As I sat down to pen this editorial, we received news that Indian mobile gaming application Mobile Premier League (MPL) had joined the unicorn club at a valuation of $2.3billion. The three year old startup that connects game publishers with users had reached 600,000 daily active users within just three months of its launch, a herculean feat by all measures. The Bangalore based startup joined Dream11, which became a unicorn in 2019.

This news comes as a strong testament to the fact that online gaming and fantasy sports has struck a chord with the Indian user base. India is today one of the world's largest marketplaces when it comes to game downloads, with 840 million installs in the month of June alone. A recent EY report found that the Indian online gaming industry was worth $1.027 billion in 2020. The sector saw a 17.3 percent growth within a span of four years. The report also estimated that the industry was slated to reach $2 billion by 2023 in terms of rake fees earned.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Indian gamers have grown tremendously over the past few years. Their number swelled from 360 million in 2020 to 510 million in 2022. A major cause for this rise has been the wider penetration of internet, availability of cheaper data and prevalence in usage of smart phones. The digital payment infrastructure becoming safer and more reliable has also affected the ingress of more and more gamers. The pandemic and the resultant lockdown also acted as a boon for the industry and motivated a slew of unlikely gamers to pick up the consoles.

The Indian gaming industry also has a large number of talented startups fuelling the gaming ecosystem in the country. Today there are upwards of 400 gaming based startups present in India and the numbers are only going to increase in the days to come.
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