I know there has been much discussed about the worlds in recent months/years, so it got me thinking about whether or not Hoops Dynasty is something I would invest in. Not in terms of coaching, but as an actual business model. Is it sustainable? Is it something Fox absorbed for the following or simply to be able to freely use the WIS engines for all of the things going on out there (since that is the only wis advertising I have ever seen).

Let's start big picture.....the game itself really only brings in......say $200,000 annually. That's a rough number, as I'm sure billyg could run the numbers pretty close. With that budget, you can't really afford a whole lot of Admin/ development/ marketing and/or strategic support. So you have to combine it with other resources, and develop/market/administrate/support most likely in "sprints" as deemed appropriate sharing with the other business units.

On its own, it seems like a $ drain. On the surface, am I missing anything? I really like the game and thin $10/season is a steal for all that has gone into it. It has it's problems, but development time is pretty expensive these days so I wouldn't expect much w/o a significant uptick in subscriptions.......significant...like 2-3 times current levels.

I think the boutique, fantasy type sites get absorbed by big players and then just gradually die out. Did any of you ever play the hoop.smallworld.com games? They were bought out by The Sporting News and eventually ceased to exist.

I wonder if I take a look at News Corp's annual report if there are any line items suggesting what of revenue wis is bringing in......along those lines, I have another thought.. Anybody recall the year they became a part of Fox?

Fox bought WIS in 2005. As for the business model, if they advertised the website at all they would probably see a HUGE increase is users. Its been talked about a lot but just a couple name drops during March Madness could potentially pay of big time for them. I feel like the biggest thing holding them back is lack of exposure.

Someone from WIS (Seble?) needs to go on Shark Tank and get Mark Cuban interested in investing.

Yup, I think I just solved all their problems.

I've heard executives from WIS on Fox sports radio, they get brought on to talk about the sim engines here and use it to evaluate real life match ups (super bowl, march madness etc)

they also makes money off the ads and everything. am i the only one who has realized the updates have slowed down again. i bet there are no more than 5 employees who work on WIS stuff.

They should hire co-op students from Universities to do programming for them. Cheap, fresh, talented labour.

Co-op is when students do one term of school, one term of work, alternating until graduation. Some Universities/programmes do 8 month work term after two terms of school. Some of these students even have to do it for free (i.e. internship).

Something for seble and WIS ownership to look into, IMHO.

Im Pretty sure Fox Interactive doesnt really need or want our help on how to run their business.I imagine WIS makes very high margins. There really isnt much incremental costs/user.

Ive been to WIS--not suince Tarek was canned. At the time there were maybe 15 employees in Cincinnati. And they did utilize co-ops. I have no idea now--but I would assume they do. Its a very cost effective way to fill lower level specialized positions.

HD started really losing users when HBD came out. HBD is by far the best of the Dynasty games and the most time consuming. Many users started cutting back on HD to feed their HBD habit. I slwoly quit HD altogether because of HBD.

You would think that with the low incremental cost of a user, just modest efforts to market this stuff through Fox Sports connections could create a pile of free money for them......pile of new users.....but heck if I know

theyve made those modest efforts through the Fox sites, through the bracket challenge. Apparently Naismith D3 got quite a large influx of users.