Gaming has been around for a long time now, as leisure activities, like a getaway from all the other important jobs. Now times have taken a big steep turn with gaming becoming a well-established industry churning out career opportunities and bringing communities together. More than 3 billion people around the globe play video games regularly and the number is set to grow monumentally in the coming times.

Starting out from 8bit games on consoles, to 2D to graphics-heavy games with full-fledged worlds to explore, the games got bigger and better in a relatively short period of time. And along with it emerged esports. A competitive form of gaming just like regular sports. Teams, organizations, tournaments, and franchises cropped up to widen the ecosystem. It turned out to be a global cultural shift and rapidly made its way towards being a well-organized sector. Gaming.

So much so that it has been beating the music and film industry in terms of revenue generated in the past three odd years. We are seeing a complete role reversal when we talk about the relation of movies/TV series and games. Earlier games were based on popular movies like Lion King and Aladdin and now we see game-based movies like Assassin’s Creed and Witchers on our screens. The gaming industry racked up a total of more than $150 billion in revenues all around the world, also the esports industry witnessed its first $1 bn year in 2019 with 26.7% YoY growth. Careers have been on a rise with gaming and esports. Esports houses more than 10,000 employees across the globe while gaming (developers & publishers) account for more than 32,000 employees.

PUBG Mobile, the hottest game in India has penetrated the web series label, “Dosti Ka Naya Maidan” is a collaboration with PUBG Mobile and some of the top content creators in India and showcases the different aspects of regular people associated with the game in some way or the other.

India witnessed the biggest leap in the gaming industry in 2018 when global video game publishers like Ubisoft and Tencent Games made their way to the sub-continent with esports tournaments like the Rainbow Six: Siege India Series and PUBG Mobile Club Open with massive prize pools.

Even giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon tested the Indian waters to dive in with their prospects for the Indian gaming market. Amazon GameOn Masters India held in January 2018 awarded the participants with a total prize pool of 5 Lacs INR just for mobile games. Along with GameOn Masters was another esports tournament, the ESL India Premiership which is the longest-running esports league in the country that offers more than 1 Crore INR prize pool and witnesses participation from in and around the country.

PUBG Mobile Club Open South Asia saw 56,000+ individual registrations last year, the highest any professional esports tournament has seen in the region.

The surge in popularity of esports and popular game titles in recent years has reflected in the number of gamers as well. The gamer base (PC+Mobile+Console) of India is well over 300 million and the market size hit INR 62 billion in 2019.

Apart from the consistent and impressive growth of the industry, it is interesting to note that the revenue sharing is drastically varied now. Previously, games earned revenues according to the sales, but now the publishers have come up with free games that have in-game purchases, publisher sponsored esports tournaments and from influencers and non-gaming shoulder content.

The biggest Indian esports company NODWIN Gaming recently joined hands with youth entertainment channel MTV to broadcast a number of esports dedicated programs. MTV airs more than two hours of esports content in a week. This shows how all the other industries are taking note of the emerging gaming and esports scene and producing properties and content around it. Apart from MTV, big OTT platforms like Hotstar, VOOT, SonyLIV all aired esports content from the NODWIN inventory in the year 2019.

One of the biggest news came in on November 2018 when the world’s largest gaming festival DreamHack announced its first-ever outing to India. The festival took place in NESCO, Mumbai over three days with more than 30,000 visitors. The festival returned again and this time to New Delhi in 2019. Both iterations were a hit among the masses with almost every type of games, tournaments, cosplay, and activities. DreamHack is returning again this year to Hyderabad in its full glory.

When the number of gamers, games, tournaments, brands (endemic/non-endemic), revenues and viewership, all show a good upscale, then it’s definitely the time to pay attention to gaming.