A look at the scintillating Indian eSports ecosystem, which has come a long way. The celebrity push for Indian eSports is evident from the star power that keeps showing up in endorsements. The Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games too are finally embracing the industry.
In a recent development, Revenant eSports, a mobile-first Indian eSports organisation, announced their entry into the PC eSports Ecosystem by signing God Particles Valorant Roster.
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Revenant Esports is also launching India’s first ever talent-first IP for Valorant & Battlegrounds Mobile India to bridge the gap between the underdogs and organizations who wish to explore the Indian Esports Ecosystem. This IP will aim to focus on competitive tournaments and on monetizing opportunities for the underdog teams & content creation at large.
Also, All India eSports League by Ultimate eSports are offering grassroots players a chance to compete against the country’s top professional players with gaming events year-round and a bigger prize pool of over INR 50 lakh.
According to the FICCI-EY media and entertainment 2022 report 2022, Tuning into Consumer, the online gaming segment is expected to reach INR153 billion by 2024 at a CAGR of 15% to become the fourth largest segment of the Indian M&E sector, driven by innovations across NFTs, the metaverse, and eSports.
Also, the number of eSports players has doubled from 300,000 in 2020 to 600,000 in 2021, while eSports revenue grew by 29% from INR7.5 billion in 2020 to INR9.7 billion in 2021.
The number of eSports players has doubled from 300,000 in 2020 to 600,000 in 2021, while eSports revenue grew by 29%
Moreover, eSports teams also grew by over 50% from 60,000 in 2020 to 100,000 in 2021. One of the most telling signs of progress in eSports is the prize money amount, and the total prize money in 2021 crossed INR 200 million, while experiencing a meteoric rise in viewership, from 600,000 hours in 2020 to 2 million hours in 2021.
The growth seen in eSports is expected to continue in 2022, with the number of players reaching 1 million, out of which 20% would be women. India is expected to have 10 international eSports teams by 2022.
As a result, the interest of brands in this segment is increasing, with 72 brands investing in 2021 (up from 45 in 2020) and expected to reach 100 brands in 2022.
India is also set to participate in the first-ever eSports competition in the 2022 Asian Games with games such as the EA SPORTS FIFA branded soccer games, an Asian Games version of PUBG Mobile and Arena of Valor, Dota 2, League of Legends, Dream Three Kingdoms 2, Hearthstone and Street Fighter V.
One of the most telling signs of progress in eSports is the prize money amount, and the total prize money in 2021 crossed INR 200 million, while experiencing a meteoric rise in viewership, from 600,000 hours in 2020 to 2 million hours in 2021
“As eSports continues to integrate into popular sports culture, government, global investors, brands, media outlets, and consumers are all paying attention to the rise in popularity of eSports in India. As we launched NESC’22, the national qualifiers to select the Indian eSports contingent for the upcoming Asian Games 2022, we are committed to developing, supporting and growing the eSports ecosystem in India,” said Lokesh Suji, Director, eSports Federation of India and Vice President of the Asian eSports Federation (AESF).
As per a recent report by the All India Gaming Federation in 2020, there were 365 million online gamers in the country, with the number expected to rise to 510 million by 2022, with a corresponding growth of women gamers.
The Tech Panda looks at five of today’s eSports startups that are forging ahead in this not so nascent ecosystem.
nCORE Games is an Indian mobile games and interactive entertainment company. The company creates and publishes category defining mobile games for the Indian subcontinent. It has expertise in midcore and live ops experts, Indian market knowhow and global publishing experience. Currently, the company has released two mobile games, FAU:G and Pro Cricket Mobile.
The Indian gaming market is set to explode and nCORE Games’ focus on localised and category-defining interactive media make it well placed to capitalize on the anticipated growth trajectory of the space.
We take bold steps, do first of kind games from India, FAU-G being the first step. We are excited to embrace the emerging trends and technologies in the company of global leaders and highly successful funds, companies and veterans to take nCore to the next level with exponential growth
Dayanidhi MG, CEO of Studio nCORE says, “We at nCore have a strong pedigree in the gaming business having built large studios over the last two decades. We take bold steps, do first of kind games from India, FAU-G being the first step. We are excited to embrace the emerging trends and technologies in the company of global leaders and highly successful funds, companies and veterans to take nCore to the next level with exponential growth.”
The company was co-founded in 2019 by gaming stalwarts Vishal Gondal and Dayanidhi M G. Gondal, a serial entrepreneur whose previous gaming venture, Indiagames, sold to Disney as one of the country’s largest gaming startup exits, while Dayanidhi has decades of experience in running 100+ games in different genres and scaling up game studios like RockYou and Digital Chocolate.
nCORE recently expanded its management team helmed by Kanwaljit Bombra as CEO, Alok Jain as the Head of Finance and Agastya Samat leading business development and legal operations.
The company has also made a significant investment in Dot9 Games, a studio run by Deepak Ail, Srinivasan Veeraraghavan, Kaiwan Pervez Yezdani, Prasad Ramdas; all also coming with decades of experience in interactive entertainment. The company has launched successful multiplayer titles like FAU:G, Pro Cricket Mobile, with several other titles planned to launch this year.
The company has plans to expand these titles and more new games into the web3 and play-to-earn sphere. It also has a platform-play through IceSpice, a gaming platform that comprises an underlying virtual currency, e-commerce store, eSports layer and publishing house. IceSpice is helmed by Tejraj Parab, another industry veteran whose last stint was at Reliance Jio heading their living room games vertical (JioFibre). Down the line, the company plans to allow players to sell and buy these assets openly and freely on the IceSpice marketplace.
Atirath develops games in casual and strategy genre bringing unique sub-continent cultural elements with global appeal. It currently has a team size of 15 members based out of Hyderabad developing casual/strategy genre based gaming metaverse platform.
Atirath was founded in mid 2020 by Shiva Bayyapunedi and Ramachandra Raju, who worked together at Apalya Technologies that Shiva founded and was later acquired. Both come with strong tech and business operations backgrounds. Their vision is to create game metaverse with geographic, economic, and social experience in strategy genre connecting players, content creators and game publishers.
New business models are evolving in the gaming world from game as a service to game as a platform model. As the model evolves, there is innovation happening in a centralized and decentralized metaverse world. Business models like Play-to-earn, Play-to-collect models with technology innovation in blockchain based solutions in NFT/FT will fuel growth. Players are no longer passive, and new platforms will be enabling them to contribute and monetize from the success of games.
Mythological games like God Of War and Assassin’s Creed have worked out very well across the world, selling over 200 million copies and we think the Indian Mythology is still an untapped opportunity since the rich history of India offers a high possibility of a hit global IP being built out of here
While RMG and casual games have continued to do well, there’s potential in upcoming models in gaming. Experts predict new forms of monetization layers coming up, especially with the onset of Play2Earn and the amalgamation of NFTs and crypto in gaming.
Vamshi Reddy, Partner at Kalaari Capital, says, “Mythological games like God Of War and Assassin’s Creed have worked out very well across the world, selling over 200 million copies and we think the Indian Mythology is still an untapped opportunity since the rich history of India offers a high possibility of a hit global IP being built out of here. This aligned with NFT gameplay is a huge opportunity to create an immersive experience. We are excited to be a part of this journey with Atirath in creating the metaverse of Indian mythology experience.”
Khelgully is a social eSports platform enabling all eSports organizers, players and other stakeholders to engage on one platform through tournaments, matches and contests of users most loved games like Fantasy Cricket, Call of Duty, Freefire, Clash Royale, BGMI, Valorant, Apex Legend among others and earn simultaneously while they play.
eSports have steadily gained popularity with the youth, consequently becoming an attractive option for brands to connect with young and empowered audiences.
We wish to build a collaborative platform that encourages and motivates players, organizers, content creators, sponsors and other stakeholders to come together in an ever-growing constructive and uplifting environment
Prakul Bansal, Co-Founder, Khelgully, says, “We wish to build a collaborative platform that encourages and motivates players, organizers, content creators, sponsors and other stakeholders to come together in an ever-growing constructive and uplifting environment.”
Started by Prakul Bansal, Dheeraj Kumar Gaur, and Rajat Goyal in March 2021, the platform caters to the need of players, organisers, streamers, content creators and other stakeholders while bringing the entire e-sports community together. The platform offers an opportunity to users to play and earn along with additional option of inviting close friends and family to the platform and thereby referral bonuses in form of earning.
Khelgully has received more than 2 lakh registrations in the last four months, emerging as one of the leading players in the e-gaming segment.
Founded in 2021, Better Opinions, is a Gurugram based, skill-based gaming startup that allows users to trade their opinion on an outcome of a real-life event. It is the stock exchange of opinions. It allows users to trade their opinions on events in various categories such as cricket, football, finance and entertainment, and allows users to trade on events while matching them with a person with a complimentary trade. It is a product for everyone who has an opinion on any world event to trade and take position on the same. It helps make trading accessible for all.
Better Opinions is an app where events are created in the form of binary yes/no questions to make trading more relatable, accessible, and widespread.
Prediction markets sit at the intersection of three of the strongest trends that are being observed today: a propensity to speculate, real money gaming, and social. Prediction market allows trading on everyday topics. RMG business is growing at a CAGR of 23% YOY.
When we start allowing trading in categories such as cricket, politics and entertainment, not only do we make trading more relatable, but we also help improve their financial literacy. In the process, they also start experiencing the excitement of trading
Samay Jain, Co-founder and CEO, Better Opinions, explains that the app is also targeted at those individuals who may not be financially literate. “Our aim is to make the app inclusive for all. The stock market unfortunately can be very technical and opaque and therefore isn’t always accessible for all. However, when we start allowing trading in categories such as cricket, politics and entertainment, not only do we make trading more relatable, but we also help improve their financial literacy. In the process, they also start experiencing the excitement of trading.”
Founded in 2021, Better Opinions launched its Real Money Gaming App (RMG App) in December last year and within a month of its launch saw 150K sign ups with a week on week (WoW) growth of 30%. The launch comes after the Beta version of the Better Opinions App, played with virtual money.
Better Opinions has been shortlisted for W22 batch of Y Combinator. The team consists of founders, Samay Jain and Soumyajit Das, who are former employees of Gojek. The team also consists of graduates from IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi and NALSAR, among others.
With events trading emerging as a whole new asset class across the globe, Better Opinions is targeting INR 1 crore monthly GMV in Q2 and 1 million users in Q4.
Gamerji is an online eSports platform for gamers to compete, communicate, share content, host matches, build their gaming profile and win exciting prizes.
An increasing number of young video gamers view competitive gaming as a career opportunity, rather than just a recreational activity. Today, gamers need platforms that can provide them with competitive exposure to help in their eSports journey and hone their skills. Gamerji believes in bridging the gap between amateur to professional level gamers through their tournaments.
eSports is still at a very early stage in India and there is a lot of talent that needs to be explored
Soham Thacker, Founder and CEO, Gamerji, says, “At Gamerji, we strive to provide gamers with a platform to begin their eSports journey by participating in daily competitive tournaments, building their stats and stand a chance to make a mark in the gaming world. eSports is still at a very early stage in India and there is a lot of talent that needs to be explored.”
Founded in 2019 by gaming expert and serial entrepreneur Soham Thacker, the company is headquartered in Ahmedabad. It has consolidated procedures such as registrations, player management and payments, making it a one-stop platform for eSports tournaments.
The platform launched in 2019 is currently serving more than 2.3 million gamers from India and has conducted more than 29K tournaments till date. The company plans to be the first step for all the aspiring gamers to start their eSports journey by organizing tournaments for more than 15 titles.
In the past 12 months, it has added 1.7 million users, launched tournaments IPs in Gamerji Community Challenge and College Gaming league.
Gamerji launched its new version in November 2021 with exciting features like enhanced profile, gaming stats, community creation, eSports content, and collegiate leagues.
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