 And it is time for me to now move on and invite the game changers of the Indian gaming industry. We're looking and talking on the panel discussion on the decade of gaming and gaming investments while we're related to be joined by Abhishek Ishaad, the founding member, FEAI, we've got Rajan Navani, the founder and CEO of JetSynthesis. We've got Gagan Naran, founding member, FEAI and President Thaligu, Esports Association. We've got Vishal, a Gondal, the founder of Cookie and Encore Games. We've got Saloni Sehgal, who's a general partner of Lumikai Limited. We've got Ruhel Amin, senior editor, BW business world and exchange for media, executive editor, BW Clause, who's gonna be the session chair. While with this, Ruhel, the stage and stream is all yours to take it forth with your wonderful panel. And I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of great insights going forward, over to you. Thank you, Bhavna and what a great topic. We have a lot of greatness heard and the numbers it through. So we have around 45 minutes. So I want to start with my discussion. The topic is the decade of gaming and gaming investments. A lot has changed in the past 10 years. It's a huge window. We come to it when you try to understand what are the short shifts happening in the gaming industry. I want to start with Saloni and Donny Lady on the panel first with you. Give me what we saw in the humongous growth of gaming and then everything opened up. I just want to quickly get a view about the sustenance of that growth. Are we seeing the same kind of numbers right now as well? Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I think that's a great question. I've been tracking now the games markets both from a global perspective and from a domestic perspective for the last decade or so. And when Lumica launched back in 2020, we were the first, and we still are the first sector focused gaming fund in the country. And the reason why we launched was there were a couple of inflection points that we saw in the market. And those inflection points have since then panned out. When we were launching a fund, we heard things like India doesn't pay for games. India doesn't play games. India's a Dow farm. India will never be able to provide exits for gaming companies. India will never be able to justify a venture strategy for gaming. Gaming as an asset class doesn't exist in India. And these were all the narratives that we were hearing about the market when we launched. However, there was some very key inflection points that were occurring in the market that we saw very early on. Now, by in 2020, the biggest, I guess cocktail of successful attributes that make a gaming ecosystem started to come together. You had game usage, game adoption, game monetization and infrastructure all converge in a way that has never happened before. Now in 2020 and 2021, India has now been the world's largest and second largest markets for mobile game downloads. India constitutes 17% of the mobile gaming downloads. So there is ample demand. In terms of payment infrastructures now, digital transactions now account for nearly 40% of transaction volume. Now that's a far stark change from the mid-20s and the middling tens that we had a couple of years back. In terms of monetization, we were, Lumikai, we did a research report last year and we discovered that India's gaming market is $2.2 billion and we project that it's expected to grow by 30% over the next three years to $7 billion. With IAP, which is in app purchases, going to be growing at a gagger of 36%. Now all of these data points to the fact that India is a, as a gaming market, its time has come, right? We have seen game developers go from less than 25 to north of 850, who we've all spoken to within the span of last year. So a lot has changed in terms of game development and adoption. We're a market of 450 million gamers, 100 million battle royale players and 100 million paying users. These are stats of the gaming country. You have specific questions coming to those numbers. I wanna go to Abhishek. Abhishek, how do you sum up last two years in terms of the impact? Of course, we know issues, but where are we now? Are we seeing the same kind of impact on numbers? Thanks, Ray. Very good afternoon to everybody. It's great to be part of this panel. We see a baby of stars. I think Saruni's kind of summarized the market fairly well and covered a fair amount of trends with respect for what we can expect. But the last two years, more importantly, one is the business side of things, the other is the attributing policy support. And we see that in India is definitely undergoing a massive turn as far as the policy outlook is concerned. And we feel that this very stage that we find ourselves in is the beginning of a new chapter as far as India's gaming market is concerned because if you are able to attribute some of these trends backed by supportive policy outlook by the government of India, automatically we are looking at scaling up to potential that have been thought of and spoken of, but we feel that the actual growth story of this country is by far not really calculated or considered right now. In the previous session, Mr. Vevedangi highlighted a couple of aspects with respect to the eSports outlook as far as India is concerned. Our main endeavor has been to make sure that we can support the policy makers with respect to a policy framework. Even two years back, if we were to look at a simple aspect of what really constitutes the framework of gaming, there are multiple subsets within that, eSports forms a very independent space because of the others. Today, the government has taken a very concerted stand during the budget to constitute an ABGC task force. Clearly, G within that, which is gaming will play a pivotal role in formulating the scale of growth that India can potentially see in this space. So that's an introductory note if I would sort of like to pause that. Rajan, your quick thoughts? Yeah, I think around the last decade on gaming has definitely been a big one, especially if you were, what was it? Did you ask a specific question, Rohit? Okay, maybe as you were trying to connect, my question was 23 months, the huge growth, and now you're going to get back home. Do people still think- Sorry, I can't hear you. Okay. So, Rohail, I believe there's some audio disturbance which is coming. So maybe if you're connected with a headset or something, you could just try and sort it out. Am I still audible? Yeah, you are very much audible. Yeah, yeah. I think you can go ahead with this audio. Okay, all right, all right. So, Mr. Rajan, I'd quickly ask you, a lot of us have changed in the last two years. Where are we now in terms of numbers? Also, let me add another question to it. The regulatory framework, the government has also come in in a huge way. Your quick thoughts on these- Okay, so I think I was able to capture the essence of your question. But again, there was disturbance. But yes, I think in terms of the growth that the gaming sector has seen, especially in the last two years, has been significant as we've all discussed, whether it is driven just by engagement or the development of the esports kind of arena, which has also been discussed extensively and the entire interest from the world in India is just the expansive growth into the pandemic. Every month, we seem to be adding anywhere between five to 10 million new gamers and also deepening engagement with existing gamers. The types of games that people are playing have changed drastically. A lot more social, a lot more first friends I made on this game kind of conversations happening, women coming more into gaming. So there are a large number of friends that have accelerated gaming and I think we'll continue to do so, especially with 5G and many other new technological developments that are coming. So I think on that front, India has really well positioned to not only be able to benefit from this entire search in gaming, but play a key role in the global future of gaming as it tends to develop. On the regulatory question, I think given that we have the highest number of downloads and games, there's huge interest and still big gap in terms of where we are as an industry compared to the rest of the world. There was this effort to kind of define gaming in India because it's still very recent. And in that process, I think you've got many types of gaming activities that are beginning to take shape based on what the consumer in India is looking at as a definition of game. Of course, the goal of government is really one where I would see it play out in a manner that will be a little back and forth because there is no clarity on some of the areas and you see some state governments, especially when it comes to real money gaming and fantasy takes certain stance. But I think those are going to be an evolution of any industry that is nascent, but aspiring to probably be at a level which is significantly higher from where we are today, even in terms of what impact would have on the rest of the world. And I think in some of the esports, we're really looking at how we shape the future of that. So this is going to continue in some shape and form. I think on the esports front also, we just ran a real ticket tournament with FAAI recently, which actually followed the process of getting the states to find out the best players and then created a layered process of identifying national champions who then could really be people who could represent the country in a typical esports kind of a thing. So if we are looking at the movement of a casual gamer to a professional gamer as the funder through which we will see gaming accelerated and then the ability for us to paint those players into the larger global market as established ranking players, I think all of that is all right at the same time. There is a central role, there is a state role, there are multiple industries and I think that's what we have been able to identify in a new promotion on AVTC, bringing skills. So a lot of areas like government can come in and help strengthen this industry. It's already working properly, but it will evolve and strengthen at the individual gaming society, which I'm the president of, we see a lot more activity in policy making and discussion with government today than we've seen ever before. Right, great. Of course, I think what you mentioned and what the panelists before you said, of course, Vishal, how do you see what are your quick thoughts on this? Yeah, it's amazing to have this discussion. I remember we launched as India Games the first eSports tournament in India almost 20 years back. It was at that point called World Cyber Games. We had partnered with the South Korean organization and we had organized this in India and now almost 20 years later, we are talking about eSports. I think eSports is clearly at a very important juncture. It is the IPL movement of eSports today is what I believe. And the reason I'm calling it an IPL movement is because either it can become really big and takeoff and it can become a mass movement of youth or it could be completely embroiled in conflicts of interest of all these real money and all these other kind of gaming. So while I know Saloni talked about billions of dollars of revenue, the reality is none of the games are making those revenue. Bulk of that revenue is going to all these other kinds of games. And clearly government involvement while we welcome it but is government running BCCI or IPL or any of the sports association? No, I mean, this is run by professionals from these fields but I think what has happened is India is a very unique case where there is a huge conclusion on what is gambling and what is not which is causing the government intervention. So I'm actually a little concerned that while we all want eSports to grow and as an association, I think what the move is really good but I think we need to be very clear that this is an industry association of people from the industry and these are not going to be determined by conflicts of interest of different parties who want to run their agenda. So that is one very clear part. The second part is that gaming in India is growing but if you look at the App Store, the top 50 games hardly two, three or five games are in India or the top 50. This is not happening in any other industry. Look at the OTT content, look at Netflix, look at Amazon Prime, look at Hotstar. The number one content pieces are India, Indian created, Indian themed and while of course we all love to watch our orange shows but they are not the blockbuster shows but unfortunately that is not the case in gaming. People are still playing PUBG and Garina, Free Fire and Call of Duty and these are amazing games. I also play them but I think there needs to be a massive push on content creation and as we know that millions of dollars was invested by all the large studios in making content. So far millions of dollars have been spent either on TV advertising or customer acquisition given that most companies could not even advertise or put their games on Google Store. I think it's high time that money goes into game production and the players, players should be making money. Right now the scenario is that eSports players are just making random videos and they're getting paid by it and not by playing eSports. So there is a lot which can be done and I think this framework is great and I'm happy to see that the leaders are here. Rajan, I have great respect for and I think under the leadership of Rajan and Abhishek and the entire thing here, I think we have a good thing going which is why I have a good bicycle. Yes Vishal, absolutely. I think the focus has to be on the content creation as well as much as we are marketing and spending on advertising. That's what your point is. Gagan, do you agree with it? Is there an uneven focus on where the really? Well, absolutely. I think I couldn't agree more with what Rajan and Vishal pointed out. I think the idea here is to have a very inclusive approach where we have the industry's requirements safeguarded as well as the players and the right balance needs to be struck and what more importantly would be, the stakeholders in the industry needs to be taken care and everything needs to revolve around the athletes and create an environment which is very friendly for everyone to prosper. And I mean, the whole idea of gaming opens a lot of opportunities for people, especially someone, I mean, if you just think of it, someone's playing a game, running in the game who's probably a para-athlete can play something that you can, like for example, BGMI or Free Fire or whatever. So it opens a lot of opportunities that way from the perspective of the athlete and especially with the meta coming in and so many other content creators coming in these days. It's going overboard. And I think like Vishal mentioned, it's the IPL moment, I would call it the hockey stick curve where the curve just goes up. So exciting times ahead. Right, exciting times ahead. Rajan, Jet Synthesis has invested a lot in eSports ecosystem. So give me a sense of what is next? We talk about NFTs, VR, metaverse. What are you planning in that space? It's interesting, right? When we talk of metaverse now, I think gaming actually in a way represents that for many years, like what Vishal was saying, there had been so many of the aspects of the future of what we would talk of a massive digital world, which gaming has actually been at the forefront for. So in a way, it's a recognition of what the power of digital is going to be in the future. So in one way, it encompasses that. The second point to that, as you mentioned correctly, is that when we started looking at eSports, we were assuming investing around all of these plays. It was very clear that an individual is going to be spending a lot more time in the digital world than in the real world, right? And we've seen Gen Zs and the number of hours and the kind of engagement that is spent in the digital world. And for us, really, the entire space of gaming, entertainment is to be able to build a relationship with a digital consumer and then cater to larger parts of the digital world. And we have interest-based communities who also that do that, right? So for us, the greater the immersiveness in the digital life, the more we believe the opportunity for growth is available to us. The second big point is that, ultimately, this is all the metaverse is about creating an economy around virtual goods. For the first time, India has recognized digital virtual goods as a category of an asset class, et cetera. So if one were to really extend and extrapolate that further, more time, more of the people's lives will be spent in the digital world and an economy that is being generated around that. I think for Gen Z synthesis, we have just about 1% of our journey complete as of today because the window of opportunity that has thrown open is just so massive when one were to look at it in that context. And that's really how we have been playing out and we are taking a lot of steps to unlock that potential of that world as well. So Ruhil, I just want to add one thing on the metaverse because there is another very big opportunity from an India perspective, which is the whole concept of guilds and how eSports and play to earn is coming in. Recently, we have partnered with Animoka Brands, which is the global leader in the metaverse and the whole web-tree space. And one of the big pieces around eSports becoming a career is about the whole idea of guilds. And if you look at countries like Philippines and Indonesia, people are literally making income, earning multiple hundreds of dollars a month, a day actually, sorry, not a month, sitting at home playing these games professionally. And what is happening is in this new era of gaming, it is just like how I buy a car and then I have a racer who's racing the car, like in an F1 race and the driver and I split or have some kind of a fee. So literally people are buying virtual characters. So you could buy Axie infinity characters and then these professional athletes are called scholars. And by the way, we are now working with multiple scholars and then you lend your items to these scholars and they play the game and they win the game and you have a share with them on the winnings. So I think the metaverse is a very broad concept, but from an eSports perspective, I know Gagan was talking about how do athletes make money? Because ultimately we all know, if we want athletes to take this up, if you only fight and athletes are making money and 99% are not making any money, then nobody will do this. So I think there is a tremendous need to also accelerate the guilds and governance around the guilds itself, which I think is a very big opportunity from an Indian eSports perspective. Right, Saloni, I want to understand from you that since you're focused on for in game developers, what big disruption will attract the next USD 100 million in your view? Sorry, yeah. Very happy to answer that. But before that, I want to go back to a few data points that were raised and some stuff that I think Vishal said. I think it's important for us to now start looking at numbers and start looking at more data points, right? Actually, surprisingly now in India, when we talk about the game sizing market, a very healthy majority of that revenue is coming from in-app purchases and advertisements. It's actually no longer just purely RMG, which is driving the market. Further, when we look at projections, nearly 50% of IEPs are nearly 50% of India revenues are actually going to be generated from IEPs and that's user behavior. In fact, the average spending capacity for a gamer in India is now about $14 with mid-core players spending between $50 to $70 a month. So these trends are remarkably changing and changing very fast. And also to go back to the fact that currently there are no titles which are India focused or Indian in nature, and it's never been seen before, but that's not true. When you look at markets which go through inflection points, whether it's the China market or whether it's the Turkey market, and I used to track the China market for a very long period of time. In 2004, actually foreign games used to account for 80% of China's titles and 70% of domestic revenue. In fact, the legend of me, very much like PUBG from South Korea was the country's top revenue generator that year. And in 2007, literally three years later, domestic online games or digital games started accounting for nearly 70% of the China market, which at that point of time was one person. You're forgetting that the Chinese government effectively banned foreign publishers from publishing games. That they banned a long time ago. That they had banned a long time ago. I am so sorry. I would like a quick response from you, Saloni, before I go to Abhishek and Gargana and write it in one more question. Yeah, so I think what disrupts is going to be original content. We've already been betting on content plays. Nearly 50% of Rumika's portfolio is content plays, whether it's Indian companies building for India from the world or Indian companies building for India from India. I think that's a combination of both. We've got companies like Studio Sira, which are building strategy, CCG games, which are just fantastic, very high quality immersive experiences, which rival world-class games. We have a company called Bombay Play. And all of these companies are doing incredibly exciting stuff for the India market. And there's going to be much more news about these companies over the next quarter or so that's going to come out. But that momentum of backing Indian content is already underway. Right, Abhishek, I want to understand from you, how is India actualized as eSports potential if you look at the policy outlook? And how important is a stable policy approach to the entire, I mean, where are we to the entire ecosystem for them to expand and get the investments we are talking about? I think, Roy, we've made a bit of a head start. I think what Vishal, Rajan, Saloni, and Gagan, of course, are highlighting are all very pivotal aspects, right? We're all talking of four, five different, very critical aspects of the direction that we are on right now. But if you, let's be also fair and conscious to ourselves, Indian market is actually at a very young stage. There's a long way off before we can shape this out and contour it into having most of the games available on the app store, coming out of the Indian developers. Fortunately, we have in this very panel, two such very strong representative of the Indian gaming industry. And I think compliments to exchange for media for having to set this panel up because at one end, we need to empower multiple sorts of game developers and ideas to sort of come to the fore. And let's be conscious. Till about a year back, the government of India, incidentally, was still, if I were to, for lack of a better word, dominating over the idea of how to look at gaming. Today they've taken a very conscious stand. And if it comes from the honorable prime minister of the country where he's highlighting that we need to promote indigenous games, I think what Saloni is saying is that there's enough disruption taking place. We just need to have a considered outlook and continue to kind of support the ecosystem. We're a long way off before India actually becomes a very independent narrative as far as the eSports player ecosystem is concerned, right? Gagan mentioned that's the reason why we have some, a stalwart Indian Olympian like Gagan Arun Vedas is to be able to guide a federation of electronic sports associations in India to take the right sort of steps and measures from day one where the core focus is the athletes. What we've learned in a very short journey in the recent past is that the athlete based in this country is very minuscule. We need to expand ourselves. And one of the big impediments we felt was not the fact that, you know, there are no young emerging business ideas. They are multiple, right? And we have focused funds like Lumika and are looking at these aspects. And like Rajan, Vishal are also investors into this ecosystem. In fact, the matter is it needs a robust support system coming in from the policy makers which we see taking shape right now. You know, in the inaugural session, Mr. Bhairav Dange mentioned founding director of FEI. We've already curated a policy document which we intend to take to the government. In some parts it's been sort of presented already. What are the core submissions and recommendations there that, you know, we need to decentralize our outlook, empower the state governments, aim at creating multiple centers of excellence, not just towards just the shared idea of, you know, encouraging young minds to make games but also create ecosystem by view of eSports clinics, et cetera to have multiple access points to young kids, right? Because for any such organization to succeed, you eventually, you know, it will be at the behest of the young athletes. And if we are not able to get into their interests and make a competitive ecosystem, we're not going anywhere. One last point I'd like to highlight is India is a larger smartphone economy, right? We need to be conscious that that is the pivot that, you know, India will bring to the world of gaming and eSports per se. So currently the world is, you know, of course mobile phone plays a very important role but as far as India is concerned, we are looking at over the next sort of five odd years, a cager of 10.5% incremental growth, reaching a market size of 281 billion, right? Almost doubling from where we are today. Because we are conscious of it, we are able to see that, you know, there's a strong element of education coming into this. There's a strong element of currency that will come into this, right? There's a reason Vishal highlighted, right? That OTTs currently are featuring likes of Indian movies, et cetera, at a global level. Let's be fair, Bollywood has taken that journey. It's been a long time, right? And he was supported by the largest community within this country. That's the direction we all need to sort of cumulative. Absolutely. We'll certainly sit on and head to it. Absolutely. Final point, Gagan, closing remarks from you. So what would be the hot bets in terms of trends for 2022-23 for the gaming industry? Like I said, our focus, especially from the perspective of FAAI would be to have a robust and a friendly ecosystem, which takes care of the needs of the industry as well as the athletes. And I mean, we spoke about technology and I'm so happy that this is one of the most, I would say, intelligent conversations that we've had so far or rather I have had so far on gaming and with Vishal and Rajan and Salomi coming in. I think it adds a lot of value and perspective to this platform. And what better user technology I'm sitting here in the middle of the jungle. And still, I am not away from technology. I'm 40 feet up on a tower talking to all of you. And I mean, that's what is going to grow. And I think going forward with, especially with respect to FAAI, we would want to build a very India-centric narrative as well, because like most of you mentioned that we have a lot of foreign games coming into the picture. And if you hear about the AVGC comment that the Prime Minister has also made, he spoke about having the Indian narrative into it. So that would also be one of our key points going forward. Of course, having placing athletes first is very, very important. The mental well-being, their physical well-being is also important. And that is when the whole industry, of course, you will have to educate the parents as well because they are the ones who actually, gives the smartphone to a kid and say, okay, you can play now and so on and so forth. So once they start getting paid for it, like Vishal said, I think the whole ecosystem is going to go right up. And like I said, exciting times coming forward and good to catch up with all of you here. Thank you so much. Royal, one last point I'd like to conclude on just to kind of continue on this theme, right? We recently hosted a four-month long tournament on one of India's favorite games, which is cricket, right? Incidentally, it comes out of the jet synthesis manner. What we are saying is it was not just a way of FAAI putting out its intent in developing indigenous games. We had entries of over one lakh kids, 12,500 out of kids eventually participated, right? And it turned out to be a fascinating contest. Absolutely. So sorry to cut it here, but thank you so much everyone for joining us. I got a cue and the next speaker's lined up, but thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you, thank you everyone.