Harsh Jain, the co-founder of Dream11 parent company Dream Sports, revealed in a Monday interview that the company's decision to halt all real money contests and switch to entirely free-to-play online social games (with ads) had seriously impacted its revenue.
Despite a whopping 95 per cent of the parent company's revenue—and 100 per cent of its profits—coming from Dream11's existing business model, CEO Harsh Jain told MoneyControl that the company had 260 million users across all verticals.
Jain's comments come days after the passage of the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill (2025) in the Parliament, which made games involving real money illegal. Offenders face up to five years in prison.
He also stated that the company would not be going down the layoffs route, opting to retain its talent using "cash reserves to run operations for a while".
"We have a runway of a couple of years and that's more than enough for us," he added, in that regard.
Dream Sports now plans to redeploy its 500 engineers and other staff across the remainder of its verticals, such as FanCode, DreamSetGo, Dream Game Studios and Dream Money, while also working on new AI-driven products for the sports and creator economy.
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"We have sports content, commerce, fan engagement, analytics, sports performance, and merchandise. All of this is going to be disrupted by AI. And now I have 500 engineers whom I can allocate to solving these problems ... We will start again to solve these problems for Indian sports fans," he said.
In FY23, the company reported operational revenue of ₹6,384.49 crores, almost double of its ₹3,841-crore figure for FY22.
