Online fantasy sports have taken a hit as the Covid-19 pandemic forced team-based sports to be suspended due to the countries implementing a lockdown.
The OFS operators though have used the break to chalk out new engagement facilities and expand to new sports that weren’t affected by the pandemic, as per the Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports’s study conducted in collaboration with multinational company KPMG.
“The force-majeure resulted in short-term revenue disruptions for the OFS players; however, the OFS operators proactively adopted strategies to like introducing quizzing, the introduction of new sports such as baseball and investments in platform innovation, etc. to ensure user engagement,” the report read.
“While the scales of the businesses got affected during these interim locked-down months, none of the leading OFS players have downsized their organization size.
“Leading players like Dream11 and MyTeam11 leveraged on their ancillary platforms FanCode and SportsTiger respectively to broaden their array of offerings to increase engagement and amp; improve customer experience by educating them about sports that would, in turn, complement their OFS platform offerings,” the report added.
Online fantasy sport has been a flourishing industry in India. As of December 2019, the user base of OFS was 90 million, a stupendous growth of over 212 per cent CAGR between 2016-’19.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, OFS players in India is likely to expand other modes of online sports engagement such as OTT to further expand their user base.