For most of the last decade, choosing a fantasy cricket team was as much a part of match day for millions of Indian fans as the toss itself. People debated captains and vice-captains over lunch, swapped players minutes before the deadline, and followed a dull dead-rubber with total concentration because their differential pick was batting at number five.

Then, in August 2025, Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, and the paid version of that habit ended almost overnight. The largest fantasy platforms stopped taking paid entries within days of the law’s passage, well before it came into force on 1 May 2026.

What happened next is an unusual case study. An entire industry lost its core revenue model in a matter of weeks, yet the underlying behaviour it had created, millions of people analysing cricket through players, points and matchups, did not disappear. It simply changed shape.

How Fantasy Got So Big

Fantasy sports existed in India well before the IPL, but the league gave them the perfect platform: short, high-scoring matches almost every day for two months, featuring the biggest names in world cricket.

Growth accelerated through the second half of the 2010s. Cheap mobile data brought millions of new users online, digital payments made entry fees effortless, and heavy advertising around matches made fantasy brands as recognisable as the teams themselves.

Courts played a role too. In 2017, the Punjab and Haryana High Court held that fantasy sports involved a substantial degree of skill, and a challenge to that view was later dismissed by the Supreme Court. Other high courts reached similar conclusions over the following years. That body of judgments gave the industry confidence to raise large amounts of investment and to sponsor the sport at every level.

The first major pressure point was tax. From October 2023, online money gaming became subject to 28% GST on the full value of deposits, which squeezed margins sharply. But it was the 2025 law, not tax, that ended the paid model altogether.

What the Law Changed

The 2025 Act draws a sharp line between different kinds of online games. It bans online money games, meaning games where users pay or deposit money in the expectation of winning money or other stakes, regardless of whether the game involves skill or chance. It also bans advertising and promotion of such games, and bars banks and payment systems from processing transactions for them.

At the same time, the law seeks to promote e-sports and online social games that don’t involve money stakes, and it provides for a regulatory authority to oversee the sector. Legal challenges to the law have been filed, but the courts have not paused it.

For fantasy cricket, the key change was the removal of the skill-versus-chance question. For years, a series of high court judgments had treated fantasy sports as games of skill, which gave platforms a legal footing that betting did not have. The 2025 law made that distinction irrelevant for money games. Whether a game rewards skill no longer decides whether a paid version is allowed.

The Arguments on Both Sides

The debate around the ban was intense, and both sides made serious points.

Supporters of the law pointed to financial harm among users, including people who lost significant sums, along with concerns about addiction, fraud and the misuse of gaming platforms to move money. They argued that the skill-versus-chance debate had become a distraction from the actual effects on households.

Critics argued that the law treated very different products as if they were the same, and that it would cost jobs, deter investment and hand business to offshore operators beyond the reach of Indian regulation. They also pointed to the tax revenue the sector had generated and the sponsorship money it had brought into sport.

Both views are still being argued, including in the courts. What matters for fans is the current position: paid online money games, including paid fantasy contests, are not permitted under the law as it stands.

How the Industry Reacted

The response was swift. Platforms that had built businesses on entry fees and prize pools shut down paid contests and began looking for new models. Many shifted to free-to-play formats, some reduced staff, and others explored adjacent businesses such as sports content, e-sports and casual gaming.

The effects spread well beyond the platforms themselves. Real-money fantasy and gaming brands had been among the biggest sponsors and advertisers in Indian cricket. The India team’s jersey sponsorship changed hands in 2025 when Dream11’s deal ended and Apollo Tyres took over. Broadcasters had to replace a category that had filled a large share of their advertising inventory during major tournaments. Agencies, creators and influencers who had depended on fantasy campaigns had to find new clients.

What Free-to-Play Looks Like Now

Free-to-play fantasy isn’t new. It existed alongside paid contests for years, but it was usually treated as a funnel towards the paid product. Now it is the product.

The formats that have held up best share a few features:

  • Private leagues among friends, where the reward is bragging rights in a group chat rather than a payout.
  • Season-long competitions that reward consistent judgement over many matches, rather than one-off contests built around a single game.
  • Rewards that don’t involve cash stakes, such as merchandise, experiences or points, where platforms can structure them within the rules.
  • Richer content around the game, including statistics, matchup data and predictions, that keeps users engaged between matches.

Whether free-to-play can support businesses on the scale of the old paid model is still an open question. Advertising and sponsorship can fund a lot, but they rarely match the revenue of entry fees multiplied across millions of users.

What Fans Kept

For fans, the most interesting outcome is what survived.

The analytical habit. Years of fantasy play taught a huge audience to think about cricket in terms of roles, matchups and conditions. Casual fans now discuss a batter’s record against left-arm spin or a bowler’s economy in the death overs with a fluency that was once limited to analysts.

The social ritual. Picking a team with friends, arguing about captains and checking the leaderboard after the match were always as much about community as competition. Private leagues keep that alive without money involved.

Attention to every match. Fantasy gave fans a reason to care about games involving teams they didn’t support. Free formats still do, even if the stakes are now purely personal.

What fans lost, of course, was the chance of winning money, and for some that was the entire point. For others, the removal of money made the game more relaxed and more about cricket itself.

Fantasy Versus Exchanges: Two Different Products

The ban also prompted many fans to ask how fantasy compares with other ways people engage with cricket through numbers, particularly exchange platforms. The two were always very different products.

In fantasy, you pick a squad of real players, and your team scores points based on their individual performances: runs, wickets, catches and so on. You are competing against other users’ team selections, not against the result of the match.

On a betting exchange, users back or lay outcomes against each other at agreed prices, such as a team winning, a batter’s run total or the number of runs in a session. Access to exchange platforms has usually come through a login issued by a cricket ID provider rather than an account opened directly with the platform.

The practical point for anyone reading this in India is that the 2025 law covers online money games broadly, so the same caution applies to both. Anyone considering any form of real-money play should check the current legal position carefully first.

The Bigger Lessons

The fantasy story offers lessons that stretch well beyond gaming.

Regulatory risk is business risk. An industry that had grown for years under a favourable legal interpretation discovered how quickly that could change. Any business whose model depends on a particular reading of the law carries a risk that no amount of growth can offset.

Behaviour outlasts business models. The habit of engaging with cricket through fantasy survived the loss of its revenue model. Companies that understood what users valued, beyond the prize money, were better placed to adapt.

Concentrated advertising is fragile. When a single category becomes a dominant advertiser in a sport, its sudden exit leaves a real gap. Broadcasters and rights holders have been reminded of the value of a diverse sponsor base.

What Comes Next

A few questions will shape the next few years:

  • Can free formats pay their way? The answer will decide how many fantasy platforms remain in business.
  • How will the regulator define the edges? The treatment of rewards, sweepstakes-style promotions and hybrid formats will matter a great deal.
  • What fills the advertising gap? The categories that replace gaming brands will reshape the look and feel of cricket broadcasts.
  • Where does the talent go? The engineers, data scientists and marketers who built India’s fantasy industry are now working on e-sports, sports media and other consumer technology, and some of the most interesting new products may come from them.

The fantasy era changed how a generation of Indian fans understands cricket. The money has gone, but the way of watching it created is still very much alive, in every group chat where someone insists they would have picked the right captain.