Harsh Jain, Dream Sports’ co-founder and CEO of Dream11, stated that there won’t be any layoffs even though the company has switched to free-to-play games after the government outlawed online gaming that requires payment. According to him, Dream Sports has enough cash on hand to last for years and depends on a high internal demand for talent across all of its channels.
“We have no intention of making any layoffs. Jain stated in an August 25 interview with Moneycontrol that “all the talent here is safe.”
“We are interested in building with this talent to dig ourselves out of this hole. The only way to deal with 95 per cent of your revenue being gone is to build new products that you can monetise in the future. That will always start with talent,” he added.
Dream11 is now concentrating only on free-to-play online social games after suspending all paid competitions on its fantasy sports platform on August 22. India’s new gaming law, which prohibits online money games where participants deposit money in the hopes of winning rewards, served as the impetus for the decision.
Notably, the investigation stated that these cash-based competitions, which are currently unlawful, accounted for 95% of the company’s current income and all of its earnings.
High demand for talent
According to Harsh Jain, Dream Sports is still experiencing a high internal demand for talent across all of its current businesses, which include the fintech venture Dream Money, the mobile game development unit Dream Game Studios, the sports experiences platform DreamSetGo, and the sports content and commerce platform FanCode. Additionally, he stated that the company plans to develop new items in the future due to the increasing demand for them.
Jain went on to say that the Mumbai-based business has enough cash on hand to support its employees and operations for a number of years, which he believes is more than enough. In FY22, Dream Sports reported operating revenue of ₹3,841 crore; in FY23, it reported ₹6,384.49 crore.
What comes next?
The company plans to concentrate all of its future efforts on artificial intelligence (AI)-based sports prospects in India, with a special focus on the creator economy.
“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,” Jain said. “We will start again to solve these problems for Indian sports fans,” he added.
