‘The world is looking at India as the next big sporting destination’

The #e4mGameOn Summit 2023 saw industry experts gather to discuss the potential of the Indian gaming market and how it can be brought up to the global map on the topic ‘Unleashing the Potential of India’s Gaming Market’.

The panellists comprised Jaya Chahar, Founder & CEO, TFG; Anurag Khurana, Founder & CEO of Penta Esports; Ninad Chhaya, Sr. VP, Reliance Games; Utsav Umang Founder, XO esports; Srikanth Rayaprolu, Co-Founder & CEO, Adscholars; Harish Chengaiah. Founder, Outlier Games and Nilesh Kulkarni, ex-India Cricketer and Founder, IISM. The session was moderated by Siddharth Rai, GM - Essence Mediacom.

Rai opened the session by asking about some of the important trends the speakers are seeing in terms of market potential. To this Chahar said, “In terms of market potential and specifically in terms of the Real Money Gaming (RMG) space, firstly I’d say that the entire online gaming in India, is currently being driven by the mobile gaming phenomenon completely. RMG today, has the largest user base with 5G coming in that will be quadrupling in the next couple of years. Today we see that a lot of gamification is happening in that front. That’s where we have also come in. There is a need for gamification. There is a need to bring in different kinds of gaming in RMG and also give a better experience to the user base that is already there. One more thing that we have seen is women in sports. Not only have women come in sports but there are more women gamers that have come in. There are women gamers and fantasy sports today who are almost at 30 per cent of the user base and there are women gamers across other online games. So, I think that is one of the emerging trends that I see in today’s time.”

Umang explained, “We also have to see that there is a large audience that are interested in our RMG. But now with esports coming into the picture, I feel they are introduced to better quality games and environment for their entertainment and making money. Therefore, I think it will be more towards esports. This year, we are launching six plus IPs, in which three are going to be micro and the other three are going to be major IPs and it is going to be held in more than 20 cities.”

Talking about how the gaming trends are benefitting the developers, Chengaiah stated, “I see a rise or a maturity curve where the gaming industry is being pushed more and more towards more complex or deeper games which is mid core and hard core. A lot of Indian companies are now getting into that space so I am seeing this maturity curve wherein the market is demanding it and then the companies are forced to move towards deeper games. So, that is where the money pot is in the future, going forward.”

“E-gaming is one sport where it is not residing into a particular country. It is traditionally a global sport. Even if you introduce or create a new sport, it pretty much is catered to global markets whereas majority of the countries design their sports for their respective countries barring esport, so that another opportunity gets linked with how you look at the lens with which you want to introduce the sporting perspective into e-gaming or any other area in the digital world. From a government standpoint, it creates job opportunities, which, in turn, creates manpower and employability. With the current youth which India is currently about 55-60 per cent and out of which almost 25-30 per cent clearly want to focus on this particular area without having to sweat a bit, creates an opportunity for them to get jobs. The world is looking at India as the next big sporting destination,” Kulkarni elucidated.

Khurana had a slightly different opinion on the same and commented, “The growth of software industry is because government was not involved and that is how our industry has gone for last 25 years. I see a lot of moves being done by the government but the implementation is going to take time. Therefore, I am not looking for immediate changes but as a policy, it might or might not even be there.”

Chhaya said, “When we started off, we built our own games and we have published them both for the Indian and the global market while our games are made in India, they are meant for the global market. We are an IP focussed company. We stayed away from the services side model and we created our own IPs and also then started working on license typing. I think one of our first breakout hits globally was the game we built on the film ‘Real Steel’ and later we built a franchise out of it. That helped us open up to a lot of gamers around the world to understand the user behaviour, what works or doesn’t work for the global title. This is now the learning we are bringing to our developer partners where we say that if there are 500 million gamers out there playing our games across the bouquet of games that we have, how can we leverage that learning and help you guys build better games as a developing team and we are building this ecosystem where the learning and the talent from the development partner can help us create games which will help put India on the global map.”

Concluding the session, Rayaprolu conveyed, “We have been playing games for the last three decades and it has been taken out by the other markets, mostly the US and the Europe markets for the initial two decades when we were growing up. But there has been a phenomenal change in the last decade, especially when it comes with the India market. When we look at the brands that are doing the game ads, the last decade was more for social media as they have been following Instagram and Facebook but this year the brands have come into gaming because they have realised that the audience, especially the 25-44-year-olds, that where they will find on gaming. There are different types of creative ads. We build mini-games within the games for example, brands like Nike or Nestle can be built on a mini-game inside a game so that the audience can engage with these games and the brand as well.”