In August 2025 the Indian government passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill. At a stroke, it made it illegal to charge customers to play fantasy sports games. This is a big deal. The industry was booming. The largest operator in the sector, Dream Sports, was the shirt sponsor for the Indian national cricket teams. It was firmly embedded in the country’s sporting culture. The Indian government believes that paid-for gaming is addictive and harmful, and is willing to lose billions of rupees of tax revenue to outlaw it. Dream and its smaller competitors opted against challenging the legislation in the courts.
As the dust settles on the ruling – and Dream seeks to pivot – it’s necessary to look at the company’s extraordinary success – and what it says about nurturing engagement from sports fans.
Dream’s numbers, prior to the Indian government’s intervention, are eye-opening. The English Premier League runs the biggest fantasy football game in the world. It has around 15m players. The Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association in the US estimates that 62m Americans and Canadians played fantasy games in 2022. Dream had 230m users in 2024. It’s a staggering number that deserves greater attention.
Basic fantasy cricket competitions have existed in India for years, much as early fantasy football games were played through newspapers in Europe. One early venture, Super Selector, attracted 500,000 players during the 2003 World Cup and was even spun off into a television show. But low levels of personal income and internet penetration made monetising the game too difficult.
One of Dream’s co-founders, Harsh Jain, returned to India after studying in the US and was dismayed at Super Selector’s demise. Jain and his business partner, Bhavith Sheth, launched their own game, Dream11, to capitalise on the launch of a new Twenty20 tournament, the Indian Premier League, in 2008. Although the pair were well-connected – Jain’s father held senior roles at Reliance for decades – they were still inexperienced operators. “We made every mistake you could possibly make,” Jain admitted on a podcast for Mint, an Indian media company. He enrolled in an MBA at Columbia to figure out what he was doing wrong.
Early iterations of Dream11 were season-long competitions like Fantasy Premier League. Players picked an XI from the teams in the tournament and scored points based on the performance of their cricketers in the real-world fixtures. There were some prizes on offer, but the main appeal was demonstrating superior knowledge and acumen relative to friends and colleagues. Revenue was generated from advertising. The game sustained itself but was far from a runaway success.
“Early iterations were season-long competitions like FPL… the main appeal was demonstrating superior knowledge to friends and colleagues”
Two decisions that changed the game
Jain and Sheth made two vital decisions in 2012 that changed the trajectory of their company. They pivoted their offering from the season-long league to daily challenges. If Chennai Super Kings were playing Royal Challengers Bangalore, Dream11 players could pick a team drawn from these two sides and enter it into a contest with others. Prioritising 90-odd daily games over a single season-length league deepened fan engagement. Instead of ‘setting and forgetting’ their teams, Dream11’s customers needed to log in and select their team every day.
“These games require such a high level of user engagement and have such short feedback loops, which means they provide so many more dopamine hits,” argues Arvind Navaratnam of Worldly Partners, an investment firm. “We have seen in all sorts of games around the world that these characteristics make them so attractive and addictive to play.”
Dream’s second crucial decision was to allow their customers to pay to enter competitions with a prize pool. They set the minimum entry extremely low, as little as 10 rupees (11 US cents), to ensure the widest possible base. Joy Bhattarcharjya of the Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports recognised this approach. “It is the same strategy that was used to sell shampoo,” he explains. “Shampoo never sold much in India because the bottles were too expensive. Then, in the 1980s, a firm called Chik began to offer shampoo in sachets for a much lower price. So, for that special day when you want to wash your hair, you could buy a sachet for two rupees. The market for shampoo then grew exponentially.”
In Dream11, competitors could enter a single game and then watch their team’s score and ranking move in real time as the match unfolded. Afterwards, their scores were ranked and those in the top half earned a pay-out from the pool, after the firm had taken its commission. It turned out that this combination – of a high number of competitions with real money at stake and a low barrier to entry – was what Indian cricket fans wanted. Dream11’s user base climbed from 300,000 in early 2015 to 17m in 2017 and 230m by 2024.
The right place at the right time
Dream also had two enormous tailwinds that boosted its growth. It rode the wave of the IPL, a competition that became so popular that its broadcasting rights were transformed into the second largest in the world on a per-match basis in 2023. At the same time, the cost of mobile data in India fell precipitously. In 2016 Reliance entered the market and opted to drive down the cost of internet services in doing so. It initially offered 4GB of free data to each subscriber to its Jio 4G network. Following Reliance’s entry, the average cost of a gigabyte of data fell from more 250 rupees in 2014 to less than 7 rupees in 2021.
These trends running in parallel – the popularity of the IPL and the falling price of mobile data – resulted in Dream’s revenue rising from $33m in 2018 to $772m in 2023. The firm ploughed some of this income into advertising. In 2020 it paid around $30m to become the title sponsor of the IPL, while in 2023 it became the shirt sponsor of the Indian national team. (That deal was curtailed by the government’s intervention, and the BCCI has replaced Dream11 with Apollo Tyres.) MS Dhoni, Hardik Pandya and Jasprit Bumrah were among those recruited as brand ambassadors.
Dream had to think creatively to overcome one of the IPL’s structural weaknesses. Although the league is highly lucrative on a per-match basis, its season is short – consisting of 74 matches played over two months. An NFL season contains 285 games over five months, a Premier League season 380 over nine months and the NBA 1,230 (plus the play-offs) over eight months. It expanded its offering to include fantasy games for Indian international matches, the Women’s Premier League and Twenty20 franchise competitions in other countries, although none of these capture the imagination in the same way as the IPL.
To continue to feed demand, Dream did a deal with the European Cricket Network and began to sponsor amateur competitions, such as the European Cricket League: a T10 tournament whose winners have included teams from the Netherlands, France and Jersey. It is a fainty absurd situation to have an Indian fantasy gaming company bringing real-life cricket matches into existence simply to provide more sport for its fantasy gamers to compete over. Demonstrating the crucial role that Dream played in keeping such tournaments going, the European Cricket Network suspended all of its matches following the Indian government’s intervention.
“To feed demand, Dream did a deal with the European Cricket Network and began to sponsor amateur competitions”
Prior to the legislation, Dream had begun to diversify from paid-for fantasy sports. Through another entity, FanCode, it applied the same principles it has learned in fantasy gaming to broadcasting. FanCode acquires the domestic rights to a wide variety of sports with niche appeal and sells access on a per-game or per-event basis, on the assumption that the sheer size of the Indian market will generate enough demand to turn a profit.
For example, it bought Indian rights to all Formula 1 qualifying and races for the 2024 and 2025 seasons and has sold single-race passes for 49 rupees. (The alternative is buying a season-long digital subscription from F1 itself, at a cost of 1,650 rupees.) Other Dream verticals include DreamSetGo, a sports-hospitality service for high-net-worths, and DreamGameStudios, a video-game developer.
Dream has also bought minority stakes in a popular Indian cricket news website Cricbuzz and a US sports broadcaster, Willow. The former could grant it access to a treasure trove of scoreboard data, while the latter could provide a low-risk entry point into cricket in America, which is showing signs of stirring.
Dream’s years of plenty revealed that there is a huge tranche of sports fans who are seeking an extraordinarily high level of engagement with their favourite players, teams and competitions. Playing daily fantasy games is a considerable time-suck. It not just about picking the XI. Most of Dream’s customers will have been checking their live ranking as the game progressed, as well as reviewing their performance at the end. And the company showed that reaching these fans is possible if the cost to play the games is low enough.
The next phase of Dream’s experiment is to see whether fantasy games remain compelling to Indian cricket fans if there is no money at stake. Immediately after the government passed its legislation, Jain issued a statement pledging compliance with the new rules, ensuring that its daily fantasy games were free to play and did not offer cash prices. Inevitably, the firm will pivot to growing FanCode and DreamSetGo. But for sports-technology companies in other markets, Dream’s exponential growth is evidence that fans want to engage further.
Mike Jakeman is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of sport – with a particular focus on cricket.
