Online Poker Industry In India
2020 will go down in history as the year of the coronavirus. Also, it will go down in history as the year of online gaming. The industry has seen incredible growth this year. Even venture capitalists stepped up investments in a traditionally under-financed sector, and launched gaming-focused funds. Online gaming has been on the rise in India since sometime around 2018, but 2020 has given the industry an unprecedented boost.
The ever-growing number of online poker players is a testament to the incredible popularity this sport has gained over the years. People in India have begun to recognise poker as a game of skill. The state of online poker market in India is robust and improving year on year. In 2017, the Indian gaming Industry’s market value was about USD 290 million, with over 120 million online gamers, as.
As the coronavirus lockdown brought down shutters on all outdoor entertainment (movies, concerts, sports, theme parks, travel), online gaming and OTT continued to grow — and rapidly. Online gaming became popular not only because it was a safe stay-at-home option but also because it brought people together and made communication easier in a time where everyone needed to maintain social distancing.
KPMG stated that, “Consumers are rebalancing rather than reducing expenditure away from outdoor entertainment, cinema, and concerts to OTT and gaming,” As per KPMG, India is also the largest emerging market by gaming app downloads (3 billion per year) and the world’s largest mobile gaming market! A surge in users and longer hours of engagement also meant that gaming companies saw a 60-70 percent reduction in customer acquisition costs, thus improving their margins and profitability.
Increased Funding, New Possibilities
The gaming sector in India has always been an “under-financed” sector. However, 2020 changed that, with increased investor attention and ‘real money’ pumped into homegrown gaming startups. As per Maple Capital Advisors, between 2014-2020, India’s gaming startups drew total investments of only $350 million. However, in 2020 alone, the top five funding deals in the sector amounted to the same! September saw the year’s greatest gaming deals with India’s only gaming unicorn Dream11 raising $225 million from Tiger Global, TPG, ChrysCapital, Footpath Ventures, dramatically increasing its valuation from $1.2 billion to $2.5 billion.
Inside seven days, Sequoia-supported Mobile Premier League (MPL) brought $90 million up in a Series C round led by SIG, RTP Global, alongside MDI Ventures and Pegasus Tech Ventures. The third-biggest arrangement included vernacular gaming platform WinZO, which brought $18M up in a Series B round led by Makers Fund and Courtside Ventures.
The PUBG Ban
One of the biggest events of the gaming sector in 2020 was India’s ban on PUBG as part of the government crackdown on Chinese apps. According to Sensor Tower, PUBG, owned by China’s Tencent Games, was the most popular gaming app in the country with the country accounting for 24 percent or 175 million of the game’s all-time downloads!
This ban opened up opportunities for a bunch of other multiplayer shooter games like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Mobile, Garena Free Fire, Battlelands Royal, Rogue Heist, and Scarfall: Royale Combat (one of the winners of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge) among others.
nCore Games have also been developing a PUBG-like action adventure game (FAU-G) which is supposed to go live in December. Pre-registrations for the game have also begun on the Google Play Store.
Ludo Is King
For most parts of the lockdown, the whole country was just hooked to one game, Ludo King developed by Mumbai-based Gametion Technologies. As per AppBrain, Ludo King is not only India’s most successful gaming app but also the first homegrown app to cross 100 million downloads! Ludo King is now nearing over 500 million cumulative downloads! Within two months of the lockdown, Ludo King’s MAUs (monthly active users) surged to 189 million, while daily active users grew to 51 million — higher than all other gaming apps in India. Ludo King’s success was driven by its simplicity that wooed all age groups.
Real Money Gaming Is King
Since 2019, real money gaming has developed consistently and is a Rs.2,000 crore industry today with 30 million gamers. The sector is ready to become 3.5X by 2025, and is expected to control a bigger wallet share in future, as indicated by AIGF. Besides fantasy sports — the cash cow in this segment with 60+ operators — online rummy and poker are also growing rapidly.
CEO and Founder of Baazi Games (which owns RummyBaazi), Navkiran Singh said, “Rummy is an old game. It has been passed on through generations. Now, with the ease of playing online, more people are viewing it as a source of recreation and social interaction while staying indoors.”
Given that the pandemic is far from over and desi game developers will continue to grow their offerings, the online gaming industry is headed for big growth in 2021 too.
For more information about the online gaming industry in India, keep reading PokerShots!
It has been discussed at length a lot over the past few years when it comes to regulation within the poker industry – is online poker a game of skill or chance? It has been accepted in many circles that it is predominantly a game of skill that involves luck, online poker India is one place where the regulation has been introduced to this effect. On that basis, why is it doing so much better than other games of skill?
If you look at the set up behind poker, not just online poker in India but online and offline poker from around the world, you will begin to see why.
The WSOP pays the main event winner over $5m in winnings just from one tournament and there are literally millions to be won every single week in online poker sites the world over. Compare this to the situation of other skill-based games, such as blackjack, rummy, and backgammon, and you will start to see why the popularity of poker is growing much quicker than in other games.
Rummy has always been big in India, certainly before regulation which made it legal to play poker – but the prize money available is nothing compared to poker.
Blackjack can be played in many places across India both online and offline, but you can only win double your stake – 3 to 2 on the rare occasions you are dealt Blackjack – so although it is popular in casinos, it doesn’t have the same following as poker.
Playing online poker in India gives access to many tournaments that take place every day on top of the promotions and bonuses that are given out to new and existing players to entice them to a certain site. The amount of competition around from the many online poker sites means it is the player’s market as there are many brands chasing each player. This also helps to drive up the prizes available.
There simply aren’t nearly as many backgammon or rummy sites available for players to compete against each other. When deciding where to play, it is important to look at what is the most important aspect of a poker site for you individually. For many, it is the bonuses you get as a new player, for others, the ongoing promotions such as cashback. Those that play mainly tournaments will look at the guarantee prize pools a site has or the number of freerolls there are.
The choice a poker player has compared to a rummy player is non-comparable. Rummy may have been the most popular skill-based game for a number of years, but unless more sites introduce it and offer considerably more in prize money and incentives, rummy is destined to remain pokers, little cousin.
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