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Comment by streptomycin | Hacker News Reader

https://basketball-gm.com/ is a basketball management sim video game (sorta like football manager), and it makes more than that from ads.

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This is brilliant. May I ask you a question? I assume you are not using real team names or real players. If you are using real names, how do you handle the licenses? Sorry, not a baseball enthusiast hence could not figure if your team / player names are real.

Yeah, that's the reason I don't use real players :)

A lot of similar games simply ignore the law and pray they don't get sued (or that the publicity from a lawsuit would actually be good).

But I do have support for uploading custom leagues, and people have made them with various real leagues like the NBA https://github.com/alexnoob/BasketBall-GM-Rosters/releases/t... and the Philippine Basketball Association http://www.mediafire.com/file/1e8cq2l3rrndln5/PBA-GM-2016.tx...

This seems like a good idea. Surely you can't be sued for user generated content which uses licensed team/player names.

I had previously mulled over trying to make a fantasy sports site using bitcoin, but since I am based in the US, the gambling laws are too prohibitive, even just using bitcoin.

> Surely you can't be sued for user generated content which uses licensed team/player names.

Probably not but I think they might be able to send a DMCA notice.

Very cool. Where do you get your stats from?

Thanks! I wrote a basketball simulation engine, it does a play-by-play sim of every game.

In what language?

javascript

Specifically: https://github.com/dumbmatter/basketball-gm

Cool little game you got there. Do you have this on iOS or Android?

No, but it runs in Firefox and Chrome on Android, and it'll run on iOS too once Apple releases a good version of Safari or allows competent browser devs to publish better browsers :)

Where did you get the initial traffic?

https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1j1e6q/i_made_a_single... got some initial traffic, and then it grew steadily for a while (although it seems to have reached a plateau this year).

Ah this is cool. I'm thinking about making a passive income sim game for the web. Didn't think of it as a monetizable thing but your experience is changing my mind.

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