The country’s still nascent fantasy sports industry faces a multitude of challenges amid different laws. While the Indian Premier League (IPL) sets records on the field, off the field, Dream11, one of India’s biggest fantasy sports platforms, claims to have broken new ground. Swaroop Swaminathan examines the industry, the different laws that govern the industry, and why some state governments have taken a dim view.
It's Friday evening in this hotel in Ambattur, an industrial hub in Chennai. As the sun’s rays filter through the windows, the Golden Hour is giving way to dusk. With regular coffee drinkers, tiffin-eaters, and snack-munchers long gone, the place’s blue-collar workers have some downtime. A few use it to catch their breath. Most, though, are seeking their own golden goose in dying natural light. So, they whip out their phones to open Dream11 to set up their fantasy team for the night. In 90 minutes or so, Chennai Super Kings will play host to Sunrisers Hyderabad. Another Indian Premier League match means another chance to put their knowledge of IPL teams to use. “I have not had the best of times this year,” one of the workers tells this daily even as he’s caught in two minds about Devon Conway’s place in his team. “Hopefully my luck turns today,” he says but the frustration is visible in his voice.
Elsewhere, another worker’s internal monologue suggests he is in a similar quandary. There’s some banter on this worker because he has made a hefty profit on his initial investment in 2023. “If you want to talk to anybody about this game in this hotel, it should be him,” one of them informs this newspaper. “He has won some Rs 4000 from Rs 350 or so.” The person who’s the subject of the banter smiles. “It’s all in the details.”Welcome to Dream11, the app that’s increasingly gotten the country’s attention over the last several years.
In 2023, while the IPL has seemingly broken multiple records, off the field, the fantasy sports industry continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Take, for instance, Dream11. The platform, having 180 million users (2023), “had a user concurrency of 10.56 million — the highest ever for a single match compared to previous seasons of the tournament — and handled 308 million requests per minute,” according to a spokesperson who sent answers to specific questions via email. To put that number into some sort of context, that’s the average number of viewers who tune in to watch a game on the OTT platform (Jio Cinema) in 2023.
That same Friday evening, Alagappan Vijaykumar is working on his Excel sheets. He’s giving his 4000 or so new subscribers the best chance of acing the game. His Twitter bio gives away what he does. “World’s 1st fantasy cricket guru”. His Excel sheets are an information dump on everything about the match including players you need to pick to optimise your squad, positive match-ups, negative match-ups, notes on the venue (MA Chidambaram Stadium on this occasion) and so on. Considering what’s at stake, it’s no surprise that people pay four-figure sums to access those Excel sheets.
“We have sold nearly 4000 subscriptions since December, with 1200+ yearly (which began at Rs 999 per year and is now at Rs 1999 per year), 2500+ monthly (which began at Rs 149 per month and is now at Rs 349 per month), and 200+ Premium (our most recent and biggest offering, which began at Rs 3999 per year and is now at Rs 7999 per year and is being rolled out in phases, with Phase III set to begin only on May 15),” Vijaykumar says. The ‘we’ he refers to is the name of his startup, covers off.
Vijaykumar, who has been playing paid fantasy contests for a decade, says the idea behind becoming a content creator centred around fantasy cricket hit him in 2018. “I was spending 100s of hours on research for my season fantasy auctions and drafts ahead of every tournament, and there was no website that came close to helping me in reducing the time necessary,” he says. “At the time, though, the only way I could have addressed it was to start my own firm, because my vision for fantasy cricket coverage was radically different from the path that the existing platforms were following.”
In the West, content creators around the fantasy gaming ecosystem are common. In India, it’s rare and most of them are free. Like most Indian millennials hooked to cricket, he grew up playing ESPN Star’s Super Selector and was sold on to the idea since then. “ESPN Star’s Super Selector would have been an inspiration for many avid fantasy cricket enthusiasts my age, and it was the same for me,” he says.
There is a direct link between Super Selector and the country’s still nascent fantasy sports industry. Joy Bhattacharjya, who played a prominent role in bringing Super Selector to TV screens in the early noughties, is now the director general of the Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports (FIFS), a self-regulatory body that works with stakeholders. FIFS’ members include Dream11, fantasy akhada, twelfth man and A23 among others (most of these companies have advertised or continue to advertise during live sports events).
“The increased level of activity in the Fantasy Sports space and the quality of the companies which have forayed into it has been top-notch, which just shows you that it is a sunrise industry,” Bhattacharjya told this daily via email. “The industry earned revenues of over Rs 6,800 crore in FY22 and at 30 per cent CAGR, it is expected to cross Rs 25k crore in FY27.”Long story short, it’s a big business.
Law and order
Yet, not all Indians can legally access the pay-to-play areas of the different games. This is thanks to how the laws work in India. For example, Dream11’s ‘help’ page says: “The laws in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Telangana, Nagaland, and Sikkim are unclear on games of skill that may be played for a fee. Hence, residents of these states are not permitted to join any cash contests on Dream11.” Other Indian fantasy sports websites have similar caveats.
Other states, too, are threatening to pass similar ordinances effectively banning ‘games of skill’. Even though the Supreme Court has held that Dream11 is a game of skill (where some knowledge is required to play the game), as the ecosystem is a state subject under the Constitution, states are free to adopt their own laws (the Tamil Nadu government and the Madras High Court have already faced each other over the issue). Considering the multiple laws governing one industry, it was no surprise that the central government body, NITI Aayog, had proposed the creation of one independent organisation to self-regulate the industry. However, there have been no concrete moves.
The one reason behind a few state governments wanting a blanket ban is the reports of people taking their own lives after running into debt while playing games online. While the National Crime Records Bureau have no plans to start tracking such suicides, the TN government has claimed that more than 25 people died by suicide in the state after losing money playing online games since 2021 (the government has not specified what games they played and there’s nothing to suggest they played games of skill).
While Dream11 remained coy when asked about the challenges of navigating a complex scenario, they were intimate about ‘Responsible Play’. “Our platform offers a wide variety of contests where the average contest entry fee is Rs 37, and 98% of our users have won or lost less than Rs 10,000 in their lifetime,” the spokesperson said.
“We have implemented Responsible Play limits where users are alerted at critical financial milestones and they can opt to take a break or a time-out from using the app as they need. These steps have been taken to help users make better decisions. At the back end, our in-house system, FENCE (Fairplay Ensuring Network Chain Entity) has been specially designed so that users participating in every contest including the paid ones, win in a fair, square and transparent manner,” they added. As it stands, 80% of the users on the platform use it for the free-to-play format. “Around 80% of our users prefer participating in the ‘free-to-play’ format,” the spokesperson added.
John Christopher, a Bengaluru-based advertising professional, is one of those who indulges in both formats. “I have been playing for the last three seasons,” he says. “More or less a timepass from the monotony of lockdown and of watching neutral IPL games. I have dabbled with money games a few days but it’s almost always been just for the fun component.” For players like Raja and Vishal Krishna, the ‘fun component’ is the lure of the platform, even though both of them are aware of the potential to lose money.
“I am in a league with a few friends and I only play during the IPL,” says Krishna, who has been playing for a year. “The maximum I have paid to play is Rs 100 and I ensure that it doesn’t become more than that.” Christopher is another who limits his exposure to small-money leagues, even when he plays among his friends. It’s Saturday afternoon. Inside the same Ambattur hotel, one of the workers is counting his chickens. He picked Conway and the opener’s contribution helped him.
DID YOU KNOW?
In India, games are broadly divided into games of skill or games of chance. Real money online fantasy games (including but not limited to Dream11) have been classified as games of skill by the Supreme Court.
Rs 6,800 crore Fantasy sports revenue in India in FY2022
98% Dream11’s users have not lost or won more than Rs 10,000
180 mn Registered no.of users on Dream11
10.56 mn Highest concurrent number of users on the platform in 2023