Gaming
Game on campus as Samsung powers College Rivals Season 3
MUMBAI: When lectures pause and thumbs take over, India’s campuses are increasingly turning into battlegrounds. Ampverse DMI has roped in Samsung as the title sponsor of College Rivals Season 3, placing the Galaxy S25 Ultra at the heart of competitive collegiate gaming.
Esports has been quietly but rapidly levelling up across Indian colleges, with student gamers demanding devices that can keep pace with long sessions, split-second reactions and visually intense gameplay. Tournaments like College Rivals have become testing grounds where flagship smartphones face real pressure not lab benchmarks, but sweaty, high-stakes matches.
At the core of this season is Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra, powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, a customised processor built for heavy lifting. Compared to the previous generation, it delivers a 40 per cent boost in NPU performance, 37 per cent in CPU and 30 per cent in GPU numbers that matter when milliseconds decide winners.
Samsung says the hardware is tuned for sustained play, not just bursts of speed. The device features a 6.9-inch Dynamic Amoled 2X display with a 120Hz refresh rate and anti-reflective coating, while a vapour chamber that is 40 per cent larger than before works alongside tailored thermal materials to keep temperatures in check during intense sessions.
Under the hood, the Galaxy S25 series brings advanced AI-driven image processing, including ProScaler, which improves display image scaling quality by up to 43 per cent. It also integrates Samsung’s mobile Digital Natural Image engine directly into the processor to improve power efficiency, a quiet but critical upgrade for marathon gaming.
On the graphics front, advanced ray tracing and a Vulkan engine aim to push visuals closer to console-level realism, improving both rendering and computing workloads during gameplay.
For organisers, the partnership is about more than devices. College Rivals Season 3 is expanding to over 70 colleges across 20 cities, introducing additional qualifiers and new team-based BGMI formats designed to raise the competitive bar. The scale reflects how campus esports is shifting from niche clubs to mainstream youth culture.
Ampverse and DMI see the platform as a pipeline rather than a one-off tournament, a space where student gamers test themselves, brands test technology, and grassroots competition inches closer to professional pathways.
As esports continues to spill out of bedrooms and into auditoriums and college grounds, College Rivals Season 3 signals a simple truth: for India’s gamers, the campus is no longer just a place to study, it’s where the next match begins.
Gaming
Dream Sports sees 100 plus exits after gaming ban forces overhaul
Company splits into eight units as real money gaming law hits revenue.
MUMBAI: For a company built on fantasy leagues, reality has suddenly rewritten the rulebook. More than 100 employees have exited Dream Sports, the parent of Dream11, after the company reorganised its operations following India’s ban on real money online gaming. The shake up came after the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 came into force in August 2025, prohibiting games where users deposit money expecting winnings. The regulation struck at the heart of the fantasy gaming industry and dramatically affected Dream Sports’ core business, wiping out about 95 percent of its revenue and all of its profits.
In response, the Mumbai based company shifted into what chief executive officer Harsh Jain described as “startup mode”, splitting its operations into eight independent business units in December.
Around 700 employees were reassigned across these newly formed ventures based on their experience and interests. However, roughly 15 percent opted to leave the company.
A spokesperson for Dream Sports said many of those who exited were experienced professionals accustomed to running scaled businesses rather than early stage ventures.
“Since some of these employees were experienced with running high scale businesses and not startups, around 15 percent chose to leave and join other scaled companies or start ventures of their own,” the spokesperson said.
Despite the departures, the company noted that the attrition rate is only slightly higher than its earlier level of around 10 percent before the ban. Dream Sports now has close to 950 employees and is not currently hiring, choosing instead to focus on stabilising its existing workforce.
The restructuring has transformed Dream Sports from a fantasy gaming company into a broader sports entertainment platform. The eight units now operate independently, each focusing on different segments of the sports and technology ecosystem.
These include Dream11, sports streaming platform Fancode, sports travel service DreamSetGo, mobile game Dream Cricket and artificial intelligence initiative Dream Sports AI, which includes sports analytics platform Dream Play.
Other ventures include fintech product Dream Money, open source initiative Dream Horizon and the philanthropic arm Dream Sports Foundation.
As part of cost saving efforts, Dream Sports also relocated its headquarters from Bandra Kurla Complex to Worli earlier this year. The new office, called Dream Sports Stadium, brings teams from its various brands together under one roof to improve collaboration and operational efficiency.
Jain had earlier said the company removed bonus lock in timelines for employees hired in recent years, allowing those who wished to leave to exit with pro rata payouts.
“We want people who are fully into the startup mode and willing to work for it, and we will share that reward if it comes,” he said.
Founded in 2008 by Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth, Dream Sports was last valued at 8 billion dollars after raising 840 million dollars in 2021 from investors including Falcon Edge Capital, DST Global, D1 Capital Partners, RedBird Capital Partners, Tiger Global Management, TPG and Footpath Ventures.
The new gaming law has forced several companies in the fantasy gaming sector to either shut down or pivot their business models, signalling a significant reset for one of India’s fastest growing digital entertainment industries.
