do Fantasy Sports Apps Work?
Are you considering making a mobile game app for the fantasy sports niche? The first thing you need is to understand how these apps work. In fantasy sports apps, the app users create virtual teams with real player icons. The teams are created based on the player's performance statistics in real-life games.
This is how the fantasy sports app flows:
● User selects the Match: Following the login and verification with a one-time password, the app users can choose a match as per their preference.
● Create a Team: Now, the app users need to create a team to play the match. It depends upon the particular game of choice. For instance, in the case of Football, Cricket, and a few others, they need to choose 11 players for the team.
● Captain: Now, the app users need to select the team captain.
● Team Division: Now, following the game rules, the app users can create multiple teams, and even some apps allow virtual players to join a team.
● Team Management: During the match app, users can change the team at any point in time.
● Reward and recognition: The players in the team, as per their game performance, get points. The collective points earned by the teams decide the winner of the match.
How Does a Fantasy Sports App Development Project Make Money?
The fantasy sports app development process involves a considerable investment, releasing, and maintaining the app. Naturally, it would help if you had a meticulous monetization plan to make consistent earnings from the app project. Considering the established sources of revenue for the leading fantasy sports apps, here below, we explain the top monetization methods.
● Charges for setting the game
In the fantasy app, you can ask the users to pay for launching a league or choosing the players of preference instead of the standard app-provided one for the team. The app can also charge for changing the game format to knockout level.
● In-App Ads
As the popularity of fantasy sports apps is enormous, advertisers always choose these apps for showcasing ads. By integrating Google AdMob, an advertiser can show ads on a fantasy sports app.
● Third-Party Partnering
A fantasy sports app can also earn revenue by partnering with third-party services and by affiliating the third-party products and services through the app.
What Features Should a Fantasy Sports App Development project consider?
The definitive features that describe a fantasy sports app development project are not too many, but they can be found in most apps. Let's be exhaustive when picking these features for our present discussion.
User Registration
This is the most common feature for any mobile app project, irrespective of the platform or niche. A mobile game development company must be very familiar with the latest user registration and login features such as social login to help first-time gamers start gaming as quickly as possible.
Landing Page
A landing page is a crucial lead generation tool for mobile game apps, and it always comes as soon as the user finishes logging in. After coming on the landing page of the game, the app user selects from the various search filters corresponding to sport, date, match type, tournament, and others.
Leaderboard
It has been seen that in most of the fantasy sports apps, users like to contest with the near and dear ones. Because of accommodating these public contests, a fantasy sports app development project must incorporate leaderboards. Leaderboard showcasing the earned points and winning streaks with figures ensure more competition and engagement.
Multiplayer Arena
Every fantasy gaming app should have an arena for inviting multiple players as per the preferences of the app users. This will help establish a highly competitive space for the users to engage while offering several options at their disposal.
Data Feeds
A fantasy sports app should also have illustrious data feeds to help app users to see all the score details of individual players and the teams. These data feeds can be both integrated and manual in nature and can ensure a more personalized and user-centric gaming experience for fantasy sports apps.
Ad-Space
A fantasy sports app development project must accommodate enough space for in-app ads. The app admins can utilize these spaces to run affiliate marketing campaigns or run ads from regular advertisers.
Referral Policy
Mobile game apps make good use of referral policy for user acquisition, and in the case of the fantasy sports app development project, this can help the app go viral quickly.
Several Popular Payment Gateways
Fantasy sports apps with their engaging gameplay can easily convert the leads to actual businesses or revenue. The only way to ensure this is to remain flexible by offering several popular payment gateways.
Profile Settings
By simply allowing the app users to customize their profiles, do you know you can create a sense of ownership among the users? Yea, profile settings, for that matter, is very important for any app project, including fantasy sports app development projects. This feature allows users to customize their profiles by updating their profile pics, setting personal choices, creating personalized menu options, allowing easy access to their reward points, bonus details, earnings from referrals, contest details, transaction history, bank details, etc.
Real-Time Analytics
Since you can only ensure success for your app by constantly improving the app based on user feedback and data-driven insights, real-time app analytics is a key requirement for fantasy sports apps as well. The most important analytics features in fantasy sports apps are live tracking and user activity analysis.
Live Video Streaming
Do you know the live streaming video of fantasy gameplay gets a huge number of viewers in social media and video streaming channels? This live streaming of gameplay also creates a unique and creative way to earn additional revenue from the game app. You can also allow the app users to record a match and release them as video gaming content on YouTube.
Gamification
Gamification or game-like interactive play not only boosts player engagement but the same also plays a crucial role in making a game create a lot of buzz on different channels. By simply winning a tournament title or topping the list of game players, app users can share the feat with others on social media platforms. This gamification helps in helping the game to reach out to a wider audience.
How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Fantasy Sports App?
Now coming to the cost estimates of a fantasy sports app development project, wider variations depend upon the size of the app, chosen features, opted platforms, and gaming experience. There are several different factors behind the development budget of a fantasy sports app.
The key aspects and elementary process to build a fantasy sports app may not differ much from any app across the niches. But certain app features need a more meticulous development to fit well into fantasy gaming apps.
The app project complexity can make the biggest impact on the cost. Depending upon the complexity of the proposed game app, there will be variable app design costs. The chosen technology stack and development method also play a crucial role in the cost of the app. Lastly, how you choose the project to be developed and whether you outsource or go for in-house development also make a considerable impact on the cost of app development.
Conclusion
There can be hardly any doubt that fantasy sports apps are increasingly getting popular, and the market for these apps is continuously expanding. These apps offer a new and innovative opportunity for a business leader to reach out to the target audience, generate leads, and convert them.
While the promise of fantasy sports apps sounds loud, both the app idea and execution play a crucial role in shaping a fantasy sports app project. To make things with control and precision, an app project like this should follow an incremental development approach such as MVP to allow subsequent updates based on user feedback.