Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports Report on OFS Platforms

The Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports has conducted a study, “The Business of Fantasy Sports” in association with KPMG, a global sports network. In that, it was found that the online gaming in December 2019 has grown to 90 million users from a count of two million users during June 2016, representing a growth of over 212% CAGR between 2016-19.

In this survey, 763 respondents across 10 cities were registered, of these 253 were OFS users (having played OFS in the last 1 year) and the rest were categorized as non-OFS users. Overall 65% of the respondents indicated sports were among the top three genres they watched on TV and OTT platforms. 32% of the total respondents indicated that they engage with more than one sport on the OFS platforms. 16% of the OFS users mentioned that their motive of watching sports leagues was to track the performance of their fantasy teams so that they can make informed choices in the game of skills. 55% of the users mentioned that their engagement with sports leagues increased once they started playing OFS. 

There will be more user attraction due to their expansion in the impenetrable geographical locations and the introduction of new games online. The new ventures include kabbadi, Football, and so on. This is likely to reduce the share of Cricket, as the Contest entry-amount has lessened to 85 percent from 95 percent in the past three years.

There has been a great rise in the population of OFS operators from 2016 to 2019. With the availability and usage of smartphones, online fantasy gaming is accessed by many. OFS Operators have generated a revenue of Rs 924 crore in FY19 growing from Rs 262 crore in FY18, which was estimated to almost triple to Rs 2,500 crore by FY20.

With OFS gaining popularity, users are opting for paid forms and sources to get insights and predictions to make wise choices in the games. But due to this COVID lockdown, league based games are under complications due to their discontinuation.

Operators have also leveraged this situation to get into branding partnerships with content creators and launching their own fantasy sports research platforms to increase the value chain.