 experiences with our speakers who will help us see the gaming world in a completely new light. So sit tight and let's dive into the world of online gaming. I would like to now invite Mr. Anurag Bhattra, Editor-in-Chief and Chairman, Exchange for Media Group to kindly come forward for the welcome address. Can we have his video please? Good afternoon. Welcome to this special afternoon. Today we are discussing gaming. Welcome to this inaugural Exchange for Media Gaming Summit. Gaming has become mainstream. The last 12 months have given all of us, our children, the young millennials, more time to be able to pursue their interests. Gaming is one of them. The average time spent by a gamer has gone up by multiple times in the last 12 months. Gaming is also becoming very important when it comes to marketers reaching out to millennials. Today through the use of AR, VR gaming, interactivity is being built in a way that we couldn't have imagined it earlier. Also gaming in terms of fantasy, sports is growing. Gaming in terms of bringing gaming into education is growing. So the role of gaming in business to go, the role of gaming in our lives is growing. Clearly if the engagement of customers, millennials with gaming is increasing, clearly marketers and businesses have taken note of it and have gamified whatever activities they are using to engage with millennials. So clearly the Exchange for Media Gaming Summit in some way brings all these stakeholders of the gaming world together and discusses where is gaming headed, where are millennials headed, what are the sub trends in gaming and gaming is an industry. Dr. Bhattra, now before we start the sessions for the day, we would definitely like to thank our partners as we all know, without the support of its partners, no event is possible, not even a virtual one. So we would definitely like to thank our partners for the event co-powered by InMobi, driving real connections and our co-partner for the event is India today. Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a look at our partner audio visuals before we start on with our first keynote address. Let's have the audio visual. Technology has always shaped how we communicate with one another. The wheel, the printing press, the pony express, the telegraph, the telephone, the computer and mobile devices. Technology changes yet one truth remains. We want our communications and interactions to be meaningful and have relevance. Today, however, driving real connections are easier said than done. But we help brands do that to drive real connections. With our platform technology and exclusive mobile data, InMobi helps you understand, identify, engage and acquire your customers. InMobi, driving real connections. India is getting ready for its biggest eSports championship. India Today Gaming presents eSports Premier League, three months, eight teams, one championship. The battleground is ready. Are you? Do you have it in you? Can you be the next undisputed champion coming soon? Once again, we'd like to thank our partners here and ladies and gentlemen, we're talking about online gaming. So definitely would like to create a buzz online about this gaming summit e4m game on. We'd like you to join our online conversation. Keep tweeting to us using the hashtag e4m game on. You can also send us questions to our speakers on whichever platform you're watching us on. Please comment, put it on the chat box. We'd definitely like to take it forward with all our eminent speakers. And starting right now, we're going to invite on screen the Chief Operating Officer of G2 eSports, Mr. Peter Mukha. He'll be talking about how COVID-19 impacted the eSports industry. A very warm welcome to you, Peter. The screen is all yours. Okay. Hello, everybody. And said already, my name is Peter Mukha. And thanks for having me here and like to give you a kind of insight into our work and what we are doing and what G2 is all about. For those which are already familiar with eSports, eSports environment, it might be some kind of two basic information that I'm sharing, but I want to give you an opportunity to understand, first of all, what we are, what the business model is about before I jump into the COVID situation and what that impact is on us in 2020 and beyond. Let me share my screen. So I have prepared some slides. Maybe if you like a little bit, how does it work? Ah, here we go. So that is about me, a little bit understanding why I'm here at G2 managing this company together with Carlos Ozzelot, Carlos Rodriguez named Ozzelot, who he was a former professional player. My background is very much in sport, 11 years of Adidas, then moving into the entertainment industry towards universal musing, leaving here the business in Central Europe before I joined Activision, by the way, within the same holding the Bendy Group. And what there in the company when the merger with Blizzard happened before I then joined the little tiny company, Microsoft, and leading there the retail business. After that, I decided this is enough of big companies and I started to invest money and manage some startup environment. One of them were Simanto, a technology company around data. And ultimately, I met Carlos and I became the CEO of the company. All together I'm talking about 33 years in the industry or in different industry and managing different companies and businesses. That is about me. What it tells you is that I'm pretty old. I'm pretty old. So not representative of that industry, how you can see it. I mean, I like to say that this esport industry, first of all, gaming and esport is not exactly the same. Content, gaming is content of our industry, but not necessarily the same. But this is the biggest niche, I think, in the world. If you see what we talk about, there are about almost two million people in the world which are familiar with esport and interested in esport. And the question, why is it so attractive for so many brands? And you see that in if you see and look into the community, we are talking most likely about the most attractive target group in the world for almost any brand in this world, because the audience is between 10 and 35. And these are the consumers of today and the future. And that's why many companies and brands have the ambition to be part of this esport industry. By the way, I predict that to be the fastest growing environment in the entertainment industry overall in the next coming years. What you see is about five years ago, the partners in this industry were very much endemic partners, but that has completely changed over the last five to 10 years already. So what you can see there is that the big sponsors from traditional esport are now moving into esport, and they're doing that with a lot of commitment, with a lot of budget behind it. And they do that with a 100% opinion that this is the right way to spend their marketing budget into in a very effective way. What you see as well that traditional esport clubs are part of this esport industry as well. So they are building teams for different leads as well, so they don't want to miss that train going forward. It's me because I have no idea why my computer is pretty slow. Why is a club? And why did I took the decision to put myself into a club, into a team environment? And I think there is nobody questioning the fact that we own the asset in this industry, and this is the players. And the players is what makes this industry this kind of attractive environment. We work closely together with league organizers, we work closely together with publishers, and we are present on all platforms, but the players, this is what makes this industry so appealing. So we own something which is the heart and more or less the asset of this entire industry. And that makes it so interesting for us to be where we are. What are we? So what is G2 about? First of all, it's important to mention is we see ourselves as part of entertainment in the same way as we have professional teams which fight hard for good performance and success, the same way we are an entertainment company, a content producer. We are working closely together with our partners, and the ambition we have is we always want to be relevant in terms of what we produce. We want to be spot on in terms of what we prepare and distribute for our fans, for our community. And that's what we do together with our partners. The other thing about G2 is we are sometimes borderline in terms of how we communicate. We are always extremely empathetic in terms of what we bring across. We don't take ourselves too serious because we don't have the intention to change the world, but we have the ambition to give some fun, to give entertainment into our communities. That's what we're doing. So what you see and to a certain extent what makes us what we are and why are we so proud with the current setup? These are all the brands and names that you can see that we could win over the last three years for G2. These are definitely, and that is a constant thing I want to say, we never speak about these guys, about sponsors. Sponsors are brands and company that show up in your office, leave the money on the desk, and disappear. That's not our intention. We work extremely closely together with our partners. We do joint marketing activities. We have brand marketing campaigns with them. We are their content producer, so-called a, you could call us a media house for them in terms of production and distribution of any content. And the thing that we are 100% proud of is the fact we have never lost a partner. So whenever we started to work with people and we work with brands, we still work with them. We never lost anybody. And that makes us extremely proud and tells us that we must do certain things right. Overall, how is our business model? Well, how does it look like? And actually very similar to traditional sports. So very comparable with what football clubs, basketball clubs, cricket clubs, or whatever, what they are doing. So we work closely with partners, as I said before. This is the heart of our understanding what we are in close collaboration working with other brands. We have income due to price money and thankfully our teams perform extremely well for a long time. We are not talking only about professional players, we are working with influencers, creators as well. And on the other end, we have typically, as any other sport club in the world as well, consumer products or merchandise, how you want to call it, both physical product as well as digital product. We work closely together with Leaks. We share the success that we make together there. And we have similar to sport clubs as well, media income and revenue as well. For us, it's not that relevant being present on TV. For us, it's more important to be on relevant platforms. And that's what we do extremely intensively. Let me be proud again in that presentation. So after I said we are proud of the partners that we work with the same way, I think G2 and that's nothing to be too arrogant. One of the most successful teams ever in this industry. And this, we are present in eight different games. Whenever we are present, we are let's say top five at least in the world. So we always try to get the best teams into our company and we support them with whatever we can in order to make them successful. We allow them to train as much as they can. We try to help them to build their own brand. But this is all part of our own army. So that's what we are extremely proud of. And hopefully, and I think I'm pretty convinced that this will continue like this. Overall important to know big difference. We have a, as I said before, we are a multi-team club being present internationally in all different kind of relevant leagues and games. And we are convinced that we are further growing and entering into other industry or into other games as well in the future. What makes us successful? And how do we measure that? And what I said before in terms of our culture and our philosophy, we always want to be relevant. And what you can see and what you can see as well in terms of the work that we won over the last couple of years, we are, whenever we are in a league or in a game, we always one of the most watched, most streamed, most relevant team overall. We spend a lot of money to continue to be in that position by producing content exactly the way how the community is expecting that and is demanding that as well. The standard way anybody who is familiar with eSports and clubs and how they are managed is pretty simple, pretty decent in terms of we have a marketing plan together with our partners. We decide in what game, what event, what content we want to produce and how to distribute that on different channels and platforms. Then we are the content producer. We promote the content with players and influencers. And ultimately, we have a data tool as well that we measure the success of whatever we do together with partners. Having that said, let's enter into the situation around COVID-19 or Corona in 2020. Being that long in the industry and on this planet, this was, I think, my opinion, by far the biggest impact ever on this planet, on industry and of course, all societies in this world. And there were different kind of impacts for different industries. And luckily and thankfully, we are able to say that we had an impact as well, that industry had an impact as well. You see that for the first time revenue in eSports stay flat or even slightly decreased to a certain extent. What you see in 2021, that is a forecast, 21 from New Zoo and how they calculated is you still see that the increase is moderate. So for 21, there's still a lot of influence due to Corona, but then in 2022, hope is there that everything gets back to normal and that we can fully use the power that the industry has to grow significantly more than this is the case in 2021. G2 needs to be extremely, extremely happy and thankful for the fact. If I show you the number, is there any question or there's, I hear sometimes some background noise. Hope that's not the case. So what you see here is compared to the industry grows, G2 has a incredible growth in 2020. Even though that we had some impacts of Corona as well, but we could grow our business so much that this is really, really incredible. However, we had to change almost everything as well the way we were. We were to a certain extent privileged because our business is fully digital and the issues other more old-fashioned industry have is the fact that they never consequently digitalized their business. So we were already in an advanced status in terms of being prepared for a digital environment. We had some kind of footprint in the offline environment as well. And we were able to move that from offline to online in order to copy fully on track in terms of our marketing execution. What does it in concrete means? What was the impact in 2020 that we have seen? So what we definitely saw is the fact that the partners that we work with works much slower in terms of commitments for budgets to be spent in 2020. That was all about the unsecurity around COVID-19 because they couldn't see what the impact would be. And therefore, of course, they were more cautious before they made decisions for big money investment into anything. Thankfully, we only had a delay. We didn't saw any kind of reduction in budget they spend or anything in terms of reduction of initiatives. But there was a high level of cautious behavior and the kind of thinking twice and even three times before anything was committed. But in real numbers, we were extremely successful anyhow because what you can see is we found six new partners. One of them or two of them is BMW and Adidas. So not small partners, big ones, the real big ones in the company in the industry. We could increase our starting revenue in 2025 by 75%. And ultimately an increase on our end, what you could see, what was flat in the industry, we could increase our total business by 45%. So very happy that this is the case for us. It's not given due to coincidence. We started last year, February, when we heard first indication that there might be a pandemic in the world, we started immediately to think what the implication could be and started to adopt our toolkit accordingly. So what, how does it look like in particular? It looked in a way that there was no way anymore to produce content the way we did before. We didn't want it to take the risk to have potential risks of our players being infected by Corona. And therefore we simply had to decide that we used photos for video creation and the community took that extremely positive that we had this kind of responsible behavior, not having this kind of potential risk for any of our employees or players to be confronted with Corona. And therefore we just changed the way how we produced. We needed to work with kind of non-person present kind of production. And what you can see here, that was extremely well perceived by the community and that was extremely well perceived by our partners in this case, BMW as well. We got good results. We got even great results. And therefore that was one activity that we did in terms of production. A second example, what we changed usually for worlds, there's a kind of big kind of on stage live content production and stuff like this. This was impossible, even though that they created an isolation bubble environment for the tournament. It was a physical tournament that happened. It was not an online only tournament. It requires that our players and all the production team needed to be in quarantine for 14 days before the event even started. And what we simply did because even the teams were not allowed to share rooms or to share any kind of thing during these 14 days of quarantine, we gave them video cameras themselves and we created content in the isolation bubble for the 14 days in advance and shared that and joined that with our partners and distributed that the same way as we did before. That was extremely well perceived because the showing responsibility for your organization and showing that you adapt according to the new situation around Corona, that was something that was super well perceived, both audio in the community as well with our partners. What do I think what it will be in the future now that we see that it's getting better? It's not like that everything is done and it's solved and it's fixed right now. I think we are still in a situation that we need to be careful in terms of whatever we do in terms of getting back to normal. But what I personally think it will never be, it will never go back to normal and it should not go back to normal because we all have learned that traveling for any event is not 100% needed. We have seen that you can reach your community and audience without being present on events or on any activity. We have seen there are alternatives in order to avoid any potential risks. On a business perspective I see we were so privileged that we didn't saw any direct impact and now here I'm talking about G2 only. There are definitely other organizations in eSport which have seen a direct impact. I don't see we didn't have that. I don't see that in 2021 but there might be an indirect impact for us as well because the partners that we work with might have an impact and might need to react in terms of their budget and commitments. I think we will maintain to use the established new formats like online events and online production and that that is a good thing to have because it saves a lot of money that money can be spent in a better way instead of traveling and that's why I think we should do our best to keep that new format alive and we created new formats. We have been able with that concept to have all our deliverables fulfilled and we could significantly grow our audience and I really believe and I think that's not something that you need to be great in making projection for the future. I think we shouldn't go back to the way how it works before because we have learned that the way how we manage the business right now with the adaptation we made it works even better than it worked ever before. So hopefully that could give you a kind of understanding what we are, how we work, what we do and what we see for the future. Thank you. Thank you so much Peter for that wonderful address to our audiences. I'm sure all our viewers have taken away some great highlights and takeaways from your session. Thank you so much for your time once again. You're welcome. Thank you and ladies and gentlemen once again requesting all of you to join our online conversation using the hashtag e4m game on. Moving forward we are going towards the fireside chat where we will talk about Indian gaming companies going global. Charing this session is Dr. Anurag Bhattra Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Exchange for Media Group and we have with us Mr. Sai Srinivas Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MPL. A very warm welcome to you gentlemen. Hi Cathy, thank you so much. Great to be here. Lovely to have you here. Just give us a moment. I think Dr. Bhattra is also here. Sure. Just quickly going to check and come back to you Sai. Thank you so much for joining me. Just give us a second. Hi Sai, how are you doing? Hello Dr. Anurag, how are you? Should I call you Dr. Anurag or Anurag? Anurag is okay. AB is okay. Anurag is okay. I'll go with AB. How are you? I'm doing very well. And where are you based? I'm currently based in Bangalore. Bangalore. You are all in Bangalore two weeks back for our exchange for media influencer of the year award. We gave it to Vivek to Naveen Tiwari of InMovie. Is it a physical event in Bangalore on the 5th? I see. Wonderful. That's good to know. Hopefully we'll get through this thing and then I think we can all get back to a more physical world. It was looking good but last couple of days again, as you know in Noida today they put a partial lockdown. Oh, looking to put a lockdown. In Delhi the numbers were really low and things seemed normal. The traffic was back to its normal. So anywhere. Good. You have done very well. So congratulations. You've done well. Thank you. Thank you. A lot of, I think, fingers crossed. We've been very, very fortunate to have been at the right place at the right time. I think a lot of credit goes to a lot of the infrastructure that companies before us have built and a lot of things. I think very, very lucky to be at the right place at the right time to be honest. And what do you think of the Nazarai Group? I think it's an incredible milestone to be honest. I think it is incredible because the fact that an Indian homegrown gaming company is gone public in our market, I think it's nothing short of remarkable. I think this is hopefully going to be the first of many. So yeah, it's amazing. It's also inspiring and it's also very, very encouraging for not only me but practically the entire ecosystem. By the way, you and Noindewari are share the same element. Are you both IT companies? Yes, yes, yes. Of course, we've separated by a significant number of years. But yes, he's my alumnus. I mean, even I'm an alumnus, not what he's my senior. I think we separated by about 8 to 10 years, I'm not wrong. But yes, in 2010, he's I think 2000 or 2001. He's 2000. Yeah, yeah. So we are ready to start, Amisha, whenever you want. Yes, please. Yes, Dr. Bhattra, I would like you to take the fireside chat forward. Yeah. Thank you so much, Khyati. Let me welcome somebody who's really in the news for the right reasons. Let me welcome Sai Srinivas, who's the CEO and co-founder of MPL. I don't have to explain to our viewers what MPL is. Sai, first of all, let me start by asking you how have been your last 12 months personally and professionally. I know the gaming numbers have gone up. The gaming business has done well. But tell us overall, how's it been the last 12 months? Firstly, thank you so much, AB and thank you so much, E4MT, for inviting me. The last 12 months has been quite a rollercoaster, to be honest. The gaming industry is left forward by about a couple of years in probably six months. On a personal point, it's not easy to practically stay indoors for so long. But hopefully with the vaccine rolling out and more people getting it, we can all get back to offices in full strength and pick it up where we left off in 2019, I guess. Okay. Let me start by asking you, today gaming is becoming mainstream. You know, it was sometimes on the fringes. It was something you did for leisure. Today, it's not no longer leisure. It's becoming a mainstream activity. You pursue it like a career. You pursue it as like a serious hobby. You also use a gamification in education. You use a gamification in almost every sphere of life is growing. So tell me, where do you think gaming is headed? And give us a sense of where it will be in three to five years through some numbers that you can share with our audience? Of course. So firstly, AB, the reason why gaming is becoming mainstream is that in all honesty, gaming has always been in some way mainstream. It's just that now, thanks to the access of internet and thanks to mobile phone penetration, it's just becoming more and more accessible. Also, the beauty of gaming is that games are probably the only format of content that do not have a language. For example, a game of pool can be played by an American, can be played by a German, can be played by an Indian, and they might not know each other's language, but they can still play the game. But you honestly can't say the same about any other format of content, be it a movie, be it a video, be it the audio, be it text. I think it's universal language. That's the reason why it's also so easy for anyone to pick it up. Now, that's honestly the reason why I think it will be mainstream even faster than some of the other content formats out there. Now to answer the other question that you asked, where is this headed, or where are we going? I think what's going to happen in a couple of years from now is that there is going to be a platform now, whether that's MPL, whether that's someone else that only time can tell. But there is going to be a platform where massive global tournaments will happen. For example, you take a simple game like chess. In two years from now, in fact, a year and a half from now, it's not far-fetched to think that a player who's playing out in New York in the US can compete with a player playing out of Saapolo, compete with a player playing out of Delhi in India. In massive online tournaments where there are a million or people playing, imagine this tournament, there are a million people playing, first round 500,000 get eliminated, second round 250,000 get eliminated, and then eventually you have quarterfinals, semi-finals and finals. Not only is the scale of the tournament quite immense, but imagine the situation maybe where you and I are playing the quarterfinals of a tournament like that. I'm reasonably certain that a significant bunch of folks from across the world would also want to see the live broadcast of how the game between you and me is going on because we've eliminated a lot of people to get to the final eight. I think that is the future of digital sport or in other words, that is the future of eSports. It is going to be heavy mobile driven because most people can access computing only through mobile. Of course, PC and console led the eSport revolution and started with them like many other things in the world, but as and when it gets into developing markets and gets into more people's hands, it's going to be mobile that's going to lead that revolution and that's the only way you're going to get competitive eSports into the hands of three to four billion people across the world, if not the whole of seven billion. That's how I look at the future and that one million is just a placeholder. These tournaments can be as high as 5 million, 10 million, 12 million, it's just the limitation is just your imagination. Practically every person who understands chess can play a tournament of chess online using their mobile phone, but imagine if a similar tournament were to be held offline, it's just impossible, impossible to even accommodate more than 10,000 people offline and that's the beauty of online digital sport and hopefully we realize that future sooner rather than later. Absolutely, so the eSports India are poised to grow and you clearly said that the beauty is that the access to the games is through mobile and that is bringing more and more players and viewers both into the ambit. Now, let me talk of homegrown games. How do you think the homegrown games are doing in India and what do you see the potential for the homegrown games becoming really big? I think two points. Firstly, there are a lot of incredible homegrown game developers who are doing pretty well in India. There are also homegrown game developers who are making games for global audiences and who focus on making games for western markets out of India. It's a different ball game that we still not have or still not had a triple A level game or should I say a world class triple A level game come out of India and I think this is just a matter of time. It will happen and the reason why it takes time for that to happen is that a game at the end of the day, the closest analogy that I can think of is a movie. To make a high budget movie, the market has to grow. The domestic market has to grow. To make a high budget movie, the person who is putting in that money needs to be confident that they will be able to eventually break even on the investment. So as the market grows, the appetite of local game developers will also grow and you will see incredibly large triple A level titles come out of India. But one thing is for certain, most of Indian game developers or Indian games will be mobile focused. I'm not saying they won't be console or PC focused, but almost nine out of 10 developers are going to build games for the mobile phone. Okay, now again, exchange for media is a business community for marketing, advertising media. Now, as I said, gamification is becoming part of every market year's plan because if a lot of millenials and a lot of consumers are using games as a way to express themselves or spending so much time on gaming platforms either participating or viewing, then clearly the marketers would want to leverage that. Tell us what are the things that marketers can do to leverage gaming? I think the first thing that marketers can do to leverage gaming is to actively participate in sponsoring or participating in large-scale e-sports tournaments. So for example, just take the example which we took, if you're running a tournament for a million people and hopefully another million or two are going to watch that tournament, that is at least two to three million eyeballs glued to that tournament and in a way that's really, really targeted communication because that audience which is playing the tournament as well as viewing the tournament, for those folks, there's no better way to reach out than by sponsoring that tournament and the cost of sponsoring these tournaments is significantly lower because it doesn't involve a lot of physical infrastructure. If you were sponsoring a physical tournament, then it always involves a lot of infrastructure and obviously that it costs a little higher and it also becomes an easy way for marketers to actually target specific audiences. For example, different games have different types of audiences like depending on the kind of audience you want to go after, you can pick and choose and sponsor the tournament which is being held in that kind of a game. If you're looking at a more male-dominated audience, then you may want to go for a more male-dominated game which has a more male-dominated user base. If you're going for a female-dominated game, there are games which are extremely female, skewed towards a female audience. That's the advantage of sponsoring these four tournaments and I think a lot of the marketers should definitely start spending time and in fact, more importantly, spending some amount of money understanding the space because eventually the marketers who do understand the space are going to get a significant head start over the other folks who will not spend time understanding it but then would want to understand it once it becomes fully mainstream. So Sai, again, let's talk of one of the things that we talk of is you talked of gaming does not having a language barrier, it does not have a geographical barrier. Now, the growth of internet in India happened on the back of Indian language content growing. Now, do you think that gaming in Indian language is the next big frontier because clearly that may bring in a set of audiences that have never been introduced to gaming? Of course, I think more than gaming in Indian language frontier, like our honorable Prime Minister said, games build on Indian stories. I mean, if you look at Japan, there's so many games that they've launched built on their stories, stories that have originated from their land. In India, in fact, we have got so many stories and every game one way or the other is telling a small story. It's a very simple story. In some cases, it's a very simple story and in some cases, it's a very in-depth story. I think more than language, I think games that are built on stories which are very, very familiar to Indian audiences will tend to do well. And I think more Indians come online, there will be studios that are focused on building some of these games. Fantastic. Now, again, gaming and if I may say esports in India is also creating new set of jobs while machine learning, artificial intelligence are taking away some of the jobs, but they're also creating a set of new jobs. Similarly, gaming is creating a set of new jobs. Give us a sense of the kind of jobs that have been created and what is the future for people who are looking at careers in gaming? Sure. I think this is one such industry, especially competitive esports. India and Indian platforms will be eventually net exporters. You will see a lot of Indian companies actually exporting the platforms to other parts of the world. What this does is that it directly builds a class of workforce which is focused on IP creation. India historically has been extremely good in services, but the advantage of building this ecosystem is that it focuses a lot on IP creation. And the advantage of IP is that IP is like digital property. It can be monetized again and again and again and again across the world. And that creates a lot of value back for the Indian ecosystem. And in terms of kind of jobs it's going to create, it's going to create a lot of jobs apart from the core aspects which everyone knows about like engineering, product management, etc. It's going to add a lot of value to the creative ecosystem. Today, if there's a storyteller, most storytellers in India are either working in the film industry or related industries. Storytelling is one of the most critical aspects of game development. In fact, copywriting is a critical aspect of game development. In fact, most of the creative folks who are working in the film industry or the OTT industry, a lot of them will find a lot of relevant jobs in the gaming industry as well. So that entire pie is going to expand and expand quite significantly. Designers, creative writers, artists, animators, that entire space and for practical purposes, India has always been good at this by the way. A lot of the work that happens on a lot of these top-class Hollywood movies, a lot of that work actually happens in India. A lot of artists in India would actually contribute into that. So it's only going to increase the pie for all of those people. I mean, the sector itself I think will easily create about 50 to 60,000 jobs in the course of the next two to two and a half years easy. And most of these jobs are going to be built around IP development and the fact and the advantage with IP development is that it's not like a service where once used the value of 50 roads, IP's value only keeps, it only keeps getting better and better. So that's the advantage of building jobs in this sector. Clearly as the e-sports audiences, players and the domain grows globally, what do you think is the role that Indian e-sports companies will play on the global level? I think the number one thing that Indian e-sports companies should the role that we should play on global level is that we should fundamentally define what e-sports means for our country. What I mean by that is, I mean, I fully acknowledge and understand that the western world has run e-sports on PCs and consoles and so on and so forth. But I mean, let's be honest, in our country, the number of people who have consoles or PCs is very few and denying the opportunity for the rest of the 2-300 million people to participate in a competitive tournament just because they don't have a PC or a console, I think is ridiculous. I think the first thing that we should do is we as a country should enable the participation of the larger audience who even have a mobile phone, they should be able to participate in a competitive e-sport. And if you look at the global e-sport audience by the next 2-3 years, easily about 30 to 35% of that audience is going to come from India just because the sheer size of our country and the sheer size of consumption in our country. Now, 30 to 35% of consumption of any industry is coming from one geography. And I think the onus is on that geography to increase participation and at the same time build out clear regulations and create regulations which make it inclusive for users and players to participate. Fantastic. Now, clearly, Sai, when you see an Indian gaming company doing an IPO, it all goes well for the sector. That means the sector is something that has tremendous promise. So tell us, when you look at your contemporaries, you look at other players, what are the kind of thoughts that come to your mind? And tell us, how does Nazara's IPO auger for well for your sector? And do we see companies like yours aiming at listing at some stage? Yeah, so firstly, let me tell you that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. It's folks like them who put in the hard work and done a lot of incredible work because of which our lives are significantly easier. I mean, back in 2001, 2002, I mean, I could only imagine how hard it must have been for the entrepreneurs then to even talk about gaming and explain to investors what gaming is. It is so much more easier today thanks to the work that these folks have done. First and foremost, the success that some of us enjoy and some of the next set of entrepreneurs are enjoying is a lot of that credit actually goes to some of these folks. In fact, some of the folks from Nazara and some of the other folks also who work really, really hard to bring that recognition to that industry. Now, as far as our listing is concerned, I think maybe at the end of the day, every company eventually at some point wants to be listed. That's the eventual dream that any entrepreneur would have. Now, we are a two and a half year old company. I think it's a little far-fetched for us to talk about listing at such a young age. I think we still have a long way to go. We still have a lot to learn from the likes of Nazara and from the likes of many other peers or sorry, contemporaries, if I may add, who listed. But hopefully someday we would also love to be on a similar pedestal and list that here. Fantastic. Now, let's talk of the trends that are shaping these. If you had to make two or three predictions for the future of gaming, what would those be? Two or three predictions for the future of gaming. I think gaming in India is going to make more money than Bollywood does or all the film industry does. I think that I am certain of. In any country where gaming has become mainstream, it eventually makes more money than all the other entertainment sectors combined. It's true about the US, it's true about China, it's true about many other developed economies, and India is heading in that direction. The second prediction that doesn't mean that those industries won't grow. Those industries will also grow, which is that gaming has this nature of the market size of gaming usually grows much more faster than some of the other ones. I think the second prediction that I'll say is that esports is going to be a part of Asian games. It's already a part of Asian games. Esports is also eventually going to be a part of Olympics. I think India and Indians will probably be on, if not the first, at least in the first three or four countries who will win a lot of medals in the Olympics. As long as esports across the globe recognizes that access to the sport is the most important thing. That doesn't mean that you create non-inclusive parameters such as only a person with a PC or a console can participate in it. If we provide the access to our countrymen, and if 300 million people are competing in a tournament, maybe I am reasonably certain the person is going to come out on top. It's more or less going to be in the top two or three in the world. Our number one job is to provide access, and our number one job is to ensure that these esports which are getting recognized by these global sporting events, they also ensure that they are allowing people with the access to the right kind of devices to increase the reach for the sport. Okay, that's very hardening, and I think for a long time we've done well in sports, but we fell short of winning medals, except in shooting or in boxing or in athletes. I think the addition of esports to the Olympics and the Asian Games will really help in boosting the confidence of the Indian sporting and esporting community, and really it all goes well that they're being included and Indians will do well. I want to ask you, what are the plans of MPL over the next 12 to 18 months, and what are your priorities? I think our first priority is to most clearly and certainly host large-scale tournaments in India. For example, last year in October, November, December, we hosted this tournament called College Premier League, where in 150 colleges participated in a national level tournament across the country, and it was the first attempt, it was in fact the beta. This year, we are aiming to host the same event with about 1,000 colleges participating. I think first and foremost, our goal is to host large-scale digital tournaments where people can participate from any part of the country in India, and capitalize on India and ensure that Indian developers earn a significant amount of money from our platform. Secondly, our second priority is to take our platform to as many countries in the world as possible. We're already there in Indonesia and we're seeing really good traction there. Our goal is to hopefully take our platform to more western economies and India, and eventually take consumer product out of this part of the world to say more developed regions. I think that's something very few people have done. It's a very, very hard task and I hope fingers crossed, I hope we will be able to do a reasonable job of it. Okay, and Sai, when you're building this incredible company and you're on this journey, who are people who are your role models and you look up to? I think my role models have always been sportsmen to be honest. I think there are other entrepreneurs as well, of course across India and across the world who are incredibly, incredibly good role models. But for me, it's always been sportsmen who are my role models. For example, Virat is in fact my role model. I've always been a huge fan of his and when we actually didn't sign him up, it was a bit of an unbelievable moment for me. And the reason why I say Virat is a role model for me is because the way the man changed himself and the way he kind of changed himself to become the sportsman he has become and the way he shaped an entire country to believe that we can be world readers. And we can also be the kind of athletes that back in the day, we used to see from Australia, we used to see from South Africa, we used to imagine, I don't know, back in the day we used to say why can't an Indian field as well as say in South Africa team or an Australian team? And I think I think what Virat Nicknick did was that he made everybody believe that not only could you do that, but in fact you could go a level further and be better than anybody else in every way possible. And for me, I think that is one I've never seen an athlete inspire someone and inspire a country as much as he has. Apart from that, of course, the other sportsmen like Ronaldo and Nadal who are incredibly, incredibly amazing as well. And yeah, in terms of business folks, I think a lot of Indian entrepreneurs, I mean, the founders of Flipkart, the founders of Infosys, like I said, we're all standing on shoulders of giants, they've all done a lot of good work and it's because of their good work that we have such a vibrant ecosystem. So yeah, these are some of the folks I really really look up to. And just so much, Sai, we exchange for media wish you luck in your endeavor to grow the e-sports in India and to build MPL to the next level. So I'm sure with somebody like you leading it, the goals and objectives you've set for yourself and for MPL will be achieved. All the best to you. Congratulations on growing MPL and e-sports in India. And I look forward to the next few months and years with anticipation, because I know that you'll be able to do a great job at being a poster boy for this industry. Thank you so much. All the best. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sai and Dr. Bhattara for that very interesting conversation. And ladies and gentlemen, as you can already see, we have with us Mr. Girishman and partner in head media and entertainment, KPMG, who will be talking about the online gaming landscape in India. Very warm welcome to you, Mr. Menon. Hi, Cathy. Thank you so much. Hello, everybody. Just give me a second until I share my screen, please. Is this visible? Yes, yes. Thank you so much, Cathy. And hello, everybody. And welcome to this session on the online gaming summit. I'm very excited to be here and talk to you guys about our perspective on the online gaming landscape in India. This is a space that is something that we are tracking very, very closely and it's a space that we've started to see explored over the last few years or so. And it's very interesting to see the continuous number of triggers that keep coming up, which seem to be driving sustained growth in the space. I mean, post the 4G and the smartphone evolution, we saw a big bump up in the user space for online games in India. And during the COVID period, this was probably one of the very few sectors which actually saw an increase in user base and user engagement. And I'll talk about that in a bit. We are also seeing a fairly robust and continued interest from investors, both private and public. And this also hopefully will all go well for solving some of the challenges around capital constraints for the sector. So what I want to do today is use this session to very quickly take all of you through some of the more basics and some key aspects around online gaming in India. And let me start with literally gaming one on one. So what is really gaming? When we talk about gaming, what do we really actually mean? And there are obviously many contexts around this, and where does what fit in. So what we've tried to do is pull together a wide landscape which sort of covers the various elements around gaming in India. So gaming at a very overall level when you split it out into devices, so you've got console and PC at one end, and then you've got mobile online gaming as the other play in India. And within all of this, when you then break it down further into what are the business models or categories of games that exist. So you've got casual gaming, you've got real money games, and you've got esports with sort of piggybacks on the overall ecosystem. Casual game in India is actually probably got the largest subset of users with 380, 400 million users currently. Whereas RMG in terms of the user base is comparatively smaller. RMG itself has many components in it and you've got fundamentally card games, you've got fantasy sports operators, and then you've got other skill based games that sort of bring in. And that kind of a base for RMG ranges anywhere between 100 to 150 million users as it stands today. Esports, and we've heard Sai a little bit before also, is a space which is showing tremendous traction over the last year to two years or so. The number of players in the country are probably 80,000 plus getting very quickly toward 100,000 players in the country. Viewers are already 40 million plus. And I think that is, gives a little bit of a confidence in terms of the depth of the user base that we are seeing in India. The other approach to also looking at online gaming in India is also the monetization models. So if you look at casual games fundamentally and interestingly and uniquely driven by advertising in India today, with paid models comprising purchase, paper download, and app purchases, which is a comparatively smaller share in India today. But globally it's the predominant mode and we are seeing a greater traction on paid models as we go along. On the real money gaming side, we've got commission revenue as the primary revenue model for most of the real money game companies with minimal advertising contribution also. And if you really pull it all together and I think the other obviously key point and the reason why a lot of the emphasis for us is on online gaming and within that on the casual gaming genre is fundamentally the fact that the majority of the users, almost 90% of the users in India play mobile games and almost all of them play casual games. So I think that's how we sort of look at the overall landscape and context for the Indian gaming segment. When you now convert that into numbers, what does that mean? So if you look at it, gaming as a business, as a segment has seen dramatic growth over the last five years from what was almost a 170, 180 million million users in FI-15, we are now close to 400 at the calendar year December 20 and we expect by another 18 months or so, we should be close to 500 million users in the country. And I think that is a significant scale up that we are seeing on the gaming user base in India. On the other hand, when you convert that into numbers and into money, gaming is about 1.3 billion dollars in FI-20 and we expect that to get to more than 2 billion dollars in literally two years time frame. And again, Sai made the point that gaming tends to overshadow other entertainment segments as it grows in size. And this is perfectly true for a lot of the mature markets. And even in India, if you look at some of the more emerging segments and you compare that to gaming, so I mean OTT is a classic example, gaming is already a larger segment than OTT. And globally gaming actually tends to overshadow more traditional segments like even television. When you look at the Indian context, and I think this is where we need to look at the maturity curve for India in terms of monetization, currently 60% of industry revenues are actually coming in from RMG, though casual is as a segment is what is expected to drive and grow revenues at a much faster pace as we go forward. Then step back a second and look at, so we spoke about the landscape of the gaming segment. What is the value chain? What are the various companies about? What do they do? Where do they fit in? So really, you can start with the developer, which is the game studio who either build a brand or an IP on their own, or they leverage existing IPs or brands. And then you've got the publisher who then picks up the studio, the IP and then brands it, markets it enables distribution at scale and enables reach to the consumers. In a lot of developed markets, you will see the publishers and studios overlap with each other. When it comes to distribution and monetization, fundamental models tend to be app store or online gaming stores or retail gaming stores. But uniquely, what sort of seeing a lot of traction in India as compared to a lot of other developed markets is India is seeing the emergence of multi-gaming platforms, which then act as a mini universe of their own for consumers to engage and play games and also direct downloads and particularly pushed through by the RMG and fantasy sports players. And that's also that that's also a model which has actually become very well established within the Indian ecosystem. So now, and I briefly mentioned this at the beginning, COVID was interestingly a trigger for gaming growth and increased interest in gaming over the last 12 months or so. I mean, we've seen, if you look at the last three quarters, Q1 to Q220, which is during the lockdown period, you saw almost a 50% growth in mobile game downloads. And interestingly, that's a number that actually sustained. So it's not that after lockdown, and this was a worry that people will pull back and there will be a reduction in gameplay. It's actually stabilized and we are actually now seeing a lot of the gameplay, the user engagement metrics, as also the number of users and downloads either stabilize at similar levels as Q2, or maybe drop down a little, but still remain significantly higher to pre-COVID levels. So bringing all this together, now while all of this mix is very interesting hearing and very interesting reading, I think there are three or four angles that we do need to keep in mind when you look at the Indian gaming industry. I mean, realistically, it is still a relatively much less mature industry, and it needs time before we can start seeing a significant growth curve continuing to come through, particularly when it comes to monetization. While gaming has been around in India for ever literally, but it's literally post 2016 where we saw large masses of users converge on the gaming ecosystem. And I think that maturity is something that we need to wait for. And that is also reflected partly in the ARPU levels. So India's casual gaming ARPU is $0.8 as compared to $65 average globally. And that is a gap that we do need to bridge, though I think one very important thing to keep in mind is fundamentally globally, most markets evolved from console gaming and PC gaming, which created a culture of payment and a culture of high ARPUs, whereas India effectively leapfrogged that entire device generation, which is effectively meant that while you got a huge number of mobile users, getting them to be monetized is going to take a little bit longer. So the other two or three angles around that need to be solved for as we move forward. From an Indian studio perspective, we need to see more studios building at scale, building game titles, which are comparable to the best in the world. And while we are on track, there is still a while to go around that. When it comes to regulatory, also there is a need for regulatory clarification and clarity in terms of the way forward for the wider gaming sector. And same with distribution and access, particularly given that there are restrictions around, particularly for RMG and OFS with respect to the Play Store realistic. So taking that forward, just to link it back to the point I made earlier around the maturity curve for India. India is still, if you really look at it on the maturity index and the monetization index in the lower left hand quadrant, whereas there is still, and therefore there is still a while to go before we can truly be comparable with the global markets. So while India has, is the second largest market in the world in terms of number of users, monetization still there is a while to go. But like I said earlier, most of these other markets we are comparing ourselves to are far more mature markets when it comes to gaming behavior. And I think India will see us get there once we get some more sustained traction in terms of user engagement levels and user base. And they're already starting to see that kind of attraction happen. So if you look at television, for example, average TV time spent was four hours daily. In that comparison, when you look at video streaming, that's three hours 42, but gaming is already three hours seven. And therefore, we are already starting to see gaming as an entertainment medium catch up with more established traditional mediums with respect to vying for the time of the consumer. And as that share becomes larger and as that share becomes more sustained, you will also see the follow on effect on monetization. And from there, what I now want to just quickly touch upon are some of the key elements and trends that we've sort of seen and evolving areas that we are seeing around gaming in India. And Sai was there in the previous conversation about esports. And beyond the point, not so much that I can add there, but I think two or three key elements that we need to keep in mind is yes, as the maturity of the gamers grows, as we see international recognition of esports, particularly with the Olympic Games and the Asian Games, we will see greater amount of traction and greater depth in the ecosystem on the gamer side. But along with that ecosystem, it is also important that the brand ecosystem, the broadcast ecosystem, the viewer ecosystem also develops rapidly. And I think that's something that we are starting to see happen as we go forward. But there are two or three key elements that we do need to solve for as we move forward. I think one of the points was mentioned earlier also is the device ecosystem. I think esports is still largely driven through console and PCs and getting a larger share of mobile gamers to play esports and to enable them to play esports tournaments is actually going to be very, very critical. The other angle that we also need to sort of keep in mind is that if you really step back and look at the titles and the publisher ecosystem for esports in India, it is still very shallow in the sense that it is largely driven by a few titles. And there aren't any Indian titles that are sort of driving this ecosystem as of now. So I think the getting more depth in the publisher ecosystem is also extremely critical for the wider health of the esports market in India. And taking on from that, you can sort of even partly marry the two. One of the triggers that we believe that could actually enable the mobile gamers to essentially leapfrog into console titles in a large way is actually the cloud gaming as a phenomenon. This is something that has been effectively launched globally in a few markets over the last two to three years or so. There is still a while to grow. It is still a very nascent product. I think the product itself is undergoing iterations. People are trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work and what needs to be sorted out. The supply is something that also needs to be sort of built on from a cloud gaming service perspective, pricing, monetization. All of those are something that is still being figured out. But if you step back a second and look at what cloud gaming can mean for India, it essentially means that the entire console universe in theory becomes available to a mobile gamer and we've got 400 million of them. You see more of these gamers being able to engage in more complex games. You will see a greater traction and maturity in the gaming universe in India. That being said, obviously, there are aspects and challenges that needs to be sort of factored in. And the key element among them will be the infrastructure requirements, particularly with respect to high speed internet and the data requirements that exist today in terms of the kind of supply that is available on cloud game. But these are, in our view, challenges which we believe will get resolved over time. And cloud gaming is something that will have a significant impact on how gaming in India evolves as we move forward. The other key angle that a couple of other trends that we also wanted to bring out, one of the reasons that multiplayer games have done and many titles did well in India, as also we saw a significant ramp up during the COVID period was essentially the ability to engage socially through games. And social gaming is something that is seeing significant traction through game streaming platforms, game community platforms, as also in-game social features through multiplayer gaming, voice chat, video chat, multilingual text chatting, all of that is essentially bringing a greater connectivity between the gamers. And it effectively means that you are essentially playing with friends, with family, and that sort of is giving greater encouragement for gamers to spend time with their interests. So I think this is a space that we will see far more interesting developments happening around how do you engage more with gamers, how do you get gamers to engage more, and how do you really sort of build the ecosystem around social gaming as we move forward. So that in a nutshell really was what we were trying to sort of articulate in terms of how we see the gaming ecosystem develop as it moves forward. And like I mentioned at the beginning, I think we are going to see significant traction in gaming both in terms of the user base, as well as monetization, monetization might lag user growth by a couple of years. But like I had mentioned, gaming is still a relatively nascent market in India. And as that market evolves and becomes more mature, you will see significant opportunities for monetization also start coming in as we go forward. That really was briefly what I wanted to convey to you guys today. Hopefully, you found this interesting. And with that, I would like to hand it over back to Cathy. Cathy, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Menon, for giving us that very detailed landscape of what gaming in this industry looks like. Thank you so much for your time. And I'm sure all of you were all those enthusiastic gamers as well as gaming startups have taken some key takeaways from your session. Thank you very much once again. Happy to win. Thank you. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I hope all of you are ready and geared up for our next session. Let me once again remind all of you there is an online buzz going on about this online gaming summit E4M game on use the hashtag E4M game on and join our online conversation. Moving forward, we're going to talk about reaching the connected consumer getting your game face on. We'd like to welcome our speaker for the session. He is the director marketing at Asia Pacific at InMobi. I'd like to welcome Mr. Rajesh Pantina, a very warm welcome to you. Hello. Hi, Cathy. Thank you a lot for that. Good afternoon. Over to you now. Good afternoon. I'm just going to try sharing my screen. Let me know when you can see it. Cathy, hope you guys can see the screen. Hey, buddy. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Cool. So I think we've heard a lot from Sai and we've also seen the overall online gaming space being described in detail by Girish. Now, what we'd like to do is basically our own insights on specifics of mobile gaming, where what we're basically looking at is a report titled Everyone's Gaming Among Us, which is probably true. And a lot of you guys must be gaming right now while listening to this. Now, this report specifically, if you look at it, what we've tried to do is basically look at three parts. One is basically a bit of consumer research. What we're basically looking at is a report titled Everyone's Gaming Among Us, which is probably true. Can I request everybody else to please stay on mute? We're getting some feedback. Yes. Sorry, Rajesh, please go on. Yeah, sure. Can you hear me now? Yes. Cool. Okay. So yeah, quickly about the report, how we've gone about looking at the insights is we've looked at it in three parts. One is that there's a bit of consumer research that we have done using InMobi Pulse, which is our mobile consumer intelligence platform. The second bit is basically we've looked at a bunch of audience intelligence, where we've looked at 1.7 trillion ad requests from January 2020 to January 2021. And using a lot of that, we've looked at actual engagement, actual kind of usage patterns, etc. And ultimately looked at some advertising insights on the InMobi Marketing Club. That's where advertisers meet consumers on the gaming environment and are able to actually meet their consumers, engage them in the right formats, right kind of ways that they want. Now, quickly jumping into just the methodology of the consumer research specifically, as I was mentioning, the InMobi Pulse platform is something that uses programmatic sampling to run surveys and gardener responses. What we did this time around was between February 9 to 16, very recently, reached out to 1000 plus Indian smartphone users or connected consumers across tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 cities, about 30 of them. And what we did was made sure that we weighed and targeted them to be representative of India's smartphone population. Now, what I'll cover in the next, you know, seven to eight minutes is basically first of just set the stage and help you understand what's the current demographic of the Indian mobile gamer like. And as we basically move and understand that demographic and then move into how the persona of the mobile gamer today is shaping up, what are their motivations like, why are they really gaming? We'll then move into the emerging trends that are actually coming up and then lasting behavior that for a long time new normal behavior that we've been talking about has come out as. And ultimately, for a lot of guys, monetization is something that you've been hearing. And therein, while publishers have a huge opportunity, advertisers have an equal opportunity, but there have been a lot of myths and those myths are something that I'd like to break at the end of this. Now, immediately setting the stage to help you understand how gamers are today, what the demographic is like. As the title suggests, it's not just a young urban man's game. It's been a long, whole held myth amongst us that, it's only the young and it's only the male who basically game a lot. But what we clearly see is with mobile, close to 50 or like 43% of basically gamers, mobile gamers are women. And what we also see is it is representative of all age groups with more than 30% of 45 plus age group, female gamers being seen on the mobile arena. Now, what we're also seeing is that gamers are quite well distributed across India. South leads with a 29% North accounts for about 27% while Western India and Central and Eastern India account for 22% each. Now that we've understood how the demographic has shaped up, how it's kind of evolved in the past, right, past 12 months, what we'd like to look at is how do we define or how do we understand the persona of this mobile gamer better, right? And what we really have seen that India is emerging as the land of the committed gamer. Now, here's how we basically been able to arrive at it is we asked a very simple question to our audience was to say, how often does, you know, one play games on their mobile phone? And what we found was a whopping 80% basically said that they played once to several times a day. And these are basically the committed gamers in India. And these committed gamers actually reign supreme across gender, while we see that there's a certain skew, very, you know, tiny skew towards male, but you see the three and four gamers, both female and male are basically committed gamers. The other set of gamers that we are defining are regular and occasional gamers where we see that regular gamers play at least once a week and occasional gamers play once a month or less. Now, I think the most critical part and one of the pieces that was already kind of brought up by Girish and is corroborated through this survey is that we really wanted to understand what's a motivation for people and why did people take up gaming, right? Now, what we really found out that mobile gaming is equal to relaxation. When we'd ask people what's the primary motivation, while you see a bunch of people wanting to compete and win, people wanting to fight boredom, people wanting to connect with friends and family, entertainment or relaxation basically reign supreme. Now, what this means is that people are treating gaming as a part of their entertainment bucket, which is comprising also of OTT video, OTT music, a bunch of social probably engagements, etc. But then gaming is starting to own that entire entertainment and relaxation genre and it's probably the new face of entertainment now. Now, what's also unique and as we basically need to keep that basic motivation in mind is that people are looking at it as entertainment or relaxation. They are also snacking on mobile gaming. You will see that a whopping 70% are basically playing either for 10 to 30 minutes for each session. So the question that was posed to people here was how long would each session of the SP and that turns out to be around 10 to 30 minutes. And that is true, not just for basically, you know, the overall gamers, but also committed regular and occasional gamers. So it's something that is a snacking behavior is coming true for anybody and everybody who is a mobile gamer today. Now, what that also basically shows is that people are looking for it as entertainment, people are basically looking for it as you know, something that is helping their snacking behavior. And so therefore, they're actually going to go play them all and try them all from casual card, multiplayer online battle arena action to e-sports, people are actually trying out any and every game that they can lay their hands on to basically entertain or relax themselves. Now, what we also saw was over 40% of these gamers overall, not just committed gamers, but overall, actually had more than three games at any point in time on their smartphones, right? While space might be an issue in the current Android heavy market, what we are eventually seeing and there was a hint of about the, you know, cloud gaming, etc. But we will start seeing this entire thing drift and more and more games being present on everybody's smartphone. Now, having said that, what we wanted to also touch upon was that while there's a lot of stated data, people are responding to surveys, how did it actually pan out when it comes to actual engagement that we were seeing in those 1.7 trillion attributes, right? Now, as you understand, this is a lot about games which use monetization, right, as their mechanism or ad monetization as their mechanism. Now, one of the first emerging trends that we basically saw was an increase in time spent and increase in variety of games that people were using. Now, that is also something that is reflected in a response that we saw to our survey, where we saw that 45% Indians actually started playing mobile games due to the pandemic. So, you see that there has been a huge insurgence of actually non-gamers just because of mobile making it available to them and therefore democratization has actually brought in a whole new bunch of gamers who do not really know consoles, who do not really look at the desktop, but are basically looking at mobile gaming as the primary way of gaming. And therein, what we are also seeing is existing gamers are basically increasing their time spent and are increasing the variety of games that they have played. Now, as you see, gaming has been winning hearts because what we saw on the platform as well was a 1.5x growth in terms of the users, unique users as well from February 2020 to December 2020. And that is very much in line with where we are seeing that 45% of people have said that they actually started gaming just due to the pandemic. Now, please note here, this is unique user count. Now, if we move to the app usage itself, what we see are two big things. The first thing being that gaming earlier definitely was a small snacking kind of piece, but it had two big peaks which was 1130 and then primetime around 839. But what has happened due to the pandemic is basically gaming has actually emerged as a constant engagement piece through the day. And the peaks have actually just shifted three to four times. And there are some peaks which are like six times or more, but then it's on an average three to four times higher than the engagement that was there previously. Now, to put the unique user and the app usage growth into perspective, this is how things panned out. You see the mark where January 2020, which is before lockdown, how app usage and unique users were at. And then after the lockdown over the course of a year, this is where we are seeing app usage and unique users shift to. That basically actually means that mobile gamers in India are not just committed, they are the most engaged and highly, you know, highly growing kind of a user base. Now, another way of basically looking at that change is to just see the heat map that we put together based on the same data. You see how there are a bunch of huge hotspots that have just exploded and there are very a lot of newer areas that have come into existence with mobile gamers actually coming on board, you know, on to the platform, in movie audience intelligence platform. Now, I think one important piece that we need to definitely look at given all these insights is at the end of the day, if consumers are behaving in a certain manner, how can brands or advertisers best make the most of it? Now, the first, I think myth that we want to break in all of this is to talk about how women have basically entered the arena and are owning gaming, right? And you see as we've seen earlier as well is that 77% of all women who play are basically committed gamers. And what they are also doing is actually playing more in terms of time spent, right? And across age groups, the time spent is way higher than the average time spent by anybody and everybody when it comes to gaming. The second bit is also a long for long kind of myth, which, you know, things that gamers are basically not my target audience, a brand always thinks that gamers definitely do not fit into my kind of target audience. Well, the myth cannot be far from the truth because gamers are equally likely to use music, social networking, sports, entertainment, lifestyle and news apps. And they're equally likely to be retail store visitors, shopping center and mall visitors, you know, restaurant visitors, anything and everything. And therefore, what we really see is that in that 300 million strong audience on mobile gaming, you actually have, you know, each of your target audience, each of your brand's target audience out there. Now, what's also unique, and this is something that again, Girish had mentioned, was the idea of how gamers basically engage with ads in gameplay. Now, we had clearly asked people as to how would they prefer to progress in games? They clearly said that three and four gamers would actually watch an ad than pay money. Now, therefore, in that purchase are definitely not going to be that prominent in the next couple of years for sure. But what we are seeing and what it means is that ads are something that gamers are basically okay with. And they also have a 60% recall whenever they see an ad. Maybe it's because the brand or product is a topic of interest. The ads help them benefit in the game. The ad is engaging and interactive. But net net, what you see is a highly committed gaming audience, which is engaged, which is watchful, and which has a high recall. That basically means that India as a land of committed gamers is basically your target audience on mobile. Now, also, when it comes to a bit of outcomes for advertisers themselves, what we have seen on the immovie platform is that we have a 31% higher video completion rate than more benchmark, which is an industry benchmark for in-app video ads. And we've also seen 2.6 is higher engagement in terms of clicks, in terms of end card, engagement in terms of rich media engagement, etc. that can be built on top of video. Now, that is basically huge, huge goal and a huge, huge distance that brands can actually cover by starting to invest and starting to make more of what the mobile gaming audience is providing to them in today's time and age. That's basically it. I think you guys will have access to the detailed report and detailed insights in the chat link. If you have any other inquiries, if you have any other thoughts, please feel free to reach out to mobile marketing at immovie.com. Over to you. Thanks. Thank you so much, Rajesh, for giving us that brief insight. And I'm sure a lot of our viewers have taken key highlights from your talk. Thank you so much for your time and sharing the insights here. Thank you, Cathy. Bye. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're all ready and set for our first panel discussion of the summit, where we're going to talk about the new media for marketeers. Ladies and gentlemen, welcoming our session chair for this session, Mr. Jayesh, President and General Manager, India in Movie. A very warm welcome to you, Jayesh. And I'd leave the screen over to you to introduce our panelists and also take the session forward. Sorry, Mr. Jayesh, you're on mute. I'm so sorry. Yes. I hope I'm out of your mind. Yes. Thank you, Cathy. Thanks for the warm welcome. Welcome to the discussion on gaming, the new media for marketeers. My name is Jayesh Vellatal. I lead the India business for InMobil. I have had the opportunity and probably I've been associated with gaming since the days of Engage when I was with Nokia. Gaming has probably evolved quite a lot from that time and it's actually become much more exciting space right now. It certainly has moved in terms of the size because earlier it used to be a niche area, niche segment, but now it's gone across. You've seen the two reports from Mr. Menon and Rajesh and the kind of audience that we have is huge. So I won't take much time. Let's just go into this panel discussion. We have a wonderful set of panelists out here who have great experience across the board on gaming in multiple formats. And let me welcome the panelists. Ritu is the head of marketing. She's the director for marketing for Dell Technologies and with Vell Alienware and Spiron Brands which are custom designed for serious gamers. I'm sure she has a lot to add to this particular discussion. Would you leave it to Ritu to actually briefly talk about what she does? Hey, Jayesh. Hi. Am I horrible? Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Okay, wonderful. So great to be here. Like I said, very, very much looking forward to this interesting discussion today. Gaming is a very important part of our overall portfolio for PC notebook portfolio, not just across the world, but for India as well. And with Alienware and G-Series is a kind of segment that we'll go after. So looking forward to the discussion today. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Ritu. We also have Mr. Nilesh Kohil, Chief Business Officer of Malkal Sokrati for more than two decades of experience in analytics, digital and mobile. What would you, Nilesh, for sharing some of your or some some assignments about your work? Hey guys, thanks for having me. I hope you can hear me. Yes. I am part of Malkal Sokrati, which is a team of all 1000 customer experience specialists. And I lead a team of about 500 experts in digital transformation and customer activation, predominantly working in India market, right? And we had a chance to contribute to a number of unicorns and growth-minded companies in India. And I had a good fortune to work with a few of the gaming players as well, like Sokro and Bazi and Games24 and so on. So it'll be an exciting and interesting learning for me and others, I guess. Wonderful to have you on the panel. Nilesh. So I think we have another interesting panelist from the world of gaming, Reshmi Ranjan Mishra, who heads Nazara's free-to-play gaming division. Reshmi, you might want to add a few words on what you exactly do. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me here. Thanks, guys. So myself, Reshmi Ranjan Mishra, I lead the free-to-play business division of Nazara Games. And it's been a long time we have been in the gaming space, trying a lot of things, doing a lot of exciting stuff that I will definitely share with the guys, my insights, my thoughts on the system. Well, I personally have been heading the business, revenue for Nazara Games. So it's been a very exciting journey for me where we have been evangelizing, evangelizing. They took the day-in, day-out for how brands and agencies can deliver this gaming as a space and help helping them, achieving their marketing goal. Great, Reshmi. Thanks for being here. Adding a whole marketing muscle to this panel is Mr. Vinit Sharma, VP Marketing and new business developer in South Asia for AV and Bev. Vinit, love to hear from you more about your work. Thank you. Thanks for having me here, Reshmi. And my name is Vinit and I lead marketing and new business development for AV and Bev here in India. Gaming for us is a relatively new space, but we have taken some interesting steps with our brand and some of the campaigns that we have done have had gaming at the heart of it. And we have learned a lot and the results have been very, very impressive, if I may say. And today I'm very excited to share some of those experiences with each one of you and learn as well because there's a lot of things that each one of you are doing and there's something that we can be inspired as well here in AV and Bev. Great, Vinit. Thanks for being here. And last but not least, we have Ashwin Patnaban from Groupon. He has the mandate from Groupon to investing in Groupon, creating with media, data, tech and other products to enhance the value for their clients. Welcome, Ashwin. Welcome to the panel. Thanks, Jayesh. I'm actually quite excited because as we speak, we at Groupon are incubating eSports business and it's on the back of a very successful sports consulting business, which actually works across multiple clients. But eSports is clearly an area that we're seeing our clients being very interested to know more about and to see how they can actually engage with this community as well as brands which are involved in this space. So for us, an important, I would say an inflection point because we're seeing consumers flocking in big way and which means brands are clearly interested. So a lot of questions for us to ask and answer right now. Great, Ashwin. Thanks for being here once again. So welcome all. It's great to be part of this wonderful panel. And we have already said the context. We have had two reports coming out, one from Mr. Menon and from Rajesh. And it's quite enlightening to see the kind of changes that have happened in the last few years and especially during the pandemic. We have seen some great changes in terms of the adoption of gaming within India as well as globally. People talking about the kind of adoption in terms of the number of people who have started gaming on mobile gaming, the kind of percentage of women involved in gaming, so on and so forth. Interesting statistics and look forward to this discussion. So to start off with, I'll put this question across to everybody. We'll pass on the question. The first thing that I just would like to understand when you think of gaming or think of mobile gaming, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Can I start with maybe Arithu, what do you want to talk about? What's your take on that? Specifically, when you say mobile gaming, I think what comes to my mind is scale. Very clearly scale. I think that's been a good big enabler particularly and we've seen that in the report that was being shared in the previous session that a lot of scale happened particularly in the pandemic because a lot of people were actually looking for online entertainment and those options were there and I think mobile enabled and allowed that to happen. So definitely scale. Otherwise, when it comes to gaming, I think of plenty of opportunities and I think of engagement. Thanks, Arithu. Let's just move on to Ashwin. Maybe you can share some insights on what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of gaming? Actually, lesser insight, more than experience, I would say, Ash. Because for me being also one of those casual gamers, adding up the numbers that Arithu spoke about, for me, those reward ads that come atop of my mind because they allow me to play more. They allow me to go and do more things in the game. But that's also a sign of the fact that engagement levels are very high and from a branding perspective, surely this is something which as marketers, we're all very interested to know how to leverage better. Thanks. Nilesh, would you want to share your thoughts? Yeah, I think my sentiments are similar to what Rithu mentioned. It's some massive business opportunity here, especially as we work on the other side of the table, enabling advertisers to take on to this. I believe it's something that is relatively untapped. Personally, like Ashwin said, I have been also an avid game player and fondly remember those stimulating experiences, especially in my younger age. I think the video games have come a long way. Don't say that you're not playing any games now. I do, but much less than I used to. It's like the second half of the humanity comes on board in the internet. I think more and more social media, the videos and the gaming are taking the center stage of the new kind of phenomena of entertainment and I think gaming is a much bigger role to play as it evolves. Great. Thanks, Nilesh. Moving on, let's hear from Reshmi, since he's coming from the world of gaming. What's the first thing that comes to your mind? So Jayesh, I have been hearing to an extreme panelist earlier. I was listening to sessions from Sai, Rajesh, Girish and all that. So I have been hearing and listening to them and we all know that what kind of scale, gender, female, male kind of participation, engagement is happening in gaming ecosystem that we all are hearing for quite some time now. But to my mind, I will say two things. So far as the gaming comes to my mind, that is high on entertainment, that is high on engagement. These are the two factors I would emphasize upon. And the third interesting thing, Jayesh, I would like to highlight here. So I was hearing to one of my friend's kid, 10 years old boy, he was telling me, I was surprised to hear. So he has started thinking how gaming can be a carrier option for them. So when I asked them what do you want to become, he told me, uncle, I want to become a gamer. So that's a very surprising and I got surprised to hear that. So I can say that's a carrier option for millenials. So that's a very interesting thing that's happening. Absolutely, Reshmi. I have one 14-year-old at my home who also seems to be taking up a carrier option. At least I'm trying to see what can happen out of it. So I think, Vinit, we are left to hear from you in terms of what is the first thing that comes to your mind when we begin gaming. Yeah, some interesting perspectives already coming in the groups, Jayesh. But for me, I think gaming, two things come up. One is new ways to reach customers. And brands today are using gaming as a very, very active marketing tool. I think it's coming up very, very sharp. And they are just going beyond the simple ad placements to create actually their own games to build out of engagement. And obviously the time on gaming has increased. And brands who are actually following where the consumers are going will actually spend a lot of time and energy in thinking, what do we do in gaming and how do we become a part of the experience? That was first and the second one is a huge economy of gaming industry. Today, I think it's valued around 150 billion plus industry. But I look at from a brand side, and then the cost of playing a video game is no longer actually limited to just purchase of a base game. There's so many revenue driving mechanisms and that's where our brands come into play. I'm very, very inspired by what Louis Vuitton actually did with the League of Legends where they're actually creating collections in real life, as well as online skins. So it's a good example for brands to follow. And obviously, there are a lot of brands who are already in the brand market. So yeah, two things. One is new ways to reach customers, as well as the same time, a huge amount of the growing economy and the growing industry gaming is becoming in times to come. Great. Thanks, Vinit. In fact, that was leading on to my next question, which you have partially answered, which is basically, as a brand advertiser marketeer, what's your perception of gaming and what is your perception of gaming as a medium is something which I wanted to ask. You have already come up with some of the answers. Let's also hear from Ritu because she also comes from the background. How does she look at it as a brand marketeer advertiser? How do you look at gaming as an advertising medium? Absolutely, Jayesh. So I think, like I said, for us, gaming is the right context, is the right platform, is the right environment to reach out to the audience that one wants to engage with. If I look at a scenario which was probably pre-COVID and sometime back when the perception about gaming was that it's a very niche kind of an audience that you're reaching out to only a hardcore gamer or maybe a certain profile of people that you're reaching out to. And once that's the only kind of, if you had that as part of your TG audience to find, then you would use gaming as a platform for you to engage. But that mechanics has changed completely as we've seen that even in the report because the demographics has widened significantly. It's no longer a young man's space, you know, a niche urban young man's space. There are no limitations in terms of demographics, it's white, it's white based. There are no limitations in terms of gender, in terms of age. So with the kind of games that are mobile, particularly mobile gaming, which are now getting introduced, it suddenly the audience profile has opened up to you. And if as a brand we are wanting to reach out to that set of audience, which is anybody's audience for that matter, if you're reaching out to that set of audience, then that's a good opportunity to do that from an engagement standpoint. And also, you know, very honestly from our perspective, it's also about engaging with them and giving them the right platform and giving them the right experience and the right nudge, because eventually they may want to upgrade from a, you know, from a, from a five inch screen to a 15 inch screen, you know, from a mobile to a PC, because as they go evolve in their entire gaming journey, they may want to get into more, you know, a different kind of a gaming experience altogether. So from a, you know, from a brand perspective, yes, there are lots of opportunities available. And we have done that ourselves, both globally across, across the world as well as in India, some good partnerships that we've had. I think what's important is if it's done in the right manner, yes, you know, as we said, there are, you know, display ads which are possible. And that's one very obvious platform that exists. But what is, what is amazing now is that the possibilities in terms of what all you can do as part of that gaming, you know, in space, whether it's as part of content, whether you build it in as part of your whole space, whether it's part of the franchise that is spoke of, how can you as a brand engage, you know, kind of get yourself into that space and engage in a very relevant manner in our contextual sense, that is what drives the quality of engagement that you want to drive with that audience. So I think that's, that's something which is available and, and it's an opportunity which is being tapped, but I'm sure there's a lot more that is left to be tapped. Great. Thanks, Ritu, that, that, that, okay, what I hear is two things. One is, catch them small, make them big. That's one. And the second one is the kind of engagement that you can bring in through gaming, being part of the content or being more immersive in the content and being part of the gameplay. That's something which you're talking about. That's great. So from the same perspective, audience, and in terms of the kind of width of, you know, reach that you're able to get, I would like to hear from Nilesh, you could talk about what, how do you perceive gaming as an advertising medium, because you would have worked across brands, you would have had the experience of using that particular medium. I would like to hear from you. It would be great for the audience to hear from you. What is that perspective as a medium? Absolutely. So I think from a, like reaching out to new audience, like Ritu mentioned, and Vinit mentioned, right, I think that that's the primary mechanism that brands have been using. The Googles and the Facebooks of the world remain the primary kind of a medium otherwise, right, in the marketing budget. So the brand who wants to scale very, very fast, right, the gaming and the programmatic way through which to reach out to these users is the primary mechanism for incremental audience and the kind of augmenting the cost of acquisition for that incremental audience. I would say the gaming is another interesting element which is like rewarded ads, right, which creates highly positive brand association as well. So while it has other normal ones like banner and video and so on, but I think the rewarded ads is predominantly used by kind of performance oriented marketers. And another area that we have been kind of doing innovative work is on our dynamic ads. So making sure that each of the ads are dynamic and playable in nature as much as possible to ensure that advertisement outcomes are achieved. All right. So what I am hearing from you is gamification of ads on one side which creates more engagement. Second one is rewarded ads because their completion rates and engagement is also higher. Thanks Nilesh, that's great. The next question I would specifically want to be addressed by Reshmi because he comes from that world and he would have a lot of insights considering he actually heads that part. Reshmi, the question is beyond normal regular advertising which is your normal banners and rewarded videos, what are the different things that you can do as an advertiser or what can advertisers do apart from this regular things to get more traction or what are the opportunities for advertisers on gaming beyond regular ads? Could you throw some light for the entire group as well as the audience? Am I audible? Yes, so sorry, I was on mute. Okay. So absolutely, guys. So this question, I mean, asked every meeting that we attend or every pitch we make to brand or agency that what else you can do in gaming for us beyond just video, display, etc, etc. So the question is always that how we can create, bring on that immersive stimulus experience to the consumers through your gaming platform. So that is the basic question that every day we have to answer and we have to justify that how gaming can add value over and above just reach, scale or the ROI kind of or the visibility kind of scenario. So I'll be happy to share a lot of things that we've seen in the market, a lot of guestries, a lot of campaigns have seen the market, be it the recent Red Bull campaign which is done on the biggest cricket franchise WCC, the campaign where a lot of lakhs of users, lakhs of participants, they participated in the qualifier round, the second, the final round, the final round. And this has been watched live stream on different 20 YouTube channels and being watched by 10 million fans, they're getting huge reward money at the end of the day in the finale. And in the game itself, you have a lot of scopes, a lot of touch points where you seamlessly integrate the brand, creatively integrate the brand and you host content in their name, you change, you customize the game mechanics, game control in the name of the brand, you place the brand, I mean, inside the game more creative manner, more without hampering the, you can see the user experience and you do a visibility, engagement and activity. And finally, you deliver the viability from the brand and the gratification gratify the users to build kind of, you know, top of the mind, engagement, interaction among the target audience. So the ultimately what I'm trying to say is that the brand has a very clear objective, they want to reach out to the maximum of their TZ through gaming vehicle. So that the agenda is very clear, the target is very clear. And two, three more campaigns, examples I'll be happy to share, like the campaign of Detol we have seen, where in the game, Chotabhim game targeted to kids and their family, where in the game, you highlight the message, you deliver the message that, hey, did you wash your hands, sanitize your hand before you eat something? So that is something, that kind of engagement interaction you create inside the game, where you deliver the message, you educate the target audience that, hey, have you used the product, the product before you do something. So that's the point I'm trying to make is that beyond the scale delivering video or display inventory at scale, or you deliver programmatic inventories by to deliver campaigns programmatically, you have a lot of other things that which can impact a brand in which can help the brands to grow and create a visibility amongst their audience. There are a lot of examples we all have seen, we've seen that Mountain Dew, Dew Arena campaign, which has been a successful franchise for last, so a swing can add to that. So a lot of we've seen the participation, the visibility last few years has been going on that that franchise has been going on successfully. So the point I'm trying to bring on to this table is that brand can't should not look gaming as just a simple logo integration or a video integration, devoted video or whatever it may be, but on the top of that, they can create a lot of interaction, they can create engagement, and they can deliver the message in a most creative and best possible manner through gaming. Interesting, interesting. Reshmi, thanks for those insights. I think what you are referring to is the fact that there is a lot of digital touch points that are happening now, which is a meeting point between the virtual and the real world. If I were to take the example of the recent, what happened with the Marshmallow concert, which happened within the game of Fortnite. So such events, such digital campfires, create a lot of traction and create a lot of engagement. Those are things which brands can leverage apart from just normal advertising. I would like to hear about that because I think you do a lot of work around eSports. I'm referring to Ashwin, you do a lot of work around eSports. And I would like to hear your thoughts Ashwin on those kind of specific events that can happen in game and can be a touch point between virtual and the real worlds. What do you have to say about that? Absolutely. I think there are multiple spaces around which a brand can get associated. And one of those spaces is the social space within a game. So if you take the Fortnite example, Fortnite created this social space where your author could actually participate in this concert. In fact, I remember you spoke about the Marshmallow concert. But I think in April 20, they did a Travis Scott concert inside the game. And that had about 27 million people watching the concert. And they had close to 83 million streams that the concert was watched by. So they've done multiple events like that. In fact, the movie Tenet, Christopher Nolan's Tenet, the premiere of the trailer actually happened inside Fortnite. And in fact, Christopher Nolan has announced that he's going to release a movie inside Fortnite. So clearly people are figuring out ways in which the audiences that are in the social space of a game, how can we leverage them? How can we create content which engages with them? And how can we create events which engage with them? And those are actually extremely exciting opportunities beyond what we've seen as obviously advertising. These are engagement opportunities. These are huge brand building opportunities and does require a significant amount of programming. But I guess the sheer scale and branding that is feasible and possible, it's actually mouthwatering. Great, great. I completely agree with you. And that's an area which India probably has a lot to do and we can as there is that opportunity to be grabbed. There is a lot of opportunity there. My next question, I'll probably direct it to Ritu and Vinit because they come from the brand marketing background. Since both of you would have had a lot of experience in leveraging gaming advertising or at least you have been thinking about it somewhere or the other. Where your objectives, if you have tried it out, what were your objectives and what are the kind of demand, sorry, what are the kind of impact that you have experienced using this particular medium? Maybe Vinit, would you want to start off with what your experience has been? Have you been using it more content or it has been inventory bias? How have you been looking at gaming inventory? Yeah, no, absolutely. We have actually branched out from just ad basements, so not just only media buys. In fact, we're looking at much more curated experiences for our audience, something that the earlier panelist Rashmi actually was talking about it as well. In fact, during New Year's time, we launched a game under our flagship brand advisor called Conker 2020 that offered individuals an opportunity to kickstart 2021 for the new note. This was a completely native route. We created a game from scratch in partnerships with underdogs Gaming Studio, Aqua Dominantrix, Animal, some of the agencies that we work to create this game. This was a very friendly refresh on how collectively all of us overcame a lot of challenges in the year of 2020. The game was divided across a lot of levels, people challenging each other. We engaged a lot of gaming enthusiasts via contests, revolts, and merchandise on our social media platforms. Not only that, we partnered with a lot of renowned gaming influencers, communities on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube as well to do that. The results were pretty amazing in a very short time. A lot of fans, not only from a media impressions perspective, but we got a lot of user-generated content coming out of the whole thing. People were actually making videos and telling can you beat me on this code? Can you beat me on that score? It was very, very good, and people were actually advocating on their social media platforms, telling us that, hey, I've got this code, can you beat this? We were giving pretty good rewards to a lot of these people. This actually from a brand side, after doing this, we became the most talked-about brand in our category in December. We got around 1.5 lakh people playing out this game in a span of 7 to 10 days. We delivered around 100 million impressions. Not only that, we actually were trending on Twitter for top five, for some hours as well. So we really leveraged this because in-game advertising and in ad placements, we do, but not at a big scale. As I said earlier as well, we're trying to understand this world of gaming, but whatever we believe, I think our brands need to not just be a logo up there, they need to play a much better role in the narrative of the games. That was the intent. We wanted to engage with our guys, engage with our audience, who are a fanatic fan base of playing games, and the results are speaking. It was a very, very positive start and I'm pretty sure a lot of our campaigns, a lot of our brands will now catch up to this matter of gaming in particular. Great Vinay, that's a great story and I'm sure that something which should get more audience so that more people try out these things. Ritu, maybe you also have some experience with that where you have specifically had some objective and probably met two games. Absolutely, Jay. So to answer your question, what's the kind, how have you been using it? So I would say it's been a combination. So you experimented with both regular display ads as well as trying to do something which is more immersive, which is more engaging. And that I think is the beauty because the platform allows you to do that. If you're able to place yourself in a relevant and an in intrusive manner, which is very integrated to the way the game is being played and I'm going to pick up one example that we ran through. So given the category that we deal with, and it's a high price category, particularly when you talk about gaming PCs. And there is innovation and technology that goes behind these products. And obviously the objective as a brand marketer in that space is to highlight those aspects or those features of innovation that a gamer would be able to appreciate in a manner because the whole objective is like I said to help them upgrade from a five inch screen to a 15 inch screen. So G-Series actually has our inspiration range of gaming products. G-Series something has a game shift key. What that does is at whenever it's required at the touch of a key, it allows you to boost your processor power for you to get that advantage that you need at that particular point of time. And we had this thing going with game loft where what we did is game loft again has a nitro booster where the car can get that added speed. When you need it at a particular point of time, it has the advantage of that speed that the car can get. So it was a very beautiful interplay that came in together and we identified those moments and opportunities within those various layers and stages of the game where these two things could go hand in hand. So it could be at the start of the game and the race is just about beginning. Or it was also a point of time when they had access to more game money or game tokens because it was at the end of it all about gamification and we know that gamers really don't mind those interventions because it gives them the opportunity. And I think somebody said that they like the part that it gives them either the free plays or it gives them the gaming money or the points they're in. So it kind of is linked back to it. So we identified those layers within the game to see how and relevant places where it could go because that's where it's a very seamless integration that was possible. And I would say this entire thing really paid off very well for us because the kind of engagement rate that we saw in that as part of that particular integration was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And I think as a marketer, I would want to be very conscious of the way that we are doing these things because it should not be something which is just there for eyeballs. Nothing wrong with that strategy for us depending upon what your brand's objective is. But for us it was not just about eyeballs, but it was actually about bringing alive an innovative concept and an innovation feature, which in this case was the game shift key and how that very beautifully tied back to a particular concept of the game itself. So that's one of the ways that we have done this. The other thing that I would say is we've actually taken gaming a little differently. And as Rashmi spoke about a 10-year-old talking about saying, I want to be a gamer and you spoke about your son, I have a six-year-old nephew. He wants to build games. He plays games, but he wants to build games. So we have this, and we know that with the youth in this country that there is this desire to kind of go and do that. We have this program. It's an online and offline kind of a social engagement program called the Futurist. And we know that gaming as an industry has a lot of pull that people have. At the same time, there's a fair amount of enigma that exists around it because the most obvious choice, of course, is I want to go and be a gamer, a professional gamer. All right, that's fine. What after that? And what are the other opportunities that exist in this industry surrounding that in that entire ecosystem? So we actually have, we've been partnering with Ankit Panth, who's a professional eSports player there. So we've partnered with him and we've had these mentorship sessions and programs with for the youth, particularly talking to them and about all the opportunities that exist in the gaming ecosystem for them to grow and develop as a profession. If that is really what their passion is right now and they would want to convert that to their profession later on, what are the other avenues that exist beyond just being a professional gamer? What are the other? It could be a shoutcaster, you could be a game developer, you could be anything. So there's this whole experience that was kind of like a program that was run for them. So the idea is to tell you that these are these two very different opportunities that the industry offers from a gaming perspective, depending upon what your brand's objective is. I think the opportunity is, like I said, it's opportunities. It's there for us to leave agency. Absolutely. Thanks, Ritu. That's quite insightful, especially the part where you are trying to do something which is more relevant for the community as well, from a development perspective. Moving on. So let me just take this. We have a positive of time here, so I need to be a little quick with some of the other questions that I have, which I want to put across to the panelists. The next thing which I wanted to talk about was or wanted to understand the views of people. Sorry. I think that was cross talk. So essentially, one of the key things in advertising is obviously audience, getting the right audience, getting the right kind of segments that you want to target your advertising too. And gaming as such as a medium also provides the opportunity, probably rightfully so because of the kind of game, the kind of games, the genre of games all matter and also talk about the kind of people who are playing it. Essentially, how do we, how have we been able to utilize that segment? How have we been able to take audiences into it? This question I would like to pose it to Nilesh because you might have cut across multiple segments and categories when you have panned out some of your campaigns. How do you take that? How do you look at the different segments and audiences? So I think being a performance marketer, our experience is complementing what I think Ritu and Vinit and Ashwin say. It's more closing and making that final purchase from the awareness that is built through the type of advertisement or engagement through ads that were done earlier through those innovative mediums. Now here, I think there are, like we discussed, I mean money follows the eyeballs and gaming is in a way perfect combination of right audience at the right time and now we need to hit with the, in a way, right messaging and a communication and ad format. Like I earlier mentioned, I think the ad format, especially the rewarded videos and dynamic ads are the crucial ones that I think we have experimented with and now we have a zero static ad policy. So that's how we are going about conveying to the audience. Now on the audience side, especially for food tech, for example, Swiggy or for entertainment like boot and gaming companies like Basi, the gaming targeting and closing like installs and engagement, the purchases and so on have worked phenomenally well. So for example, Swiggy, I think we have seen almost a third incremental audience with about a fifth better cost, right? Basi, we saw like three x jumps in the customer engagement and the CDR. So the gaming inventory is something that now forms about two-fifth of our programmatic buys that's so practical. So that's a very, very big as an evolved marketeers that we represent. It's an important one. And we have Denso marketing cloud that is built to form a layer on top of this audience to get better insights and then be able to do better targeting as obviously we do a multi-touch point marketing for our advertisers. I think that makes a lot of sense when you're telling me that you have the audience layer on top of it. And it's quite insightful when you're saying that almost two-fifth or almost close to about 20% of your entire 40% is on gaming. That's quite eye-opening actually. We have been all talking about the positives about gaming. I just wanted to understand from the panel, are there any concerns when you actually, as advertisers, can you tell me one or two concerns that come up in your mind with media? Maybe you can, Gilesh, you can talk. Maybe I'll go because this is really top of mind right now because a lot of the games obviously have content which could be by nature violent, could there could be blood, there could be gore, all of that. And in fact, a lot of the games, e-sport games, if I look at, for example, CS Go, these are all extremely aggressive games. And that's clearly a challenge for a lot of brands. Do I want to be seen in an environment like that? Do I want to be seen suspect from a brand perspective? The second is obviously what's the messaging that I as a brand responsible brand and what's the message I'm giving to the society? I think that's the second question that comes in the mind of the brands. Do I want young, impressionable kids or even adults like us to in a way be addicted to some of these things? These are questions that are coming. So how do you leverage the audiences that are coming with the whole gaming experience? And at the same time, how do you stay away from content which could be not the right kind of content to associate with? I think that's going to be a challenge because unfortunately, a lot of the content which does get the eyeballs may not be typically brand safe. Got it. So brand safety is one of the concerns. Maybe Vinit could share something because you have two sides to look at it. One is from a brand regulatory perspective and also you can share. One in fact, something we faced as well, considering we launched, as I said earlier, it launched our own game as well. I think one of the thing is gaming piracy in particular. And a lot of these channels used by the producers of the games for interacting with players in particular can be hacked as well. And a lot of third parties can do that hacking. So you need to be mindful of a lot of data leaks and privacy information of a lot of consumers. If not done rightly, can also have a lot of concerns. We also, as I said, faced something but obviously it was a very, very small part. But these are the concerns, one of the big concerns that you should be really, really careful about. And the second part is actually something that Ashwin also touched about that the gamers can be heterogeneous in terms of age brackets, especially with regards to their age. Some can be quite young, some could be older as well. So addressing to a very specific audience is what you're looking at that sharp targeting could be one of the concerns as well that are you doing that spillage as well to some people who might not be, you know, you should not target your brands to a certain audience. But that also is another concern. So first of all, the game piracy in the hacking part. And secondly, you know, just a sharp targeting that marketers in particular on media managers look up to, whether that's happening or not. So that's the other one. Great. Thanks, sir. I think that makes sense, especially targeting piece really does become a challenge if you are cutting across multiple segments. And if you want sharp targeting, yes. Ritu, maybe you have some thoughts to add on this as well, some of the concerns that you might have come across. Jayesh, if I have to pick one, and based on what Ashwin and Vinit said, I will bring it back to brand safety, both in terms of the context in which the ad is appearing and your brand is appearing, and also the audience to which you're speaking. So yes, there is a targeting challenge, but I'm extending that targeting challenge also in the realm of brand safety because the right content to the right audience as a brand and in the right context is what you would ideally want. So all these three things have to fit together. So I would probably put brand safety as the biggest one. Great. Thanks. That's wonderful. Maybe, Nilesh, you have, this is a topic which I would like to hear from everybody on because there could be concerns which we have not addressed. Nilesh, is there something which you have come across apart from brand safety, targeting and probably the hacking piece? Yeah, there are a couple. So one is around the equation cost. Again, from a performance market here point of view, in a programmatic, from a bottom of the funnel, tend to be more expensive compared to the traditional mediums like Google and the Facebooks of the world. So in only way for advertisers for now, at least to justify this investment is to get an incremental growth and an incremental cost of equation lens. So that's number one. The number two is, I think there are certain platforms that specializes in gaming inventory purchases, has certain limitations on where you can land the kind of add clicks to. So for example, only PlayStores and therefore certain advertisers want slightly more exotic, for example, app download through an APK. Those kind of support isn't available at the moment. So those are slightly more nuanced, but gaming from a performance standpoint, still yet to realize its full potential from a host and as well as a certain platform limitation point of view. Great. Thanks, Nilesh. I think we have run out of time. This panel will have to end prematurely. So let me put it this way. Let me try to summarize the discussion. It's great to, once again, it was great to interact with all of you, some great insights which have come up. The good things about gaming that I've learned over here in this panel is basically the scale, the kind of engagement that can be done, the kind of differentiated thing that we can do on gaming as a platform. And the challenges obviously boils down to basically brand safety, albeit in multiple realms of content as well as context, and as well as the cost somewhere where what Nilesh was talking about. I think, thanks, everyone. That was a great, great discussion. And I, myself, am going back, Richard Mann, in terms of my understanding of gaming. Look forward to hearing. I would have taken some questions, but we have already overshot the time. So I leave it to, there are any questions maybe you can reach out specifically to the organizers and the questions can be directed. In the capacity of time, we won't be taking questions, but thank you, Jayesh, for sharing this really interesting conversation. And thank you to all our panelists for taking out the time and being here and sharing your insights here with us. Thank you so much once again. Thank you. Thank you, Jayesh. Thank you so much. Thank you. With that, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to dive straight into our next panel discussion, which is going to be chaired by Dr. Anirag Bhattra, Chairman, Editor-in-Chief, Exchange for Media Group. We also have illustrious panelists on this discussion. We have with us Roland Landers, President, All India Gaming Federation, Naman Javad, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Operations MPL, Ishan Arya, Co-Founder, the Esports Club, Philip Wong, Head of Marketing, Esports Players League, Dinesh Sharma, Business Head, Commercial PC and Smartphone System Business Group, ASUS India. They'll be talking about decoding the online gaming market in India. I'm sure you are going to be glued onto your screens. Let's welcome our panelists and moderator. A very warm welcome to all of you. Over to you, Dr. Bhattra. Good afternoon, Mr. Powerpack panel. Next time we shouldn't do a panel discussion. We should actually play games with the panelists. I think it is very boring to do a discussion. Roland, what kind of forum is this? We're talking about Esports and we are not playing a game, but there's always a next time today. We'll do a conversation about it, but maybe next time we'll actually be experiential about it and actually play games. I mean it when I say it. At the end of the real action is in gaming. Talking not necessarily doesn't produce more gamers or more revenues, but it is important to evangelize this growing domain. We have today panelists who represent this growing domain and they come from various stakeholder ecosystems. Let me bring in Roland Landers, who is the president at the All India Gaming Federation, Ishaan Arya, who is the co-founder and head of business. He founded a community of e-gamers. We have Dinesh Sharma, who represents a manufacturer and owner of hardware for the digital economy. We have Navan Jahawar, who is the vice president strategy at the MPL. I did a conversation with Sai two hours back and last but not the least, we have Philip Wong, who is again very active in the e-gaming space. Only problem here, we have no women. We should have also women in gaming. We should do a separate session on women in gaming. Let me start by asking Roland. Roland is a domain which is growing very fast. This one week has been very good for gaming as a business with the IP of Nazara. Clearly, if there is interest in its IP, it is because of the growing nature of the domain and the fact that we are still under-penetrated and hence for the next few years, we are only likely to grow. I would like you to start by making a few predictions about the future. Where is the gaming industry headed in India and what is the top two, three things that will happen to the gaming industry as we go forward? Hi Anurag, thank you for having me. I, Naman and my other families. Hi Roland. We have already in a good place over the last three, four years actually. The sector itself is not too old. It is only about 12 years old. I am talking about the online gaming industry. What we have seen over the last three, four years has been clearly a phenomenal growth, a really optimistic growth. And that is because of the digital infrastructure and fundamentals being in place. Obviously, we are looking at today, we have to mention some numbers that we have just shared with EY for the future. We are currently at about 320 plus million gamers in the country and this year, the turnover for the sector will be in the excess of a billion dollars. Clearly, absolutely bang on as far as the projections were concerned over the last three, four years. If I have to look into the near future, this is going to grow next month. Onward, there will be the IPL again, which we know is the reason for a huge uptake in the number of gamers and participants, especially in the fantasy gaming side format. So companies like MPL now look forward to a huge upside. As far as the business is concerned also, this is going to grow in accordance with the last three, four years. So they will be easily in the excess of 25, 30 percent growth for the overall skill gaming sector. Obviously, there are some challenges which I am sure you will bring up later, but we need definite support the way it is structured is a little that is unwanted as far as the country is concerned. But I am sure that with our interactions at the age of several stakeholders, we are hopeful that we need support. Okay, Roland, let me bring in Naman first, then bring in Dinesh, Shan and Philippe. Naman, as a leading player, give us what you see happening in the future. No, so I think industry is very, very well placed. You are seeing on both sides, whether it is developers or whether it is consumers or even from the investing community, you have already mentioned the likes of Nazara going IPO. So even the retail investors have shown a lot of confidence on the industry. So I think the critical success factors for scaling and growth is out there. And I would see a lot of developments which are going to happen on multiple fronts. One, of course, we would see a lot more Indian game developers kind of making it big to the overall global scenario. I think that's going to be definitely a mark shift change. That's on the first side. The second I would say is the scale of competitive tournaments is going to really, really go higher. We would see one of those years which will be an inflection point for online skill gaming, both on the casual side and also on the pro side as well. That's the second big, I would say, trend that we can expect. The third is of course, in terms of, from a brand perspective as well, this industry is going to create a lot more opportunity on the brand monetization side as well. And that's something which is already happening, whether it is live sports or even like the online gaming platforms, but that's only going to kind of scale up as well. So I would say I think these three really, really look poised to be in India. We do see, I've already mentioned about developers, but even the platform play, someone like MBL as well, and a few of the other platforms that have also come, would start to kind of have a much more global play as well. So that's again, I think, a fourth big trend that we can kind of see in the future. Thank you, Naman, for being specific. Ishan, again, something that started as a hobby, became into a full-time profession and a community that grew. Give us a sense of what is likely to happen in the near future. I think we're moving towards a place where esports competitive video games, they're not looked down upon. They become very much part and parcel of everyday entertainment. And that's something that has been really boosted throughout this pandemic with more and more people looking for alternate means of entertainment and engagement. This digital medium has really filled that void and thrive. And we've seen that with more and more people participating, more and more people watching events. We started off, we're just about 18 months in. At the beginning of the pandemic, we had about anywhere between 100 and 200,000 views a month across our esports campaigns. Fast forward to Feb 2021, we are crossing 1.52 million views every two and a half, three weeks across our campaigns. That's the kind of growth we've seen. That's the kind of interest being generated here. And now I think the main challenge is to find a way to create a sustainable platform that gives these players the reasons and incentives to keep coming back, therefore creating value for advertisers, sponsors, investors. Fantastic. And one of the things is now, I've heard all three of you and the two more panelists coming is that it is growing. There is legitimacy and clearly, these are early years. So these are the three things I'm hearing from all of you. And considering even fantasy gaming is becoming mainstream, it was looked upon as betting. Let me say it as it is. But it is getting some kind of acceptance, if I may use the word. And that is also spurring new users. And let me give you two data points. One from investment. The stock market had two crore retail investors a year back. The stock market has more than four crore retail investors. So what has happened in 20 years has happened in 12 months. If you look at the overseas US retail market, the detailing was almost 16% of the overall retail in the US, which is the most advanced e-commerce market. That became 27%. So 16% in 20 years and 11% in 12 months. So clearly, if these numbers are happening in retailing, they're happening in the stock market. The e-gaming domain cannot be far behind. So let me now bring Philippe and then bring in Dinesh. Philippe, you're opening comments because you look at India, but you look at markets beyond India. So you have a view which is both international and also understands what's happening in India and Asia aspects. Philippe. Thank you for the introduction, Dr. Anarok. And thank you all the panelists for having me. Philippe Wang from e-sports players, the ESPL, a bit of marketing here. Well, where actually a global e-sports tournament platform that provides across multiple regions. So yes, we have experience with multiple regions, but I think when it comes to the real money gaming fantasy gaming area, I think Roland would really be the expert on this area. But for ESPL in particular, we're focused on building that ecosystem. Ishan, he mentioned that as well. And through our platform, we actually provide that. So basically what we're aiming to do is build and focus on the grassroots e-sports settlements and build that kind of platform for players to aspire to reach that e-sports dream. So I think in that area, what we've seen, especially in a global sense, here in India, the community is certainly very competitive, very exciting. But in Southeast Asia, what we've seen, for example, in some of the regions that we're in, the communities are a lot more mature depending on the game title as well as the country as well. The competitive spirit here is strong, but I think it's good that there's talent development with certain organizations like we've seen T-Mahi and Global e-sports, nurture pro talent. But I think a bigger thing that is important is to have more tournaments and more competitions for teams. So I think we have seen how the play style and strategy of teams can skew to a specific direction. So we have observed that teams get used to competing against the same top teams again and again. So having regional and international tournaments helps expose teams to different competition. And we have seen things like that in Southeast Asia, where a lot of the tournaments are region-wide. So an example of that is the HyperX Elite Cup, which we hosted and organized in Southeast Asia. And that brought over more than 1,500 over teams. And we do this by expanding to more regions. And here in India, we're working with an amazing partner at the FGE, Sports and Paytm, First Games. And through that same vein of providing players with competition beyond their own borders, our initiatives like our ESBI Amateur Championship, this is our yearly global tournament focused on providing amateur teams with a platform to broaden their experience and expose their esports teams to international audiences. So I think in that sense, building a lot of the bridges and allowing an opportunity for a lot of the teams to also play internationally is an area that I see going forward for India as well. There's been great teams and talent there. But yeah, that's what I see for India in comparison to global areas. Fantastic Philippe Lau, let me bring in Dinesh. Dinesh, clearly India is growing at a pace that we hadn't imagined and we expected COVID to slow down our business and industries. But whether it comes to gaming, it's one of those sectors that has actually got accelerated. Give us a sense of what's happening in this sector through some data points and some trends that you have observed in your role. Sure Anurag, thanks a lot for this opportunity. Hi everyone and a big hi to all the co-panelists including Naishpiti Nishan again. So couple of key points Anurag, we are the largest gaming brand in the world when it comes to ROG which is a sub-brand within the ASUS portfolio which is called Republic of Gamers. So we are globally number one both on PC side as well as smartphone side when it comes to gamers. And in both PCs as well as smartphones we are seeing a phenomenal growth when it comes to gaming centric products. So when you actually look at products which are designed for gaming they are pretty much different from your standard designed products. We're clearly seeing a good growth out there. The factors which are driving the growth have been kind of highlighted by a couple of co-panelists already. One of the key trends that we are seeing is that when the pandemic occurred obviously you wanted to connect with each other culturally and gaming became a perfect platform to kind of get together and virtually play with each other. So in fact I would like to say that eSports is kind of trending in a manner that it will become as big as cricket at a point of time because when we were young we used to kind of go out and play cricket every day. What are the youth doing today? They are actually playing an eSports game while they are free, while they are traveling it's a great stress cluster. So as more and more AAA plus titles are also further coming to larger democratized product segments which are like let's say smartphones. Apart from having those AAA titles available on PC and consoles you are seeing a much faster penetration of multiplayer gaming and also one of the big changes which happened in the Indian market is the availability of 4G at very very economical prices once you came into the play and it kind of democratized high-speed data networks. It led to huge growth in gaming and one big friendship which is also further coming up is essentially 5G. So once 5G comes into the play and already the top-end gaming devices and flagships are obviously 5G enabled, you will have further capability to give even better immersive experience on smartphone gaming then what is available even now and therefore that will lead to further surge in gaming adoption, gaming consumption, the time that is being spent on gaming. In fact all these stats KPIs if you were to look at it from an industry perspective are actually on a very high double-digit growth phase as far as India is concerned. So therefore if you were to look at all the trends they are pointing in a direction which indicates that gaming is here to grow quite big when it comes to both smartphones as well as when it comes to PCs. Again with some data points on the smartphone side you know we operate let's say in the top end of the market where we are where our product sells at about 40k, 45k price points. Even at these price points by being in a gaming-centric product which is ROG4 we've been able to grow this year at a much bigger number as compared to last year and again this year we are planning to grow much better than even so let's say when I was comparing this year last year I'm talking about let's say the financial aid okay and then if you look at the next year next financial year let's say between April to March again we would again expect a very big growth rate out there as well. On the PCs front when it comes to gaming-centric PCs again on the ROG brand and the Tuft brand the two brands that we have we've actually been growing with very very high double digits and also we have seen the market expand at the segment of gaming PCs in India expanded at a very high double-digit growth rate. So both on the PC side as well as smartphone side we were seeing a phenomenally high growth despite the fact that there were some changes which happened recently in the past in the smartphone ecosystem with a major game title going offline but despite that the consumers just shifted and they adopted other available options and still the I can say the indulgence and you know the fact that they spend equal amount of time gaming that continues it's just that the game changes that's all. So that's what we observe from us. Thank you. Thank you Dinesh. Now let me start this time Revers. Let me start with Philippe. Philippe really you know when we look at the e-sports market we look at fantasy sports we look at real-money gaming you look at all these segments clearly international titles are very big the Indian game developer ecosystem is growing and with the interest in this sector with the money flowing in this most of modern people getting passionate you'll see more and more games coming out of India hopefully and dominating the market and the beauty about the games is that they you know they are not language specific you know they are international you know. So do you see Indian games I want to ask you this question because and I wanted do you see Indian games becoming mainstream when it comes to global success? I think it's certainly possible and the talent is there certainly for sure. So we've seen multiple games come out especially with the hype of e-sports I myself when I was very really young that was the number one thing that I just told my parents every day e-sports is going to be huge e-sports could be huge and now it is right we're looking at 500 million over audiences whether it's going to be just a casual game that's being developed in India or an e-sports game specifically. There is a market for it we've seen games for example in Indonesia where we've done tournaments for example a new title done by Indonesian developers called Lokapala for example and we've done a tournament for them before to kind of launch into that sector. So I think you know that is the opportunity there and well if developers want to try to hand that they got an e-sports title that they want to enter and try it out they can always speak to ESPL to have a look at that. That's very diplomatic on the Philippe clearly but let me start by asking Ishan this time Ishan how do we make sure that you talk about passion you talk about deceptibility you talk about mainstreaming how do you make sure that the Indian developer ecosystem produces titles that really go on to dominate in the world that's how we will become a leader both in terms of as a spot and both in terms of a business and really it will plow back into the ecosystem to grow the ecosystem what do you have to say to that? I think the most important thing here is to just note the distinction between the two types of games. Indian developers are very good at what they do there have been a lot of standout titles of late Raji to name one in particular that has been received extremely well overseas so there's definitely no shortage of talent and capabilities however taking that next step to producing a full service game that needs to have a longer lifespan that needs to have constant content updates that has that you know crazy online multiplayer component to it that requires a whole bunch of different skills and capabilities which not a lot of developers I would say have that much experience in and not to mention it requires much more investment you know to put up the servers and support for a game like that however you know in India being a country where you know the technology sector is growing at such a space we are one of the leading you know hubs where people look for developmental support I certainly see it as a possibility but it's not an easy roadmap to get there to compete with these polish titles yes yes you know you need you need a lot of polish you need a lot of features and you need a lot of constant support to really make it in that industry in field okay let me bring in Dinesh, Rowland and Nishan into the conversation again first you Rowland Rowland how do we become a global phenomena you know Indian titles have started to do well how do we become a global phenomena in the overall arena yeah I am not totally equipped to answer that but yeah I think my co-panelist Nishan and even Naman actually you know they've been a lot of MPL was started by you know game developers and they're doing so well so really the what I think at a very high level we all know that globally is that Indians are very good in technology and creativity so you know if you combine the two obviously I think it is quite possible to what I've heard you know at my role here is that a lot of game development is now happening in India it's not just outsourced but these are you know Indians working on globalized teams and they are big studios who set up shop here and I'm sure you know with that kind of experience of co-working together there will be you know products some of the panellists mentioned about you know certain e-sport formats that are doing well I know certain cricket games that are you know doing extremely well so I'm sure Naman you know will be better equipped to answer but that is my take Anurag on this particular question you know Naman why don't you answer this and then we'll bring in Dinesh to give his perspective right right no I think see let's let's look at it in terms of you know why we are now kind of you know well placed as well right I mean earlier the dominant models around monetization purely were you know kind of I think predominantly reliant on ad monetization or to certain extended app purchases right which then made sense for you know creating games you know largely that can that can kind of you know make the survival if I can call it for the for the developers right and that is that is now kind of changing right our panellists talked about e-sports you know there's of course like competitive gaming around a real money gaming skill based gaming as well right which has again come as a again a new monetization model right and that is definitely kind of enable developers to to think about scale I mean you have that kind of scale in terms of monetization you can you can think about you know that scale development as well right because the the talent is out there right you you have the right art you know talent you have the right game design talent you have the right product management talent to be out there right what was needed was the right impetus in terms of investment a right distribution model and also right monetization model right which with the coming up of platforms like MPL you know we've created that ecosystem that can enable these developers to think big and I think that's that's markedly you know one of the biggest change that the industry has seen what else would actually also enable this you know there's a lot of while we see a bunch of stakeholders giving it legitimacy I think there are there is also pockets of you know perception that is not really kind of working in the favor of the industry right which which again kind of impacts you know the developer itself at the end of the day right because they were talking about an industry that you know it has has clarity in terms of you know policy in terms of certain regulations then you're talking about job creation you're talking about you know Indian developers making a mark globally but that also is critical you know in the hope to make sure that you know the sunrise and the street does see scale not just in India but also global. Okay Dinesh your point of view on how to get India to dominate and have a large part and grow the C4 system in India even much more than what it has grown now. Sure see firstly you know like from if you look at the top at least on the smartphone side if you look at the top e-sport gaming titles in the world okay India is a prime market for them because in terms of installed base of customer whether you look at the monthly active numbers or let's say you're going to install base of customers from India on these games they are running in excess of 100 million consumers so let's say you know like as Roland we spoke about the fact that there are about 320 million gamers in India who are playing any kind of a game on a smartphone if you were to look at the big titles they had installed base of let's say upwards of 70-80 million for sure and you were to look at the top three titles and you were to look at the combined install base in India it would actually exceed 100 million and these these games I'm talking about the very immersive games which are apps for e-sports of course India Indians typically you know like prefer the first player shooter format and you've seen that format really exceedingly well when it comes to adoption of games so from an ecosystem perspective Indian developers are very close to the Indian consumers in terms of understanding their need and they have a very large domestic market readily available to them comprising of more than 100 million you know quite serious gamers and if you look at the monthly active base also of very serious gamers they would typically exceed a number of 35 to 40 million in India now this is a very healthy established ecosystem available for Indian game developers to capitalize upon because they can understand the need better being local and try and see how they can actually innovate and come up with a great phenomenal game which might appeal to this audience and the other good part is that if they are able to appeal to this audience there is a very large global audience which is local like you know in marketing terms if I were to call it and this lookalike audience would also you know like and adopt you know what these Indian gamers are adopting because Indian gamers are pretty much adopted international titles for reasons well covered by our other co-panelists before in terms of tech and investment that is required to create so for Indian developers this is a great opportunity that they can leverage the good part for them is that 4G is very well established out there 5G is coming up the device ecosystem you know which is required for supporting good quality of games is also accelerating in terms of penetration very very fast and they have a large base of you know high performance smartphones and PCs available to them to capitalize upon so there is a huge opportunity which Indian developers should make use of from our perspective also we had let's say for example partnership with Unity which is one of the gaming engines okay for our products to give additional capabilities on our products now when we were working with Unity India was also one of the key focus markets for us to do developer meets and we were doing that which means there's already a strong base of and focus by even giving engines for the Indian market so I think the Indian developers have a very good fertile home ground that they should capitalize upon and vehicles of this approach thank you now let me bring in Roland Roland one of the things is policy risk how do you bring policy consistency to this industry because the more policies consistency you bring in the more investments that will attract it will attract legitimate big players apart from entrepreneurial young player who really create this who have created this domain so how do you make sure you bring policy certainty in and what areas and the other question is about creating content in Indian languages which can bring in new set of users as you unlock the value of Indian language gaming content that possibly can bring in the next 100 million 200 million users on these two I would like your comments Roland yeah so we'll take the policy I think first obviously at the edge of we've been at it for the last five years and you know gaming is a state subject however the business is entirely digital and online and hence there are you know issues definitely all the stakeholders barring policy obviously and mind you the industry is self-regulated like we do at the edge here for the sector the thing is that despite that it has grown you know such a humongous level obviously it's a new sector it's a sunrise sector and that is why like you know OTT before us or even media entertainment before us television broadcasting have been self-regulated for the longest time but obviously you know we've been approached by a lot of central ministries we worked you know I'm sorry to manner with them and they are very eager to support the industry because you know it has demonstrated in the last few four years that here's a sector that can really you know add value in terms of you know drop creation in terms of the taxation to the extract and things of that now you know but the fact of the matter is it's a state subject and then you know different states interpret online still giving differently and that's where the issue is obviously as part of our mandate we work with several it's work in progress we continue to do that and you know most of the time it is a lack of understanding of the sector itself India is uniquely positioned in that way because you know in other countries they don't have this differentiation between games of scale and otherwise and that is why you know things are a little things get blurred and that's why as you began saying in the beginning that you know fantasy sports was equated with something but that's the reason why now I think you know from the other stakeholder communities like where big investors be it you know gamers who are adopting gaming practices all of that there's been absolutely no problem at all number of gamers growing year on year in the I'm you know recently we did a report with maple capital advisors and there's been in the excess of 400 million worth of you know MNA that has happened in the sector over the last three to four years so absolutely no problem you know confidence from the investor community it's just that you know definitely we need to look at some national you know policy and we are working in that direction which can mitigate this problem that comes from different interpretations from various things that I think is the answer to the first question the second one the second one obviously you began by saying you know gaming is agnostic language agnostic I believe that and hence yes that is true but that is more in terms of you know a certain kind of audience but beyond a certain kind of audience we need to bring a larger audience than possibly possibly so yeah so how it is that you know obviously when you're looking at you know content or you know content around gaming then obviously I think that you know when you get into the regional languages and there's a huge you know audience that can be brought into gaming definitely there can be but really you know where we you know focus our interest on are in the subscription led or transactional side of gaming and there I believe you know because it is not looking at you know advertising as a source of revenue and creating content around it I think this form of transactional gaming is really a language agnostic and you know it is shown demonstrated that year on year there's been a healthy double digit growth in you know in the number of gamer uptake fantastic now our conference is called game on keep the game on for the next two three years and take it the game to a next level I would want to get a closing comment from each one of you on what is that one thing you are doing in your area of influence in a in what you are doing to make sure that the gaming pie grows so let me start with Philippe first and go around the house Philippe thank you well for ESPL I think it's a matter of thinking global but going local um so what we do at the end of the day is we work with country partners we've got a franchise model with our platform that's easily um sent throughout our regions that we're in we're in latin america south asia southeast asia me now we're in um in scandinavia as well and I think what what we're doing at the moment is through our platform um connecting with multiple country partners who already have an existing community for example here in india we have ptm first games has amazing large community of gamers who are looking to play esports games in particular as well and engaging with them and connecting them with our lot of larger audience that we are present in in the multiple regions that we're in so what we're doing is connecting um players across the world throughout platform and giving them that zero a hero um journey through our platform hopefully thank you Philippe for making the game global and believing in the power of partnerships ishan what are you doing to be able to grow this sector not just your own sphere of influence but uh in some way contributing to the growth for the overall sector so I think the main objective here is to continue to provide opportunities right because if you look at sports uh there are leagues that run throughout the year there are different levels of competition that players can sort of work their way through as they grow older right you've got your school levels your local levels district state uh then your amateur leagues your semi pro leagues and then you know you get picked up by one of the lower divisions and then you make your way up uh the likes of the isl uh so that's what we want to try and create for esports by providing that platform by providing that opportunity at several tiers what this does is not only give them that recurring opportunity to own their skills and to improve but also to try and create a sustainable uh job out of it right somebody competing at an amateur or a semi pro tier they don't have to worry about competing with the best teams who are competing for a separate price pool altogether you look at most organizers most events it's just one jumble of teams it's a free for all the best funds uh and you know you can probably pick out the names from on just one hand who's going to walk away with 95 percent of the money right we are trying to change that entire approach change that ecosystem to ensure it every level of competition there is enough incentive for players so that once there are more players there is more interest there are more fans there are more viewers and that it's more value for your sponsors advertisers and investors and you know ishaan with the possibility i mean esports have already been included in ish in games there is a very very real chance very soon that they may be part of next year's Olympic games uh and if that happens then clearly the competitive there's nothing more enthralling and engaging and watching a competitive sport and gaming has is possibly made for a screen whether a television screen or a mobile screen on an ipad you know the format of the that of the game is such that it it attracts audiences it is accelerating to be part of it by watching it and commenting on it so clearly that acceleration may take it to the next level dinesh and naman your final comments yeah yeah sure thanks so first of all you know as a company we give the best and the most ultimate weapons to the games so whether it be your next smartphones or pc's we give you the most ultimate but apart from that when it comes to building up the esport community we are taking two major measures one you know we run this tournament called battle of gods which is you know for rog users and every weekend you know we have an esport tournament for rog4 users which they can participate in and we have a price pool of 50 000 rupees plus for them which they can win and we successfully conducted now already two weeks on idol of gods one and one of gods two on the rg4 plus you've got similar kind of tournaments on the pc side we've also started on the pc side and rog academy you know to train gamers you know who are really keen to become esport players on esports and make them capable to participate in the esport tournament given the clarity on pc already on pc rog academies started working with the teams that are being trained to become esport players and on the smartphone side we have you know the kind of waiting for to see you know like how the info system now moves forward on which you know let's say the game platform will become the mainstream esport game and then you go like to the ship as even for smartphones we are working on upstanding we're working on training of gamers we are working on giving them the best equipment in the country and the best support to kind of embrace high quality esports and have you know the best possible teams in the world and win global tournaments from India we also partner very closely with the big gamers in India and we take a lot of care and put in terms of what we should do in terms of further product development so you will see us working you see us actually working with the top gamers on the smartphone ecosystem as well as the pc ecosystem as well as a lot of tech gurus you know who kind of work on product use etc take their inputs to create the best gaming products even going forward so this is a nutshell about what we are doing great Naman your final comments so two customers for MPL I think a lot of focus is to kind of enable you know both of them to scale one of course is on the developer side so working a lot with a bunch of Indian studios an Indian developer ecosystem to kind of help them scale and scale at you know with the better and faster monetization right so that's one part of the focus area that MPL focuses on to really really develop the community the second on the user side I think what we've actively also taken is you know a fair bit of focus on responsible gaming we do understand the risks that are associated with the you know the industry and we want this to kind of you know grow and grow sustainably so I think that's again a big charter that MPL has taken and has a clear focus in the next two three years to promote responsible gaming and on the third side is ready to you know kind of break the myths right we just went live with one of our sort of sensitization campaign if I can call it with hand-to-face wherein he won one of the Olympic medals back in 96 and we have an Asian Games that is coming up in 22 and the idea there is that look I think the medals can be won in both fields whether it is live sports or you know sort of virtual sports and then this time yeah that's I mean it goes by the tagline called I don't know and that's the spirit that you want to kind of embrace and you know promote this industry thank you so much we are talking to the pioneers of the gaming industry catalysts who are making this sector vibrant and making it mainstream and making it exciting both for players for audiences for investors for marketers for all the stakeholders so let me congratulate them and say the game is truly on we're delighted that you could join the exchange for media gaming conference today and while we are doing this virtually hopefully next time around we'll do it in hybrid physical and online model hybrid is a word that gets used a lot I'm sure it'll get used in gaming too when it comes to large format game tournament and clearly the beauty about technology and digital is helps you to scale up without geographical restrictions and gaming has been a big beneficiary of co-ed because the digital acceleration has really helped people get on to gaming and pursue their passion of gaming and the extra time available to them for some of them it's gone into gaming so clearly the game is on congratulations Roland for doing the work you've done for this sector over the last four in five years and I'm sure the work you've done in the last few years will manifest itself in the coming year so I wish you luck and I look forward to next time playing a game on our show with you thank you so much God bless you and back to you Cathy thank you thank you thank you everyone thank you everyone thank you thank you so much Dr. Batra and thank you to all our panelists thank you for taking out the time and being present here today at the first ever e4m game on online gaming summit ladies and gentlemen we have another day filled with eminent speakers industry leaders who talk about more on to the gaming industry in India but before that we would like to thank all our speakers for the day our panelists illustrious speakers who came in and gave us a brief overview on the online gaming industry of India ladies and gentlemen before we close we would definitely like to thank once again our partners for the event as we all any event is not possible without the support of its partners so we'd like to thank our co-powered by partner in mobi driving real connections and a co-partner for the event india today thank you so much to both our partners we'd like to close this evening by showcasing their audio visuals thank you very much this is khyatika warrior who's signing off I will see you all tomorrow technology has always shaped how we communicate with one another the wheel the printing press the pony express the telegraph the telephone the computer and mobile devices technology changes yet one truth remains we want our communications and interactions to be meaningful and have relevance today however driving real connections are easier said than done but we help brands do that to drive real connections with our platform technology and exclusive mobile data in mobi helps you understand identify engage and acquire your customers in mobi driving real connections india is getting ready for its biggest e-sports championship india today gaming presents e-sports premier league 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