eSports and Digital Gaming: A quest for young Indians to dominate the global stage
Indian firms like Mobile Premier League (MPL) have been at the forefront of organizing such nationwide tournaments
In his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ address to the nation on August 30, Prime Minister Narendra Modi devoted a lot of time on India becoming self-reliant in the areas of manufacturing toys. He also touched upon indigenous gaming applications as an area where Indian firms can be make it big.
This is a big moment for the online gaming industry in India. In India, the industry started developing at the turn of the century, but the real popularity has come in only in the last five years with cheap mobile data and smartphone penetration being the prime driver of the industry’s growth.
From less than ten firms in 2016, India today has more than 140 companies in the area of digital gaming and eSports. The number of users has also gone up from 2 million in 2016 to more than 90 million now. In fact a third of these users play on multiple platforms. The online gaming segment grew 40% in 2019 to reach INR65 billion and is expected to reach INR187 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 43% states a FICCI- EY report on media and entertainment industry.
eSports competition and games were identified as major areas of growth for the industry and a new trend to watch out for in the same . Indian firms like Mobile Premier League (MPL) have been at the forefront of organizing such nationwide tournaments. VS Rathnavel, a young chess prodigy who earned his Grand Master norm at the tender age of ten, was one of the beneficiaries of one such MPL tournament. Struggling to raise sponsorship money, he won 253 chess games in an online tournament in twelve hours and won five lakhs in prize money. He was later awarded an eSports scholarship by MPL to allow him to participate in international tournaments and get adequate coaching.
User generated gaming is another big area. Several developers are creating their own games and using platforms like PaytmFirstGames, Winzo and MPL to host these games. These platforms provide all the utility functions of bringing in users, deal with financial transactions and connects gamers playing against each other. The developers get a share of the spoils, thus monetizing their coding talent. This can be a great model for unearthing India’s technology talent in the gaming space.
Ashish Daga of Psypher Interactive has worked with MPL since the platform’s inception. He says – “For Indie studios like us, it’s overwhelming to such trust and support from the MPL team. For someone like us, we know how to make amazing games but to market that’s a different ball game altogether that we need to master but in the meantime, platforms, such as MPL help us grow and understand the mass audience.”
