BANGALORE, INDIA: The number of Indians online is more mind-boggling than you would imagine it to be.   India’s Internet penetration is low but is growing exponentially. In 2009, the number of Internet users increased to 71 million, a 42 per cent growth over the previous year, according to a study by market research agency IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India.

According to Forrester Research India is expected to have the third largest Internet user’s base in 2013 with China and USA at numbers 1 and 2.

Faster speeds and falling rates mean that more and more are turning to the Internet for their daily fix of entertainment and engagement. Bollywood and Cricket are India’s two big draws, bringing them together and emerging as a major draw in its own right is online gaming.

Online gaming in India has progressed from the days of playing chess online to playing in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) and also massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) games like Blackshot with thousands of people from all over the world. However, games where a person can play their favorite sport online remain the most popular form of online gaming.

There are hundreds of sports themed online games but perhaps the most engaging is Fantasy Sports.

Fantasy Sports is $4.5 billion industry in the USA and Canada alone with over 60 million players playing worldwide. While Fantasy Sports is popular globally; in regions where cricket is a popular game, its virtual counterpart is extremely popular as well. Fantasy Cricket is more than a swing and hit gameplay; it takes more than a see-ball hit-ball strategy because it is a game which puts the player in a managerial role. It requires a user to create his own cricket team with players from the teams playing a particular tournament. Users get points depending on how those players perform in real life. User with the highest points at the end of a tournament stands to win a grand prize.

Fantasy Cricket can be highly addicted and, depending on the duration of a tournament, could keep a user engaged for months, A sizeable chunk of the Indian population is knowledgeable about cricket and Fantasy Cricket, especially with the amount of Cricket being played, is catching on like wild fire as well.

There are Forums and online discussion boards dedicated to cricket with membership figures in hundreds of thousands. Even social media portals such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter have a sizeable number of cricket followers. These virtual outlets provide the ‘common cricket loving man’ a platform to discuss and give their views and opinions. Fantasy cricket on the other hand gives these ‘experts’ a way to substantiate their arguments by providing them a chance to create their own team and measure it’s progress against teams made by their friends and many other such experts from across the world.

Fantasy Cricket first made its appearance in India on Star Sports. Now known as ESPN Star Sports, the channel introduced Indian audiences to the game by calling it Super Selector. The channel roped in Bollywood actor Naseeruddin Shah and former Cricket greats Sunil Gavaskar and Geoffrey Boycott who were tasked with enlightening Indian viewers on Fantasy Cricket through an interactive game show on TV. It was one of the first shows in India allowing interaction with TV audiences. The show was a major success. Infact, the game was so popular that it broke the record for the most number of entries received for any similar online game conducted across the world – 265,000 – in November 2001. The game has since lost its charm and no longer followed like it was, partly due to the fact that the user experience started dwindling and more importantly because the game started requiring the users to make purchases.

2008 saw the launch of IPL and along came Indian Fantasy League, a website devoted solely to fantasy sports. It offered visitors a chance to choose from a range of fantasy sports: fantasy football, fantasy tennis, fantasy golf, fantasy f1 and the big one, fantasy cricket.

Since then, many fantasy cricket sites surfaced with me-too products offering prizes for major tournaments to keep visitors hooked. However, many of these websites were limited in terms of tournaments tracked or prizes offered. Some websites were complicated to use and navigate. Some had a plain user interface and lacked interactivity. Most websites though tried to copy ESPN Super Selector and while they did succeed initially, many failed to keep the users hooked due to their lack of innovation.

Fantasy Cricket is all set to be the next big thing to happen to the Indian gaming industry. Sports entertainment has already reached dizzying heights and it is about time interactive sports entertainment is taken seriously. Cricket is a religion in India and Fantasy Cricket could well achieve a cult status in the country as well.

The author is CMD at Dream11 Gaming Pvt. Ltd