Dream 11 Goes Global: How Sciflare’s Fantasy Sports Expertise Powers World-Class Scalability
Written by: Shiva Kumaran S
Quick Summary
Dream 11’s global expansion to 11 countries signals the necessity of scalable tech, fan engagement, and high performance during peak load periods for succeeding in the global sports ecosystem.
Global expansion needs you to cater to diverse user needs, region-specific sports requirements, payments, and compliance measures.
AI-driven personalization, machine learning recommendations, and gamified elements are redefining how global sports fans interact with their favourite sports.
Introduction
The Dream 11 global expansion to eleven countries, including the UK, US, UAE, and Australia, comes at a time when fantasy sports platforms need to rethink user incentives beyond real-money gaming. While cash contests cease to exist post the RMG ban, what cannot be overlooked is users’ love for fantasy gaming in a sports-obsessed nation. The proven potential of fantasy sports in engaging and delighting users is reaffirmed with Dream 11’s global expansion after becoming synonymous with fantasy gaming in India.
While it is still unclear if Dream 11 will offer real-money gaming in these countries, India’s first gaming unicorn going global with sports tech built in India signals new opportunities with tech scalability, fan engagement, real-time scoring systems, and hyper-personal fan experiences to boost engagement, retention, and revenue. This blog helps fantasy sports businesses with a checklist for going global and erase all boundaries for sports fans, irrespective of their geographies.
Dream 11Global Expansion Prerequisites
Dream 11 enjoys massive popularity in India with over 10 million daily active users and approximately 250 million total users post the RMG ban, according to Vikrant Mudaliar, Chief Marketing Officer at Dream 11. Becoming a household name in India was not an easy ordeal, given the cutthroat competition and evolving expectations of Indian sports fans. However, with the right prerequisites in place, Dream 11 not only became a household name in India, but also took the global leap to unite sports communities worldwide. Let us look at what those prerequisites are to ensure you do the necessary groundwork before expanding worldwide:
1) Fantasy App Scalability
Dream 11 has solved for scale. With billions of sports fans joining contests in the final 15-20 minutes before the match and from different devices, it is important to ensure that the system can cater to peak traffic and offer users consistent experiences, irrespective of the devices they use. From cloud-based auto-scaling to a fault-tolerant backend, and scalable databases that manage user splurge during peak events, such as the IPL, helped Dream 11 offer a seamless gaming experience to sports fans.
A recent case in point would be Dream 11’s Manager Mode (developed by Sciflare Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) that enables users to create and manage a single 11-member fantasy cricket squad for the duration of an entire series or tournament. With key features like squad selection, transfer utilization to substitute players, specialized boosters to enhance team performance, captain selection, and leaderboards, the Manager Mode handles peak load concurrency of 5.5 million+ users. Our scalability expertise across every aspect of mobile app development, including frontend, backend development, UX, testing, quality analysis, and deployment, helps Dream 11 perform effectively in real-world scenarios, handle heavy user loads, and maintain data accuracy for an unprecedented user experience.
2) Real-time Scoring
Users’ victory in fantasy sports games offered by apps like Dream 11 largely depends on how well they can leverage the available match data to enhance their strategic decisions. Dream 11 offers accurate real-time scoring updates to their users to eliminate their worry of calculating scores and minimize their cognitive load while making quick decisions. By converting raw data into actionable insights for users, Dream 11 helps users make better decisions for team selection, predict weather conditions, and optimize their lineups with the right insight at the right time. The expectation of reliable scores in real-time is present in sports fans worldwide, so Dream 11’s groundwork in their home ground successfully establishes their platform’s reliability worldwide.
3) Community-Driven Engagement Loops
Dream 11 successfully created recurring engagement loops for their users, giving them ample opportunities to participate in a variety of contests. From fan favourite public contests at scale to custom mini leagues with friends or family, Dream 11 ensured users felt part of the platform even without match days. Additionally, competitive leaderboards contributed to users feeling emotionally engaged, and social sharing features helped them amplify Dream 11’s USP to their circles, inviting more fantasy sports users to the platform.
4) Hyper-Local Relevance
Dream 11 witnessed explosive growth in India, not just for their fantasy gaming format, but also in how they translated fantasy gaming into a UX design that perfectly fit with India’s sports culture, digital literacy, and gaming preferences. India’s diverse market includes hardcore cricket fans, multi-sport fans, cost-conscious consumers, first-time tech users, as well as tech- savvy audiences. To cater to these requirements, Dream 11 offered a gaming experience specially designed for Indian users, enabling them to enjoy the gaming experience without much cognitive load, offer localized player insights and vernacular touchpoints for better engagement, and leverage gamified elements like leaderboards, progress, streaks, and badges for keeping users coming back for more.
Global Expansion Checklist for Fantasy Sports App Development in 2025
From our first-hand experience of building and scaling Dream 11’s Manager Mode to 5.5 million+ users, we share with you the proven checklist essential for your global expansion journey:
1) Build Scalable Fantasy Sports Platforms
With fantasy sports crossing borders and bridging gaps across global sports fans, fantasy sports businesses need to prepare for the fact that their user will not just grow, but multiply across diverse user preferences, leagues, formats, and time zones. While scale does not bring surprises in terms of user volume or concurrency requirements, fantasy sports businesses need to prepare for unpredictable traffic surges during peak load periods, ensure the platform can cater to billions of concurrent users without compromising performance, and offer real-time responsiveness to user actions.
With the increasing passion for sports, proven popularity to unite fans worldwide, and the proliferation of gaming leagues throughout the year, fantasy sports scalability is no longer just about handling user volume. It determines users’ trust, revenue growth, uptime, and performance in high-stakes gaming environments, where the platform’s resilience is truly tested. Any lag in score updates, contest creation, or team management can frustrate users and drive them out in favour of other platforms. This irreversible damage can be avoided with:
Microservices architectures to distribute workloads and ensure stable system performance.
Auto-scaling to help your server adjust to increasing user demand seamlessly.
Distributed data systems for low latency.
Failover strategies to ensure consistent system performance across all regions.
2) Prioritize a Fan Engagement Platform
This is the era of interactive sports, where sports fans don’t just view the game, but equally participate in the heart of the action. Fan engagement is at the core of this transition and defines how fans choose your platform over the myriad other options they have at their disposal for associating with sports. Being a critical pillar for your global expansion journey, fan engagement drives user retention, fan loyalty, and stable revenue for your platform.
As you expand globally, a one-size-fits-all approach for engaging fans across all sports cultures, fan expectations, fan age groups, and diverse cultural sensibilities. What excites Indian users during the IPL is very different from what excites European fans during global football leagues. Fan engagement is the investment that ensures that fans do not just sign up on your platform, they participate and return for contests and activities beyond match days. By combining gamification, expert insights, micro engagement loops, community features, social media integration, and e-commerce functionalities, you can convert every fan interaction touchpoint with your platform into a stable revenue source, adapting flexibly to global fandom, different sports calendars, and different peak seasons.
3) Sports API Integration
Reliable, real-time, and custom sports-specific data lays the foundation for seamless user experiences in fantasy sports. Global expansion needs you to create value for new markets and cater to diverse requirements to enhance your platform’s accessibility. With high-quality sports APIs, your platform can support multiple leagues, formats, and scoring models, offer accurate player stats, injury updates, and live scores, enabling users to enjoy an error-free, fair, and transparent gaming experience.
Additionally, high-quality APIs help boost your platform’s credibility by eliminating all inconsistencies from real money gaming contests, offering error-free score updates, and consistent performances across all leagues, time zones, and scoring models.
4) Multi-Sport Compatibility
Multi-sport compatibility enables your platform to get year-round visibility by catering to each region’s dominant sports ecosystem, which a single sport cannot sustain. What cricket offers for the Indian sports ecosystem is offered by basketball in the US, football in Europe, rugby in Australia, and baseball in Japan. A fantasy sports platform catering to these regions is bound to succeed if it can cater to the preferences of all sports fans, including dominant sports of their region and niche sports according to their likes.
With multi-sport compatibility, your platform can ensure continuous user engagement, even in the dominant sport’s off-season, maintaining user stickiness and platform affinity throughout. This not only stabilizes revenue, it also opens your platform to sports fans with varying sports preferences and expertise levels. Modular scoring engines, scalable data pipelines, and flexible roster structures help fantasy sports operators offer multiple sports and an unprecedented, immersive gaming ecosystem to their global user bases.
5) Personalization and Gamification
This is the era of hyper-personalized digital experiences in sports. From custom UX, ads delivery to onboarding flows and player recommendations, AI personalization has made delivery relevance easier with machine learning algorithms. When your fantasy sports platform is tailored to the needs of hardcore and new sports fans alike, it automatically resonates better globally for creating better accessibility and relevance.
With gamified elements, such as daily streaks, rewards, and badges, your platform can appeal to users’ intrinsic motivation to engage more in contests, ensure better conversion for ads, and create genuine user stickiness by standing out from other available options.
Why Choose Sciflare For Sports Tech Development?
As India’s leading fantasy app development company, we have catered to reputed clients like Dream 11, Boomer 11 (UAE), American Dream 11 (USA and Canada), and others in our decade-long journey. Discussed below are reasons why global fantasy sports businesses continue to choose Sciflare for their sports tech development needs:
Comprehensive Gaming Expertise: We help you develop and launch your fantasy sports app from scratch. Be it concept, UX design, testing, payment gateway integration, or country-specific compliance, you get access to comprehensive sports tech expertise under one roof.
Scalable Tech Specialization: Sciflare’s infrastructure powers Dream 11’s Manager Mode to manage 5.5 million+ users concurrently in peak load periods like the IPL. Our specialization in helping global fantasy sports businesses scale from 1000 to 10m+ users, deep expertise in auto scaling, microservices architectures, and low latency solutions helps you manage peak traffic effectively and boost revenue.
Compliance: For our client, American Dream 11, we helped them implement different payment gateways for USA and Canada users, adhering to the laws in each state. Our client, Boomer 11, became UAE’s first and largest fantasy cricket platform with 50k+ users. We helped them implement an e-commerce module to navigate the prohibition of real-money fantasy gaming in the UAE, enabling users to win virtual coins from their purchases and use the same for playing fantasy cricket.
Tailored Fan Engagement: We help you convert every fan interaction touchpoint into a solid revenue source for your platform, including merchandise, ticket sales, AI pushes, mock, and draft platforms. Additionally, we are experienced in catering to the needs of Esports, skill games, and casual games, enabling you to engage fans across all gaming formats.
Conclusion
If global expansion like Dream 11 is next for your fantasy sports platform, this blog will help you understand the core components necessary to bridge gaps across global sports communities. From fan engagement to real-time scoring and API integration to compliance management, we help you expand and deploy your platform globally, tailored to the needs of different sports needs and fans. Get in touch with us today to start your global expansion journey and replicate the scale of Dream 11 today.
FAQs
1) Can Sciflare help me scale my fantasy sports platform globally?
Yes, we specialize in offering scalable fantasy sports expertise to businesses like you, built in India, for the world. From auto scaling and low latency to region-specific compliance, we help you establish your fantasy sports app for a global audience.
2) Does Sciflare offer white-label solutions for fantasy sports?
Yes, we offer white-label solutions for all fantasy sports which help you get-to-market within two weeks. These solutions are cost-effective and built for the purpose of understanding your target market better before further investment.
