Daily fantasy sports platform FanDuel announced on August 1 a bold new feature that takes on the bigger, more entrenched “season-long” fantasy sports providers. And today that feature goes live to all FanDuel users.
The feature is called Friends Mode, and it allows FanDuel users to set up private, recurring leagues to play against friends every week of the season. (The core of the FanDuel product, in the past, was for users to enter large prize pools with strangers.) The format of this is still “daily” fantasy, meaning that every week, users can draft a new team, but by making it recurring, and closed for friends, it essentially becomes season-long structure.
Beginning this afternoon, August 25, all users will see a “Friends” tab on the FanDuel desktop web site and mobile app. Commissioners (something that didn’t previously exist on FanDuel) can start up a league, create an initial contest, set the entry fee, and invite friends. Once a league is created, it automatically creates a recurring weekly contest. But users can join an existing league, or invite new friends to an existing league, any week during the season. That is not the case with traditional season-long fantasy sports, where a group of, say, 12 friends will conduct a draft before the NFL season, choose a team, and stick with that team for the entire year.
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