The booming fantasy sports market in India is something many of you may have already heard about.

It is also understood that the Indian market's openness to skill-based games regulation, coupled with Indian players' obsession with cricket, has enabled real-money fantasy sports games to grow rapidly in India.

Given the experience with Indian regulations, we have learned that most countries worldwide do not strictly regulate fantasy sports as gambling games, or most regions do not consider fantasy sports as gambling games.

Therefore, leveraging the fantasy sports game type to develop real-money games will be one of the beneficial remedies to penetrate the relatively closed gambling market.

Therefore, this article by PASA will analyze two points for everyone: one is how big the fantasy sports market is in the global market, drawing on the experience of the "vanguard" Fanduel, to see if there is still room to provide enough opportunities for new entrants;

Second is the uniqueness of various projects in fantasy sports, how we can develop them into real-money games, and make players addicted to them.

I. The Global Market for Fantasy Sports

According to Mordor Intelligence, the fantasy sports market size is estimated to be $32.75 billion in 2024, expected to reach $62.58 billion by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 13.83% during the forecast period (2024-2029).

Fantasy sports are gradually becoming a prominent social phenomenon, attracting large investors, fantasy players, and fans.

In recent years, with the emergence of various sports leagues such as badminton, football, rugby, basketball, and volleyball, sports culture has undergone rapid changes, with increasing professionalization.

Fantasy sports allow sports fans to participate in the games, which is the fundamental reason for the popularity of fantasy sports.

If you are not familiar with the mechanics of fantasy sports, you can click on PASA's article "Global Spotlight! India's Fantasy Sports Market: 220 Million Players Create the Next Untapped Online Gambling Goldmine!", where we have made a very in-depth distinction between fantasy sports games and sports simulation games.

Furthermore, technological advancements in different countries, increased smartphone usage, and accelerated internet penetration.

Also provide a continuous stream of players for fantasy sports games, with more and more people participating, discussing, or joining, further promoting the development of fantasy sports.

Unlike other gambling games, general gambling games often raise a lot of regulatory concerns, causing some countries and regions to strictly control the social addiction of related games and reduce the social exposure of such games.

But for fantasy sports games, the sports industry even encourages more users to participate in fantasy sports!

Because as a sports game, it has global legality, and operators can market their products very actively and even recklessly, and can directly cooperate with professional leagues for sponsorship, making fantasy sports a rare treasure in this track.

In other words, the development prospects of fantasy sports games are not limited by national and regional regulations, not constrained by the moral norms of gambling addiction, as long as there is a continuous stream of online sports fans, the scale of fantasy sports games will be endless.

The only thing that can limit the development of fantasy sports games is two aspects:

One is the number of online internet users, and the other is the fan base of sports projects.

As mentioned earlier, with national technological advancements, smartphones and the internet are becoming more widespread globally, and the number of global network users is showing a gradually increasing trend.

And game merchants can also respond to specific markets by developing ecosystems adapted to local conditions to match some rural and urban populations' use of low-cost smartphones.

For example, in the article on the Indian market we mentioned, using relatively low-resolution and pixel advertising materials in some underdeveloped areas of India can effectively improve the conversion rate of advertisements because users' low-cost phones will be smoother to watch, thus reaching users more directly.

As for the fan base of sports projects, this requires point-to-point analysis of each market, such as in India, where cricket fans are the most numerous.

Here I take the North American market's Fanduel as an example to introduce how Fanduel entered the U.S. market from fantasy sports games when gambling was not legal in the U.S., until many major states in the U.S. legalized sports gambling, and Fanduel eventually grew into the second largest gambling operator in the U.S.

North America has the highest share of the fantasy sports market. In past articles, PASA has introduced the largest sports gambling merchant in the U.S., DraftKings, which, along with Fanduel, originally started in the U.S. with Fantasy Draft.

As many sports projects began to move from niche to mainstream, Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) became popular, and later, as the development and gradual lifting of U.S. laws, DraftKings and Fanduel relied on DFS to master a large number of players' businesses that operators most wanted to get involved in—Online Sports Betting (OSB) and iGaming (casino games).

At least 79% of DFS players reported that they might choose to participate in these gambling entertainments if their state legalized OSB or iGaming, according to the report.

This is a later story, which we will talk about in later articles. Here we focus on the DFS fantasy sports business.

Daily Fantasy Sports is one of the game forms of fantasy sports, which is characterized by being able to play games every day, not all sports projects can have matches every day, so DFS has strict restrictions on sports projects.

For example, Premier League matches are often concentrated on weekends, while NBA games have multiple matches every day, so DFS is Fanduel's preferred game type in the U.S.

And NBA NFL MLB belong to the U.S. national leagues, which are just suitable for using the DFS game type.

Unfortunately, the DFS business data of DraftKings and Fanduel are not public, we can only judge based on the information before 2021, that is, when many states in the U.S. have not yet started to legalize gambling.

We conservatively estimate that it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in turnover, accounting for about 10% of its receivables, which is just the market share within the U.S.

According to Fanduel's expectations, the market share abroad is also at least above 10 billion euros.

But despite the seemingly large market share of DraftKings and Fanduel, fantasy sports games are the games with the greatest opportunities for new entrants among many gambling games.

According to Mordor Intelligence data, the fantasy sports market is in a highly competitive state and has not seen a monopoly enterprise. It is important to know that the global market for fantasy sports will reach over $60 billion in a few years.

And the key is that, according to the experience of DraftKings and Fanduel, by using fantasy sports as an entry point, retaining a large number of sports game users, and then using this as a basis to enter new market areas, thereby opening up a larger gambling market!

II. The Performance of Real-Money Games in Fantasy Sports

Fantasy sports is a type of online prediction sports game where players can form a fantasy team composed of real sports athletes in the game.

The performance of the players chosen by the players on the real field will all be converted into scores, and the total score of the players on the field is the player's score for this round of the game, competing with other players by comparing scores.

Different sports have their own game modes, so PASA here evaluates and draws on how several popular fantasy sports games on the market are made into real-money games.

Soccer

For example, the Fantasy Football League, which is basically settled on a weekly basis, players can only choose 2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders, and 3 forwards.

A maximum of 3 players can be selected from the same club, and the total player budget cannot exceed the amount set in the game's "salary cap."

Each real player has their own price, which will change based on their performance during the season, the better the performance and popularity of the players in real matches, the more expensive the players will be, but the salary cap requires players to allocate each player reasonably.

After completing the selection of 15 players in the player's roster, they need to select 11 starting players based on these players every week and designate one starting player as the captain, who can get double points in this week's game.

After the end of a week's game time, the platform will calculate the player's score for this week based on the total score of the player's starting players, then compete with other online players for ranking, and finally distribute rewards based on the ranking.

Also, after the end of a week's cycle of games, players can also transfer to get new players to prepare their teams for the next week. In the FPL game, multiple transfers can be made after each week's game ends, and each transfer will also deduct points from the player's score accordingly.

The more times you transfer, the greater the risk you take.

In fantasy football games, there are several stages where real-money game rewards can be set:

The first is the selection of captains or key players, where players can pay to buy higher weights on the selected captains and key players, and when the bet players perform better, they can also get higher score rewards accordingly.

The second is the process of changing the lineup and second transfers, if players need to switch back to the original lineup or replace better-performing players, then they have to pay a higher betting fee.

And this kind of paid betting does not change the fairness of the game itself, and is also a relatively common real-money game play.

Basketball

Take NBA basketball fantasy games as an example, NBA is suitable for DFS game types, so the frequency of betting can also be increased accordingly.

In terms of gameplay, for example, the real world NBA is about to hold a Cavaliers vs. Wizards game, the platform accordingly launches an online game;

Players participate in the online game by paying a certain entry fee, part of which is deducted as management fees, and the remaining is all invested in the entry pool, serving as the reward money for this round of online games;

Players also need to select and hire athletes to form their own "fantasy team" within the limited "salary cap," the number and positions must comply with the real game (point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center).

But the selection is not constrained by reality, and it is even possible not to be all composed of players from any one real team (for example, Kevin is a Cavaliers player in reality, and Ian is a Wizards member, but players can choose both, and the 5 members selected by the players eventually form an exclusive online "Dream Team").

After the real-world NBA game ends, no matter who wins between the Cavaliers and the Wizards, the platform will convert each player's actual score into online points, thereby calculating each player's cumulative score, and then accordingly ranking players and distributing reward money.

And since it is a DFS game type, lineup changes cannot become our betting point.

Therefore, in NBA fantasy basketball real-money games, we do not need to set additional betting points like football, because the daily games are already large enough for player betting frequency.

Of course, similar to sports betting gameplay, additional betting on the winning team to obtain reward points is also feasible, which is also very similar to the similarity between fantasy sports and sports betting.

Of course, there are also popular sports such as baseball, cricket, rugby, etc. Due to space limitations, PASA will not expand here. In short, it is very necessary to adapt each project to real-money games accordingly.

This is a great test of the game merchants' development capabilities, and developers with innovative capabilities often can take the lead in the market.

Take FanDuel's example, FanDuel developed a fantasy sports league, some of which allow players to play for free, but players can also use a bet of up to $5,000 to form a team among players from the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association, National Hockey League (NHL), and college football and basketball teams.

Then lead the team to participate directly in the competition, joining forces with up to 124,000 teams, this kind of one-in-a-million scoring method corresponds to the ultimate grand prize designed by FanDuel.

Of course, to prevent savvy fantasy sports gambling players from using high bets to "big fish" swallow "small fish," FanDuel has set an upper limit on the number of matches a player can participate in.

This measure leads professional players to matches with bets of $1,000 or more, while also keeping matches with bets of $5 for amateurs, which also ensures the fairness of the game well.

Conclusion

In summary, fantasy sports games are a globally popular market track.

With its help, not only can it enter the existing large gambling market, but it can also rely on "skill" to enter strictly regulated undeveloped markets, and with the accumulation of users, relying on the number of fantasy game players, it can be more convenient for game merchants to switch to other higher-profit gambling games, which can be said to have the best of both worlds.

It is expected that the fantasy sports market will reach a scale of $60 billion by 2029, not to mention that this is also a shortcut to the larger national model online gambling market, so interested operators and game merchants might as well take a closer look at this track.

Perhaps you also have the opportunity to grow into a gambling giant like Fanduel through fantasy sports.

We look forward to discussing more unique insights about real-money fantasy sports games with our readers and sincerely invite you to follow the global iGaming leader's overseas information platform PASA to get more first-hand industry information about getting rich.

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