 Ladies and gentlemen, we are diving straight into our last panel discussion for the day, which will talk about the new world of esports. Charing the session is Prateek Gupta, co-founder of Foxy Moron and Zoo Media. And we have with us on our panel Anirudh Pandita, founder of Pocket Aces. Dr. Rishendra Sinha, CEO and founder of Global Esports. Vinit Sharma, category director of Mountain Dew PepsiCo. Amit Doshi, chief marketing officer in Lenovo. Ankit Panth, Red Bull Athlete and Siddharth K.D., chief executive officer, not been gaming. Thank you for your patience with us, gentlemen. A very warm welcome to all of you. And I'd like a moderate to take the session forward. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Can everyone hear me clearly? Yeah, good afternoon. Yeah, this is good. So, okay. So I know it must have been a long day for everybody, but I think we're going to have a little bit of fun while we chat about the future of esports. I think, for me, one of the things that really strikes out when we're talking about esports and gaming and the entire ecosystem is passion and passion points. I think passion has been something that has driven a large part of marketing and marketing communications. And passion is something that obviously drives this community at large. And I think with that, we have the entire ecosystem which is here with us today. I think my voice is echoing for you. Okay, I think it's better now. So anyway, so I was talking about passion and passion points and we've actually got the whole community inside of esports here with us today. We have an athlete who is representing the athlete side of the system. We have streaming platforms. We have an e-gaming company. We have the hardware side of things. And obviously, very importantly, we have the brand side, which is what everybody's looking at to get the money from to keep this community alive and kicking. So I think from that point of view, we have a very well-rounded panel of experts. I'd like to start the session by basically understanding the ecosystem of esports, where it is currently sitting. What it was about five years ago, and I read a very fun factoid which said the term esports was put into the Oxford dictionary only as late as 2015. So it's been six years. But the fact that we're all sitting here with immense numbers is just a testament to how fast this category has grown. So just want to understand where it was, where it is today, from everybody and get a different perspective of where everyone is sitting at. So I'd like to start with where most of the money comes from. Winnie, you'd like to tell us a little bit about how you think the esports community is moving. No, I think esports community is the gaming. First of all, I think let me pull back, talk about gaming. Gaming as a passion point has something which has really grown in the last four to five years. And I think initially, it started off with an online medium, but gradually, I think with mobile really going deep, that was a big explosion in terms of, and once people started gaming as a part, participating in gaming, they were all going to top up in terms of esports, etc. I think even for us, as we started off with an on-ground event and started off with online, but gradually as mobile became big, we started expanding into, so we've almost grown 10 times from 2016 when we started off. So our participation, etc, has almost grown 10 times. So personally, we feel that, in fact, we didn't do the on-ground leg for the last couple of years because we feel that the virtual environment will be far bigger. And therefore, what we're trying to do is to say, how do we really take it virtual in terms of really capturing the billions of people which eventually aren't go on this platform? So talking about the virtual platform, I think, Anirudh, if you can step in and basically comment on, from being the founder of Pocket Aces, which was supposed to be delving into a lot of fiction-based content and into that sort of a space, when and why did gaming come into the fore of what you guys are doing? Thanks for having us here, guys. It's always fun to be on these events and talk to you guys. In terms of our own journey, it's been a pretty straightforward experience of having gaming become a focus area. I think, as a company, we've always focused on where consumers are spending their time and how they are solving their boredom. Where are they entertaining themselves? And I think, in the last year or two, you've seen that massive inflection point of number of gamers and gamers, not only hypercasual gamers, but also games of people who play games like PUBG and Free Fire. These are games which really marry skill and strategy and are therefore fun to watch, which was primarily PC driven earlier. So you're seeing those games really get that audience set, and that has also had a bullish effect on PC games. So people started really appreciating what it means to play a Valorant, for example. So that has done really well this year. So I think when you see where people are hanging out, where they're getting entertained, gaming was a natural next step for us. In fact, we felt, with the phone becoming the centerpiece of the entertainment experience, interactive entertainment or gaming and short video, the two big places which traditional media could not service. Television is becoming OTT, but actually, OTT is not where you're spending most of your time during the day and in the evenings as well now. So now in the next phase of the Indian entertainment experience, as you go from 2020 onwards, as phones get better, internet gets better, people just don't want to be dumb consumers. They also want to interact. They want to create. And I think you are seeing the beginning of a pretty large 10-year movement in that sense. And so for us, it was a very natural thing to be involved in. Okay, talking about where people are spending time and enabling platforms for these people to spend a lot more time with us, I'll move this conversation to I think Siddharth and Rishi Indra, where you guys are creating platforms and these platforms, I mean, I was trying to figure out how to define Nordwind Gaming, right? But it almost seemed like it's a gaming company that almost does anything. I didn't want to call it an agency and I did not want to call it infrastructure. But it almost seems like you want to be sitting at the center of enabling this gaming movement in India. So where do you see this Siddharth and why did this become a centrifugal point of where your business was going? Sure. So let me give you two analogies to just illustrate how gaming has evolved or eSports has evolved over the last five years. The first analogy is eSports is like cricket. Started as a five-day test match. It was a gentleman's game. Primary language of communication was English. Only the elite could afford to play, afford to watch. Going forward from a five-day to a one-day to a two-twenty, where cricket got truly democratized. The first time that you saw not just Hindi but vernacular came in commentary across. It truly got democratized, whether it was IPL, whether it was T20, eSports has gone through the same journey. eSports was a PC dominion. The language was English. The affordability was Europe, US could afford it. India affordability of PC gaming was always a question mark. But when mobile democratized it. So for example, in eSports, the primary language of communication is Hindi now. It's not English anymore. English is not even the second language. It's Hindi, Bangla, Tamil. English comes a distant third or a fourth. So that's the transition that eSports has had in terms of viewership. And that has predominantly been contributed by the mobile part of the things. The second analogy that I would give is the player participation. The whole gaming is good movement, which has taken over, play a part together, which has taken over. So 2020, for example, was really coming out of gaming and eSports in a country like India. So what used to be in dorm rooms, what used to be in closed doors, came out as a family sport. It came out as a family activity. And that was a huge shift that happened in 2020. And again, mobile has been one of the key contributors. And the other example is, and it's a funny story, four years back, I was at Viacom. Akshath, our founder at Nordwind, used to be still running Nordwind. And he came to us and he was talking about media rights. And I asked Akshath, okay, what's the kind of viewership that you get? And Akshath, because if I'm going to buy media rights or something, I need to understand the viewership. Akshath said 50. And I'm looking at him saying, dude, you are missing the unit. 1000 million, lakh, what are you talking about? He said, no, absolute number 50. And I just looked at him and said, you've got to be kidding me, man. You're telling me viewership is 50. If you were not a friend of mine for the last 10 years, I wouldn't have even asked you for tea. This meeting would have been over now. He said, no, trust me, we will be a million viewers before you know it. And lo and behold, our peak viewership last year and some of our tournaments crossed 1 million. And that's the journey Esports has seen in the last three to four years. And when you see that journey, that's why Nordwind is where Nordwind is. We have created the market. We have created this industry in India. We have created the Esports media rights market in India. We have created some of the biggest tournaments that one can talk of. And Ankit is sitting right there. He will add more to that. Dr. Rushindra is here. We've all been part of the same ecosystem. And that's what I have to say as introduction. I think I'll let the others talk for now. So, Amit, he's already segred to you. So I won't kill the flow. So what do you have to say about where Esports is in India? And how does that all go for your business as we said today? Hey, thanks. Thanks, Pratik. And great to be with this panel here. Look, I think Siddharth and Anirudh said the context beautifully. I really don't have much to add. And we've also seen the ripples of that in our categories. We're present in gaming PCs. We also have presence in tablets, smartphones. And it's an impact that the whole category and we have as a business felt, we had to in fact as Lenovo completely reimagine our gaming business. The way it was about five years back and the way it is now, it's completely different. Earlier, we would have a line of products that were gaming friendly. And then we had to go back to the scratch, go back to the community, go back to people who really experience gaming and are a leading edge and ask them what is it that we could have done as a company? And that's how our gaming brand Legion was born. And in fact, we take a lot of pride that it was pretty much co-created along with the community. And that's why if you look at a Legion, it looks very different from everything else. So a huge, huge force behind the whole growth that we've seen in the PC category, not just in terms of numbers and volumes, but also in terms of how much an individual customer is willing to today pay for a computer. That table has absolutely gone up. One is this whole market where people want to buy specialist gaming PCs. But even if someone is looking to buy a laptop for their classes or for doing their work or running their business, this has become one of the key criteria. Will it play games? Will it hold up to what I want to, even if I'm not buying a gaming PC? So it's just become so pivotal to overall consumption of the device. One of the very interesting things that we've been noticing in the marketing circles, and we work with a lot of mobile phone brands itself, is that the camera was always the reason for a mobile phone to sell. And over the last about 15 or once and highly accelerated during the whole 2020 lockdown and everybody staying at home. The conversation for the first time and we were really tired of launching new phones, which had a differential of a camera, which you would never see, but you would often speak about. Finally, the processing power. Finally, the graphics, the fact that you have an end to end display. And the conversation changing even in a marketing room or the product room of a mobile phone was evident to us in terms of how people are actually moving in that sort of a space. So, Rishinder, how have you utilized this whole ecosystem of hardware, of brands, of content creators? And what do you see is where eSports is currently? So I think everyone else has said precedent really well. The gaming ecosystem really started off with PC gaming. I know the early days were in South Korea, but even growing up, even as early as 2001, 2002, I grew up playing Counter-Strike tournaments and then moved on to Dota. And it's always been about PC gaming. And that was always the biggest barrier. The entry barrier was the cost involved. And average Indian household didn't have a PC unless someone in the house needed it for work or for very specifically for gaming. That's the only reason that people would go out and buy PCs because I think India skipped that entire generation and moved on to mobile phones. The rest of the world, everyone made sure that they had a computer in their house. But in India, using WhatsApp and 4G data becoming so cheap, everyone went straight on to doing their business, doing their work, everything on their mobile phones. And then obviously the pandemic happened and then lockdown came in and suddenly people started buying computers again. They needed a PC at home so that they could, whether it was for work, whether it was for school, a lot of people needed it for Zoom calls so that the children could attend classes. And all of a sudden, we saw the shift and mobile gaming became so popular and that entry of barrier was suddenly taken away where it was so easy. It was so accessible. Anyone who had a phone in their pocket could pull it out, download a game and get going. And with eSports rising so far, the number of tournaments, the number of tournament platforms, and just in general, education and information about the eSports and gaming industry made it so easy for everyone to enter in. And now that people have gotten into the ecosystem, they're exploring other options. So I know people who never played a game in their life that started with a game like PUBG Mobile, which was a great entrance into the space. And then from there, they started learning more about online gaming. They started learning more about eSports. A lot of them went and got out of PC. Some of them even started streaming or put their right their own hand at content creation. So it became this really exciting space where people wanted to know more about it. They were introduced to mobile gaming and now they are buying more hardware. They're getting a better webcam. They're getting better lights so that they can stream better. They're upgrading their stuff as they go along. But it all started with the mobile phone that was in there. Super. And I'll just take Siddharth's analogy ahead. And we've spoken to all the people who are supporting the cricketers. But now let's speak to the cricketer themselves. I know he would hate to be called one. But Ankit, what do you think is the space that athletes like you and I'm glad they call you athletes because it takes as much preparation. It takes as much time and it takes as much effort to do what you do as consistently as what you do it. And how have you seen the journey over the last so many years and how do you feel about it today? I remember playing for mouse pads, movie DVDs and paying 500 or 1000 bucks for a string for a tournament to playing events like ESL India Premiership which not been gaming does. I've seen events, scam events where some Pollywood and some singers were invited and there were teams from all across the world there present one of the top teams at that point of time. Counter-String 1.6 and Moscow 5 was there. And that event was a fraud. So now there was a time where everyone started saying that nothing is going to happen in the Indian esports scene. And that's when not been gaming started doing legit events. And when it comes to us players, we were like, which event? Not been gaming? Okay, let's play. I will get money. Because that was the time where we had to actually save money to even get. I'm talking about myself because I come from a very humble background. So 500,000 bucks was also a lot for me traveling to cities like Delhi for national finals, Pune and all these cities to compete was also a big thing. But now online qualifiers are there. You don't have to pay for tournament registrations. You just have to show your skills. And if you keep winning, then you'll keep leveling up and then you can go and play LAN finals. But I've seen it happen in a very good way. But I still feel it's taking time. And also, there should be a bit of consistency is what from a player's perspective, I can tell you now. Yes, Norden gaming is trying, is doing some events. There was Diorina, which was like a price position for us, because if you won that tournament, our name would come on the bottle. Now with brands like Red Bull also, we have started Red Bull Fragout, Red Bull Flick. Then there is now Red Bull Campus for Valorant. For mobile, we have Red Bull Mio. So now there are multiple tournaments, which I can show my parents and tell them to see. It's not a one time thing. Earlier, it used to be that if I don't win this tournament, I will not get any money. And I won't be able to sustain my passion, sustain my living. But now after all playing all these events after doing basically the jump in my career and the entire shift happened when I played U-Cypher. That was aired on MTV. After that, I started signing multiple seven figure deals. I became the brand ambassador of Alienware, brand ambassador of Intel, sponsored by Corsair, Red Bull Athlete. That's when actually my parents thought, okay, this is not, he's not joking. This is a legit profession. Earlier, they used to think that, okay, maybe he's going to a gaming cafe and I should stop him. Why? Because they saw people are abusing, drinking, smoking, being aggressive, shouting. And till today, I don't drink, I don't smoke. So I took all their questions because I knew if I couldn't convince my parents, this journey would have been stopped then and there. And the one thing that they wanted was studies. And I told them that I'll manage my studies, but let me do this because I want to represent my country. And representing my country was the biggest motivation that I started for. And I did that in Dubai. And after that, now when my parents see that, okay, he's a known guy in the community, respected guy, and he has fans, brands are supporting him. Then when I came on BBC World News, that was an eye-opener for my mamas because they've done big, they've done MBAs and they work for big companies. So even they thought that, this is a one-time thing and he'll finish it off. But now four years, five years, 15 years, yes, struggle was there. But the whole change started happening since the last three, four years. And it's a good thing that now we have global esports, Nordwind Gaming in new arena and local, all these guys. Now we are building that ecosystem, which we needed from the start, I needed from the start, but we couldn't have it at that point of time. But now things are improving, I would say. So for me, two things that stand out in a conversation. At least when I started getting into the whole advertising and marketing space, I remember all marketers talking about India being a one-screen home. We spoke about how that screen had different prime times for different people. In the early evenings, it was the college kids who came back because there was the mother who was preparing food and the father had not come home to watch either cricketers or news. And then prime time, dependent on what the family was watching, determine what you actually consume. But I think over the last 10 years with mobile phones, and I think we've all discussed this, there is no singular screen. Like we all have computers, you all have mobile phones, and we all have very, very, very different viewing and consumption habits, which means that passion points that consumers are actually latching onto are also becoming passion points that they can do, slash, consume, play, watch throughout the day at their convenience. And we've obviously seen a lot of things change in terms of these consumption habits. So one really fun factoid that I read somewhere while I was researching for this was that globally, people spend about eight hours, 27 minutes a week on gaming. And the Indian number has now eaten that global average to about eight hours and 30 minutes. So obviously, everybody sitting on this panel is doing something absolutely right and being able to predict what the future of esports is going to be. Obviously, as it's already been discussed in this whole over the last two days, esports is part of the entire gaming universe. It's like what we all keep saying that sports in India needs to grow and not only cricket. So what is the future context to what you guys are seeing over the next two or three years? Because the pandemic almost must have come as a booster shot, no puns intended to the vaccine for all of us over here. But how do you see the role that each one of the stakeholders, and I keep calling you stakeholders for this community because you're adding different dimensions to it and are while having your own reasons for backing the community, have a very important role to play in terms of where this community is going to go. So I'd like to focus on why is it important for this entire community to exist for what they are doing and most importantly for how they're going to be contributing to the community to grow at large. So I'll take that question as a way forward into what esports is going to be because I think that we've all heard and overcome the fact that the hardships over the last three or four years while everybody was investing in setting this ecosystem up will now start to pay dividends. But what is it that we're going to do for the community is what I would like to hear or what is it that you would like the other stakeholders to do for the community is what I would like to understand. So again, let me actually start off with Siddharth because like I said, I found it really hard to put you into a slot in terms of what you guys do. So let's take as broader point of view and then we'll come back into specifics. So great question Pratik. I think again, we keep drawing from analogies from industries that have already grown that we are because we are still in its nascency. So if you look at sports, right? Sports, country after country, league after league, the sports massification happened because of distribution disruption. EPL was formed by Sky Sports. IPL is what IPL today because of Sony First and Now Star, what they have been able to achieve. And of course, all the brands contribute to that. So if you look at the eSports ecosystem, eSports ecosystem is essentially right here, right in front of us. There is an Ankit sitting here. There is a Dr. Rishendra Sinha sitting here. We need many more of those. How do we get many more of those when on one side, eSports and gaming becomes more and more of a viable career option. It becomes more often more of a viable career option because companies like Nordwin Gaming put up bigger and better tournaments, bigger and better prize pools, whereby both fame and money gets added to the lives of Ankits and Dr. Rishendra Sinha. But at the same time, brands are extremely important because at the end of the day, the brand sponsorships drive bulk of that revenue that is going to come to the teams that is going to come to the players, right? So the brands are really, really important both for the players, the community, for companies like Nordwin Gaming. So the brands have to pose more and more faith in the world of eSports saying, this is where we believe the future is. This is where we are going to invest in. However, like I said, distribution disruption, which means without Anirudh becoming bigger, without a loco becoming bigger, we can never have that disruption. And again, if I go back, Anirudh is going to become bigger because of the brand support that is going to come in. So brands are going to play a very, very important role in this entire ecosystem. Because again, if you look at IPL, while Star paid 16,500 crores for five years' rights to BCCI, Star is going to recover that money predominantly on the back of sponsorship and advertising. Subscription is never going to yield more than 10% of that money, maybe 20% of that money across their linear and digital platforms. So that's really the future. The future is, and I very firmly believe in this, if there is one category that can give cricket run for money in the country of India, it's eSports. And the analogy that I can give you is we were at a conference last year where a similar company like ours came from Brazil, and they said, increasingly, the young Brazilians do not want to see Ronaldo play football. They want to see their friends play FIFA on the screen. Now that's a massive statement for Brazil, because football is to Brazil, what's cricket is to India. So that's really how the future is going to shape up, and it's happening. So we have come a long way as an industry in the last five years just to add to what Ankit said. The first tournament that Nordvin did, our sponsorship was, mark my words, returnable mousepads, not even mousepads, returnable mousepads. We will give it to you, put our brand after the event, give us the mousepad back. That's where we started as an industry. There are some hard words here. So I mean, I'm fairly enthused by what eSports has to offer. And Ankit, before I come back to Turu Shindar and Anirudhan and the rest, I would like to know, what does this mean for a brand like yours? You have two objectives. One is, obviously, to look at your business functions and what it is doing for you. And obviously, the second is, you have to also contribute in growing this whole ecosystem, because it is cyclical in that format. And what do you see your role to be in moving this community forward and creating the right kind of impact and building the right kind of infrastructure to enable all of this? Because I think that's a very important part that you're playing. Yeah, that's true, Pratik. We see our role in two ways. The first is BraStacks. I think going back to what we really do, we want to make absolute top-notch infrastructure and experience for gamers. So it means constantly challenging ourselves and asking the customers, the community and ourselves, are we levelling up, are we doing the best that we can to adapt to what eSports players want as situations change, as they want more elevated playing experiences, as game titles want very different experiences. So that's the first thing. I don't think we'll ever lift our eyes off that. I mean, we've done a lot of comparisons with Cricket. That's what the bad manufacturers would first do. I mean, are they going to be able to turn out absolutely high-quality stuff all the time? That's one. The second is, we can play a big role, I feel, in making gaming accessible. As Lenovo, we have presence not just in PCs, in tablets, in smartphones. Again, PCs, it's not just about high performance gaming PCs, which are top-notch in terms of pricing, but how do we build smaller gaming experiences at every price point? So that's one. The second is to find opportunities where we can meaningfully engage and intervene. And again there, the problem is not very different from any sports sponsorship. Now, if you look at any sports sponsorship, and if you're a well-known brand, like a Lenovo or a Mountain Dew is, it's not awareness that you're fighting for. You're fighting for building the right kind of equity, the right kind of presence. And if you are like a new brand, you're still forming your bits, it can give you large-scale familiarity and awareness immediately. But if it is not that, then it's really about being able to critically measure what's the return on investment for the brand. And if you're able to find that sweet spot in terms of finding opportunities and presence, where the community benefits and the brand is able to transparently see the value that they're able to create for themselves, that would be sweet. Now, at this point in time, I think, and that's why I admire the work Siddharth and their team do, because before them, the space was extremely unorganized. As Ankit said, you know, a lot of scam tournaments and that kind of takes away from the credibility and trust. And over the last seven or eight years, I've, and my team has learned from, you know, many odd experiences, some good, some not so great. But it's great to finally see that we're coming together and we're committed to grow with the community. So I'll take ROI from there, right? Like ROI for business and ROI for the community. And who do better people to ask about ROI than Anirudh and Vinit. So Anirudh, for you, ROI is obviously the key balance between understanding what you're able to give to a brand and also the platform that you're creating for this game, for the gamers and for the esport athletes in terms of being able to showcase, you know, what they have to offer. So, you know, how are you going to be able to maintain that balance? And you know, therefore, what do you think is the role of, of local and platforms like yourself in this entire, you know, esports and gaming ecosystem? I think, you know, the traditional way of thinking about the balance pits one against the other. Whereas actually, it doesn't have to be that way. And, you know, that's, I think, the big difference that something like this has. Like, we don't mind if, you know, Roshinder is going to wear a Nike jersey. I think he's not going to mind. And his audience is not going to mind that. If he says the right things and he represents the kind of values that a certain advertiser wants, there's going to be no issue with that. On the same, in the same way with local, let's say we produce products from an advertising point of view that enhance your viewing experience, that enhance your interactive experience, you're not going to mind that. And I think we've seen that in short video content. We've delivered tremendous value to a lot of people in the advertising ecosystem. That's why they keep working with us. So from a point of view, we think of advertisers as our partners who are going to work with us to make these things happen. And they're sitting on the same table as us. They're first class citizen on that table. So is our team. So it's not like there's some other, you know, this balance is, I feel an old media point of view on how the world should be done. No product should, you know, no ad product should be in local if it is not given the same respect as another product. And I think really what's happening is, you know, I think Sid touched on it a little bit earlier. You have 300 million plus gamers in India today. 100 million plus gamers are monthly active users of these battle royale games. We have not even seen this category grow yet. You know, it's like PUBG pre-fire, we're talking about two games. You're going to see a lot of games come out. We're also going to see India getting wealthier in the next five years. So again, PCs consoles are going to improve, mobile is going to explode. So you're going to start seeing the kind of participation numbers that are eye-popping. And the most important thing is that you're sitting in a kid sitting in a second year, third year city where you don't have the kind of facilities in terms of, you know, mall or something else to do, you know, entertainment avenues. You will spend time online, not only as a, you know, as an entertainment experience for yourself, but to meet other people as a social hangout. So social bonds across India are getting stronger. They're spending time practicing these games. You're going to see the MS donies of this world come soon. We have not seen them yet. I mean, I think, you know, Ankit, you know, you've seen some of the guys in the PUBG ecosystem, you know, Thug or Ghatak or these kind of guys who have dedicated their lives to bringing the ecosystem up. You have to see the fruits of that very soon when you're going to actually have guys that, you know, Minit can really, really say proudly that, yeah, I'm associated with this person. And I think we're very, very close to that moment. And, you know, you're going to have brands then see which kind of game they want to associate themselves with. If they want more casual fun, they may associate themselves with a clash. They want more action, fast-paced action. They may go with, you know, a PUBG or a Free Fire. So they will start seeing where the audiences are. What is their point of view? They will find those things. And then most importantly, it's an entertainment experience. So again, boring from what Sid said, you're going to have to have the right kind of producer. For an IPL, you need an IPL to be produced at that quality. You need the right kind of players there. You need that credibility. Then you need that delivery. So those all things have to be done by us. You know, I always joke that Khan market in Delhi was not built by one store. A bunch of stores had to come together to make that place a place worth visiting for a shopper. If you look at that for the audience, we have to build that. And we are doing that today. And I think we have not seen the numbers yet, right? I mean, if you're seeing kind of numbers that PUBG or, you know, with Scout, these kind of guys are doing on concurrency. It beats a lot of Premier League games in India. But 200,000 concurrences is not a joke. No, not even, you know, the best content on YouTube, which is some of the content we've made, gets that kind of numbers and that's high value, great production. So we have not seen anything yet. I think you want to see much bigger numbers. And I think one really important thing that guys like Vinit and Amit are doing is that you don't remember the IPL sponsor today as much as you remember the first IPL sponsor. You remember the World Cup, you remember the Prudential World Cup, because they took the risk when others were just waiting and watching and waiting for it to become hygiene, cricket is hygiene today, right? Everyone can do it. Everyone knows it's big, but these guys are onto a secret. So you will see them getting 10x the returns of the guy who comes six years from now. And at that point, it will not be a choice. It will be a necessity that you have to participate in this ecosystem. No, and also, I think Ankit said that correctly, right? Like for him, the people who backed him right at the start of his journey, right? Like, I mean, those are the people who will leave back legacy, right? So I mean, and it's always, I mean, retrospectional is 2020 vision, right? But I think that all of you are sitting over here and like, like, Vinit's brand says that I think you guys have already, you know, moved in that sort of a direction. So Vinit, for you, do you really think that that, you know, the massive statements made on this panel, right? Like the statements of like, you know, esports is is the only, you know, we've always had this joke saying that India has five big sports cricket, cricket, cricket, cricket and cricket, you know, and do you think that that that that that esports will break into this into this top five and, you know, therefore create opportunities as a community from a brand lens like yours and tap on to that passion point that I always know Pepsi wants to, you know, wants to always be with. No, I think personally for me, from a beverage brand perspective, we do a billion plus transactions every year. And but out of this billion plus transactions, almost 28 to 30% of the people are actually people who are very passionate about gaming. They do spend time on gaming, typically spend two times the time that they spend on YouTube. As compared to YouTube, they spend two times the time on gaming. So therefore, clearly, there's a very strong passion, which is there. I think the opportunity is that it is right now extremely fragmented. And therefore the opportunity for brand to integrate for a brand perspective, I would love to integrate. For example, IPL is a very seamless forum. It's one of these things. So opportunity is there to say if we can get an equivalent of an IPL or equivalent of a platform which is created, which has that which has the numbers because the numbers are there for gaming as a system as an ecosystem, but they are all fragmented very much. So that's the opportunity. If someone can bring it all together on a single platform, that can be very powerful. For example, for us, for example, if the philosophy in gaming, there's a genre of gaming, which is about let's say competitive sports and people do say that suddenly there are too many people and the space is going down, there are too many people surrounded and therefore there's fear that I might die. And then there's an opportunity to get integration of your philosophy with that gaming. But I think it's an opportunity waiting to be taken. It's just about getting the right aggregation of the platform. The numbers are clearly there on the overall system. So Roshinder, do you think that we have the infrastructure today to create this platform that brings Ankit and brings like Vinit and brings the viewers, which are the consumers of all of the products that we're trying to push to them all together. And what you see is the contribution of a platform like yours in the future. And where do you see the numbers grow? Where do you see your contribution? Where do you see your investments coming in over the next two to three years? So obviously there are a lot of questions in there. So I'll begin with firstly, I think Siddharth and Anirudh really covered a lot of the points as well as Amit and Vinit. I think from our sponsorship perspective, it's going in the right direction. Obviously it could be a lot better. What's happened is over the last few years, we have evolved to the point where now it's not if gaming will grow and if eSports will grow, but when we're already seeing this electronic shift happen where younger consumers, especially those below the age of 20, 21, would rather play a video game and would focus their energy on playing a game at home as opposed to what's something like Netflix. I think I read somewhere beautifully, Netflix says that the biggest competitor is not Hulu or Star or any of the other OTT platforms. It's a game like Fortnite because if all the kids are spending all their time playing video games, they're not going to watch TV shows or movies on an OTT platform because playing a video game is a lot more engaging and there's a lot more that they can do. It's a lot more interactive, especially during the pandemic. We use this line a lot that gaming brought back the social and social distancing. So I know friends, families, a lot of people that got together using gaming as a platform in general. And the good thing about that is it didn't really require any marketing. No one had to go out and say, here, play this game. It'll help you pass your time. It's something that happens so organically and passively that people go out and start seeking games and start seeking places where they can kind of not necessarily but escape from reality to a certain point. And we have seen that happen, obviously, especially over the last one year, when people are locked in their homes, they've seen that habitual change and that habit formation. Now, when these people grow up, their kids and their families are going to just spend more time playing video game. It's like how with people of my generation, we grew up watching cricket. So that's what we wanted to play. That's what we wanted to see. That's what we connected to and related to in terms of sports. 10 years from now, today's generation of kids are going to only connect to esports. They're going to connect to a Valorant game, a PUBG game, and not going to connect to tennis or golf or cricket as much. So it's just an eventuality. We're already seeing that happen with hundreds of millions of gamers, not just in India but across the globe. We're seeing that shift happen and it's just a matter of time. I think all the people that got in early, whether it's the sponsors, whether it's the esports organizations like us, whether it's players like Ankit, platforms like what Nordwin and Loco are trying to create, all the people that got in early are really going to see the ROI, so to speak, and are going to be at the advantages end of being at the top of the wave while it's happening, while everyone else is going to have to play catch up. So Ankit, I've asked everybody what they're going to do. I think with you I'll ask what do you want because the rate at which these people have spoken, I think if nobody else, I think you have the best seat in the house, and as an athlete, and since all sports are touted nowadays to really spoiled athletes, I'd like to ask you a question. How would you like to be spoiled, sir? I would like to be spoiled by having more tournaments, I feel, and having a chance to represent our country on the international platform. We need more of such tournaments because that's what drives an athlete. I started because I wanted to hold that flag on an international stage. So I think more events and a bit of price pool should be increased because in India I don't feel an athlete can only depend on the tournament winnings because you can't predict which tournament you're going to win. The competition is rising, sometimes you'll win, sometimes you will lose, and if that was the case in my scenario, my parents wouldn't have allowed me to pursue this till now, thanks to the brands who are supporting me, and thanks to the events that are happening. So consistently, slowly, slowly from playing one event to having ESL India premiership like thrice in a year, now we slowly have more events. Valorant has actually helped the scene a lot. After PUBG Mobile gone, Valorant picked up and all the influencers, all the PUBG Mobile guys, they started playing Valorant. So that got a lot of eyeballs rolling towards that game, and it picked up. So more tournaments, more tournaments where we can represent our country and a little bit of increased price pool and the consistency of all of these things would definitely help. I'd like to actually ask you another question. There's also a certain kind of a responsibility that you will have towards the athletes who are actually coming into the system as well because I think Siddharth said this correctly and everybody touched upon it, is that the importance or the growth of this ecosystem will also depend on the quality of athletes and the people that we can actually rally behind. So again, going back to the cricket analogy, there was a couple of days, there was Sunil Gawaskar, there was the Sachin Tendulkar, there is now Virat Kohli, NMS Tony and Rohit Sharma. And I think that the evolution of these athletes has also coincided with the evolution that cricket has taken in this country because they have become demigods, they have become people that people aspire to be. So as a person who's sitting right on top of this food chain, Ankit, what do you think are your responsibilities towards representing this athlete community and also nurturing this athlete community as you go along? So that has started happening, I would say. I'm not bragging about myself, but I have seen people touch my feet at events. I've seen people put my pictures in their home temple. I've seen people get their parents to meet me. Earlier, I used to get scared because I'm a gamer and they're going to say, you're spoiling my child, what is this nonsense? But at Intel ESL one, there was a beautiful thing that happened. Parents were standing in a queue when their chance came. They spoke to me for like 15-20 minutes and his dad was like, my son used to follow Virat Kohli, Lionel Messi and now he says, I want to become like Ankit Van Pan. Just because of you who has joined the gym, he used to use a lot of slang language, he has stopped that and I'm proud that you have inspired him. I used to think that all gamers are very aggressive and my son shouldn't pursue this, but after seeing you talking to you, you have changed my thinking and I'm glad that he has taken you as an inspiration. I'm fully going to support him. He wanted a PC, now I'm going to get him one. So that is the kind of thing I've started doing that you are not going to become, when I'm in just one day, you're not going to become an esports athlete, but just forcing your parents to get you a PC. It takes years of hard work. Yes, you might see that I'm wearing this cap. I'm a Red Bull athlete. I'm the brand ambassador of Alienware Dell and so many brands are sponsoring, but it has took me a lot of time to get all these things. So you have to prepare yourself. You have to balance life and you have to also understand that being in this industry, you have to do things like you need passion and you have to be very hardworking because it's not going to be like a single short thing where you won one match and you're going to get a lot of sponsors. It doesn't happen. It doesn't work that way. So that's what I'm telling all my fans and I'm trying to, from my experiences, make them understand these things. So I think there's only one question that beckons now, I think we have all the ingredients to make a really successful bull run in the esports and esports space. And I think we have a fairly great representation of all the people and all the platforms and all the athletes who are going to contribute towards this. However, a large part of the success of an ecosystem or a community depends on just one question. How do we work together? Because we may try and achieve a lot of things inside those, but the ability for people like yourselves on this panel to come together, work with each other. And just very quickly, before we wrap up and before we just give out closing remarks, I'd just like probably two lines from each of you of how you would like for a lot of people to work together to make this work like a well-oiled machine that it is later to be. The only difference between, in my opinion, the success of this now or later is the ability for all of us to sit here and work together. So just very quick two lines on that and then I'll try and wrap up. So let's start, Siddharth, you've been waiting very patiently, but please go for it. I think Pratik, the mantra is really what the digital economy has shown to the world. So before the digital economy, the world was siloed into I am a provider, I am a customer, I am a processor, but that has all blurred. Everyone is now playing multiple roles. I am a consumer and a supplier at the same time. So I think really the key to success of this industry is collaboration. We need to be very clear of what we bring to the table and collaborate with each other rather than trying to do everything ourselves. And I think that's how we are going to grow. We will grow together by collaborating, not by competing with each other. Siddharth, you want to add to that? No, I think what you said is absolutely right. What a lot of people we saw early on in the industry tried to do was everyone was fighting for the bigger piece of the pie while I think now the players in the ecosystem are realizing that it makes more sense in trying to grow the pie rather than fighting for the existing 100 million gamers. Let's all work together and find out how we can get to a billion gamers. And then automatically, obviously everyone does get a bigger piece of the pie. So right now, I think all the focus, at least what we have seen in the last few months or rather the last year and a half, two years, the entire focus of the ecosystem has been towards growing it, getting more people involved, whether it's in the form of content, whether it's in the form of bigger tournaments, making it more accessible, getting international logs to India, working with sponsors. I think the entire ecosystem as a whole, all the players at the top of the food chain, thankfully, have now started working together. And it's just, I think the gaming industry for the next three to five years in India is going to be absolutely brilliant. And we're going to leave a lot of the western countries behind. We have a head start, especially when it comes to mobile. And we should really take advantage of that and go forward. I think we have a head start on the basis of population actually. And I don't think they'll ever catch up on that number. But I think for me, what is most important is the fact that while this ecosystem is asking everybody to work together, I think that there's one stakeholder that we all have to work with, which is where I'll get the next three comments in, which is regulations, the government and regulatory bodies, because that will also determine the pace at which this industry will grow or slow down or however we see it. So why are we talking about the collaboration? Amit, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you would like for this to be formalized? Look, one of the examples that all of us have seen in the marketing industry or industry per se in the last few years is mutual funds. And that was an amazing example of how players across came together and build awareness for the category and remove even some of the stigma that may have been there or barriers that may have been there. I think time is ripe for a formal structure to be in place. And as much as we may not enjoy the bureaucracy or the red tape or the lack of speed that comes with it, we need structure, we need a certain formalization. And it is, like you said, a multi-sectoral problem. Many people have to come together to be able to do it. And then build positive stories, positive role models. We need more people like Ankit. We need Ankit to go out to more people. And that's how I think we're going to have a breakout. Anirudh. Yeah, I think there are three really important things that we all have to do. One is to realize what time it is. Is it a time to invest or is it a time to harvest? And it's time to invest. We cannot bear the fruits of something that we have not put the hard work in for. And there will be capital put in one of the most largest checks in this ecosystem in the last year. And we will continue to do that. Second is, I think, not forgetting who this is for. It's for the audiences and it's for the players. But putting them first, recognizing what their interests are, protecting them and giving the best entertainment to the audience is the best way to interact and the best way to express themselves. That is really, really important. We forget that in the larger scheme of things. If you have that mission, I think that's important. And from the government side, I think we need clarity. We don't need too much governance. We just need some simple clarity. Real money gaming is not e-sports. It's a very simple thing. It doesn't require a scientist to know that. What is e-sports? How are we going to protect people? How are we going to protect players? And that's it. We just need simple rules. And what those rules are, the government should put out, and we will follow those rules. But we don't need too many rules. It's a simple clarity for all of us to operate in. And I think you will see we've been back medals at multiple games this in the next decade. Deneet, how would you see the participation of everybody to make this the best branded product out there for you and for your brand? I think it starts from the consumer for me, for everyone in fact. I think we have to elevate the consumer experience, both for people who play and both for people who view as that it would trade. It's almost like cricket with example, we started off with a five-day test matches, then we eventually went down to a one-day match, then eventually went down to 20. While all these changes have happened, I think the viewership increased, the interest increased, and therefore it was also elevating the consumer experience to say, I don't have so much time, give me that excitement of that thing. So I think it has to be started gaming as an ecosystem has to become big, where we elevate the consumer experience, giving people what they want and elevate it to a level where it does more than just sort of vicarious participation. So I think it's about really fundamentally looking at it and saying how can we give the best experience for the players on one side and for the viewers on the other side. Ankit, what about you? These guys summed it up perfectly, like government, simple rules and once they announced that, then it will help us to convince our parents more easily that see this is government-recognized. Earlier when I started it, they thought I was gambling in a dark cafe where computers are there, they didn't understand computers, they didn't understand machines. So one thing would definitely help, where governments say that this is East Coast, they are athletes, we have an Indian team and they are representing our country maybe in Olympics or Asian games. So I think for me, I started off this whole panel by saying that the one thing that really strikes out when we are chatting or when we are looking at this entire industry is passion and how passion pockets through any sort of barrier that you put in front of it. I think we've got to boost the shot in terms of the lockdown and the pandemic. The hardware is setting in our ability to create content around gaming, our ability to consume content from a consumer point of view, whether it becomes technologies that are enabling it, whether it's internet speeds, whether it's mobile phones and also the cost of entry or just the ability for a lot more people to access and to want to be this seems like a passion that cannot be controlled by most external factors. So while we've spoken about what we think we are at today, personally for me after this panel, the future seems a lot more bright. But one of the things that I'll take out of this is that we've got to recognize all the stakeholders that are being represented on this panel and the importance of all of these stakeholders to actually work together to give a truly consumer focused experience that will then bring back to the community what the community actually deserves, right, which is the name, fame, glory and the fans and the fan glory that comes with it. Because I think that we're all at a time where if we play this correctly as an ecosystem, we can really propel this into, like I said, becoming one of the top five sports in this country. And yeah, thank you so much everybody. I think everybody give a very honest point of view on where they are at. And I think the stories came together fairly well to create this narrative of what the future of eSports looks like. Thank you everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much Pratik for steering this really interesting conversation and thank you to all our panelists for your time and sharing your insights with us. I'm sure all those startup gamers, the new gaming companies and even all the stakeholders have taken some great takeaways from this conversation. So once again, we'd like to thank all of you for your time.