Fantasy Sports Business in 2025: Trends, Challenges & Solutions

Quick Summary:

• India’s fantasy sports market is projected to reach INR 1,65,000 crores by 2025, driven by sports obsession, digital infrastructure, and sports entertainment.

• Key trends include multiple sports integration, real-time data, cross-platform compatibility, minimalistic design, gamification, social integration, and multiple payment gateways.

• AI, blockchain, AR/VR, and cybersecurity are shaping the future of fantasy sports, enhancing user experience, security, and engagement.

• Fantasy sports platforms monetize through entry fees, in-app advertising, premium features, and affiliate marketing, ensuring profitability and user engagement.

• Regulatory hurdles, competition, and user addiction are challenges, addressed through responsible gaming, scalable tech, and innovative user experiences.

Introduction

As India’s Number one fantasy sports app development company ↗, we know the firsthand importance of staying updated in the fantasy sports industry and acknowledging its dynamic evolution. What started as a means of participating in one’s favourite sport digitally has evolved into a mature ecosystem powered by technology, passionate sports communities across the world, and demand for more immersive and lifelike gaming experiences, moving significantly beyond traditional gaming.

As per a report by Statista, the fantasy sports user base in India will grow to 500 million users by 2027. So how can fantasy sports businesses enter this booming industry in 2025, how has the fantasy sports market growth over the years shaped user perceptions today, what are the latest industry trends and regulatory challengers before businesses, what strategies have worked well for established businesses, and what lies in the future ahead, find out in our in-depth article below.

Fantasy Sports Market Growth

An industry overview published by Dream 11 ↗mentions that there were only 16 market players operating in India as of 2016. In a comparatively short duration of time, the number of fantasy sports businesses in India has gone up to 150, understating the rapid fantasy sports market expansion with soaring user demand.

A report by the Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports (FIFS) and Deloitte India mentions that the fantasy sports market will grow to INR 1,65,000 crores in 2025 from INR 34.61 crores in 2021, with a CAGR increase of 38% in just four years. Factors contributing to this exponential rise include:

Sports Obsession

Sports is the single most powerful phenomenon that can engage users across the globe. In the recent ICC Champions Trophy finals, JioHotstar registered 90.01 crore ↗ concurrent users when India lifted the winner’s trophy against New Zealand. It is a known factor that major tournaments like these fuel fantasy sports participation, as more and more fans assume roles of active team managers, ready to lead their virtual teams to victory. The FIFS reports that sports viewers have a high propensity to engage in fantasy sports because of its ability to augment their viewing experience.

Additionally, the proliferation of sporting leagues and tournaments throughout the year (including the IPL, pro-kabaddi, and football leagues) give fantasy sports users ample opportunities to participate in their favourite sports. As of 2022, there were 13 crore registered Indian fantasy sports users and 80 crore users viewing cricket content. Among this, the FIFS and Deloitte report that 85% of viewers are likely to convert as fantasy sports users.

Available Digital Infrastructure

Any fantasy sports market analysis is incomplete without understanding the widespread availability of the digital infrastructure that fuels its growth. The accessibility of the internet across every part of the country, along with widespread smartphone ownership, creates the perfect setting for fantasy sports app development, providing digital-native and sports-obsessed fans a medium to channel their strategic prowess as fantasy team managers. The FIFS and Deloitte India report mentions that the average age of the fantasy sports user worldwide is 37 years, while in India, it is the highest median between 25-40 years. Not only is this the world’s highest millennial population, but also a tech-savvy population with a high disposable income to spend on sports entertainment, a major pillar for fantasy sports engagement.

Sports Entertainment

The fantasy sports industry growth in India has been considerably faster than in other parts of the world. In India, the fantasy sports industry is hailed as the sunrise sector for the same reason, having witnessed exponential growth than mature and over 50-year- old fantasy sports ecosystems of countries like the USA. A considerable amount of this rapid growth can be attributed to the widespread sports entertainment in the country. The proliferation of leagues, accessibility of match viewing experiences on OTT platforms, passionate sports communities around celebrity players, and strategic partnerships for greater visibility on sports platforms make sports entertainment accessible to one and all. Fantasy sports apps enhance this accessibility further by giving users a platform that rewards them for their gaming opinions and how well they manage their selected virtual teams.

Fantasy Sports Industry Trends

As a fantasy sports app development company invested in delivering future-proof digital experiences to fantasy sports users, we have curated a list of industry trends from our first-hand experience of delivering the world’s leading fantasy apps like Boomer 11, American Dream 11, and more, keeping an eye on the industry trends from both, user and client angles. Discussed below are popular trends that can inform your fantasy sports platform development in 2025:

Multiple Sports

Fantasy sports user engagement is becoming increasingly challenging amidst a plethora of options users have at their disposal and regulatory challenges that impact the viability of fantasy sports operations. In such a scenario, and with increasing demand for hyper-local sports such as Kho-Kho and Kabaddi, market leaders like Dream 11 ↗ are incorporating multiple sports along with cricket to provide an immersive gaming experience to users and benefit from the enhanced visibility and engagement during respective sporting leagues and live matches though the year.

Real-Time Data Integration

Real-time data integration is among the emerging trends in fantasy sports industry 2025. It enhances users’ decision-making by helping them optimize their lineups and team adjustments through real-time score updates, instantly reflecting how their selected players perform and giving them the necessary information to adjust their strategies. Accurate real-time score updates also reduce the cognitive load for the fantasy team manager making crucial decisions within a short timespan to beat fellow strategists at winning a virtual game.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

As a sports app development company, we have seen and catered to the growing demand for cross-platform app development. As businesses look for more and more cost-efficient ways to expand their reach among millions of fantasy sports users, cross-platform compatibility in fantasy sports apps presents itself as a top priority. Additionally, it is considered a must-have to ensure your fantasy sports app functions seamlessly across all devices with efficient data synchronization as users tend to log in at the same time using different devices and operating systems. As such, all fantasy sports must prioritize responsive design and adaptability to different screen sizes to maximize user engagement irrespective of the platform users are on.

Minimalistic Design

The best fantasy sports business solutions like ESPN, DraftKings, and Boomer 11, prioritize minimalistic design to ensure users can access and enjoy the core gameplay experience seamlessly. Selecting team players, optimizing lineups, and leading their virtual teams to victory constitute the core gameplay, which is heavily reliant on how users access and make sense of the available match data. Thus, minimalistic UX design facilitates these components, boosting engagement and retention over daily and season-long fantasy contests.

Our UI/UX experts have designed Boomer 11 ↗, UAE’s largest fantasy sports app with over 50,000 real users, with this exact precision in mind to give users an immersive experience and ability to focus on just what matters with non-cluttered screens, balanced colour combinations, and accurate font sizes.

Gamification

Gamification occupies the top spot for boosting fantasy sports user engagement in 2025. Dream 11, India’s first gaming unicorn, uses gamification strategies like team building, points, rewards, challenges, and daily streaks to maximize user engagement, keep users drawn to their platform for during the entire game, and incentivise them with targeted rewards that drive their internal motivation to participate in contests. Popular gaming apps like Winzo leverage gamified elements like referral rewards to make users come back for more and invite others with them, thereby extending the platform’s reach.

Social Integration

Sarah Chen, a leading gaming psychologist, said that “users don’t just want to play, they want to belong to a community. The most successful fantasy sports platforms understand this human need for connection and competition.” As fantasy sports app developers responsible for creating some of the world’s leading fantasy sports apps, we have witnessed this demand for social integration first hand. Integrating fantasy sports apps with social media or implementing features that incorporate social elements like sharing updates with friends, seeing how others are playing, or accessing player performances is a good way to make fantasy sports interaction more lifelike, satisfying the human need to belong to a community and staying within an immersive gaming ecosystem.

Multiple Payment Gateways

As India’s number one fantasy sports app development company, we have catered to clients worldwide and know how important seamless and secure transactions are for fantasy sports platform credibility. For our client American Dream 11 ↗, we integrated two different payment gateways for the USA and Canada users as both countries permit different payment platforms. As such, enabling users to transact in payment integrations permitted in their countries, and in their preferred medium is necessary for them to have a seamless fantasy gaming experience, constituting a major trend in 2025.

Multiple Game Formats and Languages

The fantasy sports market expansion has been fuelled by the proliferation of gaming leagues throughout the year for popular sports like cricket, football, hockey, kabaddi, and more. The FIFS and Deloitte India reported that approximately 87% of the fantasy sports revenue came from cricket as of 2022, including all formats such as T20, ODI, and more. As such, sports fans want to be engaged with these major cricketing (or other sports) events as much as possible, and offering multiple formats is a splendid way of making your platform accessible for all preferences. Additionally, as the sports culture permeates with enhanced digital penetration and viewing accessibility, more sports fans are seeking vernacular commentaries and multiple language support in fantasy sports apps, opening endless value creation opportunities with enhanced accessibility.

Top Fantasy Sports Technology Trends in 2025

We have helped fantasy sports businesses across the globe with custom fantasy sports app development by delivering solutions tailored to their unique preferences for technological advances, user engagement, and revenue maximization. As solution partners, we enable our clients to remain at the forefront of technological innovation, and from this first-hand experience, we have listed some major fantasy sports technology trends in 2025:

Fantasy Sports Automation With AI

AI fantasy sports app development ↗ is on the rise with AI’s capability to personalize fantasy gaming experiences for each user, enhance strategic decision-making for fantasy team managers with predictive analytics, structure raw data, convert it into actionable insights for winning a game, and learn from users’ preferences and gaming habits to tailor strategies for them.

The Yahoo Fantasy app uses AI to facilitate data-driven decision-making for users by providing tailored recommendations for upcoming matches, reducing their reliance on chance and improving their strategies by eliminating guess work.

Blockchain In Fantasy Sports

Fair gameplay and secure transactions are non-negotiable constituents of trust for ensuring a credible and transparent gaming environment. Blockchain technology in fantasy sports helps businesses achieve just that by ensuring tamper-proof and authorized transactions and withdrawals, offering DeFi features to facilitate smart contracts and automated distribution of prizes, and integrating non-fungible tokens to offer users unique digital assets. For example, Sorare, a fantasy soccer platform, offers its users non-fungible token player cards to compete in tournaments.

AR/VR Integration With Fantasy Sports

Technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) redefine how users participate in sports and engage with gaming experiences ↗. AR/VR implementation in fantasy sports apps enables users to experience lifelike excitement for the game with real-time information, 3D replays, interactive training sessions, and more. Popular fantasy sports apps like DraftKings use the combined potential of AR and AI to provide users with accurate performance data and insights for optimizing their strategic line ups.

Cybersecurity

As a sports app development company, we have seen the rising need for enhanced data security measures to protect users’ transaction data and maintain the credibility of the fantasy sports platform. For this, fantasy sports businesses must prioritize security from the outset, incorporate multi-factor authentication, and implement measures to detect fraudulent activities, bot or duplicate accounts, and phishing attempts that can impede a fair and transparent gaming environment.

Fantasy Sports Revenue Models

If you are wondering about how to start a fantasy sports company ↗, one of the major things to consider is how to make money from your fantasy sports app. In addition to monetization strategies, it will require the right balance of tech and business understanding, tried and tested user engagement strategies, and adherence to regulatory establishments till date. Mentioned below are some fantasy sports monetization strategies used by popular market players:

Entry Fees

All fantasy sports platforms charge users an entry fee or fee to participate in a particular contest. The key to earning substantial revenue from entry fees is to expand your user base and offer users multiple opportunities to participate in fantasy sports, keeping in mind the viability of the entry fees for the user and your business.

In-App Advertising

A successful fantasy sports app will have a passionate community of users with similar interests. For example, a successful fantasy cricket app will have cricket lovers who take interest in fitness, game strategies, merchandise, and more. In such a scenario, partnering with third-party advertisers for advertisements on products your users will find useful is a viable revenue source. Additionally, with advanced machine learning algorithms, you can tailor advertisements to users to improve conversion rates and earn significant commission from every purchase made on your platform.

Premium Features

Custom fantasy sports app development gives fantasy sports businesses an opportunity to include a careful selection of premium features in their offering to attract gaming fans who want more than just standard options. With fantasy sports users desiring more control in their hands as fantasy team managers, features like real-time data updates, predictive analytics, and personalised recommendations emerge as tools that enhance their decision-making, improve their competitive edge, and willingly want them to make in-app purchases.

Affiliate Marketing

Fantasy sports apps can make money by promoting other products and services that align with the interests of their users. Promoting their brands on your platform leveraging its gathering of sports fans can be a major driver of revenue as more and more users join your platform with the same interests.

Is Fantasy Sports Legal in India?

Yes, fantasy sports are legal in India because they have been classified as games of skill as opposed to games of chance (like betting or gambling). Their classification as games of skill highlights the role of users in leading their virtual teams to victory, exercising their strategic decision-making capabilities, interpreting available match data to their strengths, and responding to evolving match circumstances faster than their opponents. The role of the fantasy sports user combines passion for sports, data analysis, strategic decision-making, and social networking into one.

In an order passed by the Supreme Court of India on 30 July 2021, fantasy games were recognized as games of skill, dismissing all reliance on chance and guess-work, and setting them apart from betting, gambling, wagering. Among other fantasy sports regulatory challenges come the implication of the Goods and Services Tax (GST)- a 28% GST ↗ levied on the face value of every bet placed on fantasy sports platforms.

Other fantasy sports legal challenges across the world include the prohibition of the use of real money for fantasy sports transactions in all Gulf countries. Additionally, each country and platform have their specific licensing requirements for fantasy sports platforms, without adhering to which businesses cannot seamlessly function as entities providing fantasy sports services.

How To Overcome Challenges in Fantasy Sports Business?

Along with regulatory challenges, fantasy sports businesses face other challenges in terms of profitability, viability, competitiveness, and more. Discussed below are some challenges and ways to overcome them to start a profitable fantasy sports business in 2025:

Responsible Gaming

Digital games come with the responsibility of preventing addiction in users. With season-long fantasy games, and back-to-back sporting leagues throughout the year, users can find fantasy games addictive and difficult to live without. In such a scenario, we have devised a feature for responsible gaming that enables users to set time limits for participating in paid contests, empowering them with a choice for when they want to engage with fantasy sports.

Lag-Free Performances in Peak Load periods

Upcoming tournaments like the IPL witness concurrent viewership and engagement. The recent ICC CT where India beat New Zealand to clinch the trophy saw 90.01 crore concurrent viewers on Jio Hotstar. It is known that such events maximize engagement on fantasy sports platforms, when millions of users access the app from different devices and operating systems at the same time.

To ensure lag-free performances in peak load periods, we implement auto-scaling for the server to automatically adjust to the user spike, and efficient load balancing techniques to ensure spikes in user engagement are evenly distributed. Additionally, our solutions are designed with core scalability in mind leveraging cloud infrastructure to optimise for peak match-time surges.

Competition

The best fantasy sports business solutions like Dream 11, American Dream 11, Boomer 11, and more stand out to their loyal user base for a top-notch experience others find hard to replicate. Be it intuitive design, top-notch performance, seamless payments, or adherence to gaming laws, each of these market favourites stand out from the competition by continuously improving their user experience. The FIFS points out that users today have several fantasy sports apps at their disposal, and being a technology-driven sector, leveraging technological advancements to improve the core gaming experience is what will set one market player apart from the other to build a loyal user base.

Dynamic Evolution

Fantasy sports users today are more than just passionate sports fans. With their evolving role as strategists, data analysts, and networkers, their demand for enhanced decision-making tools is on the rise. Users don’t just want features that bring them the fantasy gaming experience, they desire a gaming companion that can be their right hand at the game and help them leave fellow players behind. Additionally, with rapid advancements in technology and digital experiences, businesses need to continuously evolve to keep up with the industry’s dynamism, creating innovative opportunities from these challenges.

Profitability

With fantasy sports regulatory challenges, businesses must leverage the right tech stack, development expertise, user engagement, and go-to-market strategies to remain profitable and keep their operations viable, minimizing the impact of regulations on their established user base. This needs a careful balance for technological investment with the right solution partner, understanding of your user base dynamics, their income streams, and alignment with the overall business requirement to achieve profitability and grow sustainably in the long run.

For this, businesses must consider providing a complete and immersive gaming experience, going beyond a single sport, and make their platforms accessible to a wider user base to scale.

The Future of Fantasy Sports

The fantasy sports industry has a bright future ahead with the necessary digital infrastructure, investments, and established user demand in place. However, the metrics which businesses have chased for so long to evaluate their fantasy sports success will evolve to newer metrics more qualitative in nature, where the complete fantasy gaming experience, users’ participation and engagement with all features, willingness to bring more users to the platform will be evaluated to understand how well a fantasy sports solution fits their lives and digital experiences. We have helped global leaders achieve both qualitative and quantitative metrics (like revenue, number of users) over the past ten years, and are ready to help you establish a credible presence in the competitive fantasy sports ecosystem. Get in touch ↗ today and build the fantasy sports app of your dreams with Sciflare!

FAQs

1. What is the cost of developing a fantasy sports app in 2025?

The cost of developing an off-the-shelf white-label solution that businesses can rebrand as their own starts at approximately $5k per sport. The cost of custom fantasy sports app development ranges between $15k-$100k depending on unique business needs.

2. How long does it take to develop a white-label fantasy sports solution?

With Sciflare as your solution partner, your white-label solution will be ready for launch within 14 days, provided you have your OTP service and payment gateway applications filed.

3. How long does it take to develop a custom fantasy sports app?

Custom fantasy sports app development can take approximately 3-6 months, ensuring end-to-end custom development from scratch, implementation of features unique to your business, tech stack of your choice, and complete source code delivery.