Esports, streaming, to fantasy gaming: Inside our sports tech special

By the time you read this, some of the biggest global sporting competitions would have wound down after mostly nail-biting finales—the Premier League, the UEFA Champions League, the French Open, and the one that matters most at home, the Indian Premier League. The best-of-seven NBA final series would have commenced, Wimbledon awaits us in a fortnight, then the Women’s Hockey World Cup. The baseball World Series follows later in October, with the year ending in style in Qatar with the FIFA World Cup.

Sports aficionados will identify with most of the tournaments mentioned, perhaps with one exception: Baseball. It may come as a surprise, but not to those who follow it—or play it online as a ‘fantasy sport’.  

In this fortnight’s special package on sports tech, Forbes India looks at the various segments that make up this rapidly growing new-age sector: Casual gaming, Web3, NFT and blockchain-based gaming, esports, sports streaming, sports content and commerce, sporting experiences platforms. And there’s the biggest and perhaps most controversial piece of the pie: Fantasy sports, in which contestants select a roster of players and win or lose points or money based on the real-life performance of those players and teams.  

Cricket, of course, accounts for the largest cohort of the Indians immersed in fantasy sports. But there’s also kabaddi, hockey, football, volleyball, basically games in which leagues exist in the real world. And, yes, they may not hold a candle to fantasy cricket, but there are thousands of baseball buffs who keep the fantasy baseball leagues going in this neck of the woods.  

There are few digital businesses that are as well placed as the top fantasy gaming ventures. They’re well-funded and have garnered millions of (paying) users. As per data put together by the Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports (FIFS) and Deloitte, the market was estimated to be worth ₹34,000 crore with all of 200 players in the fray.