The New Game Theory

UP AT THE CRACK of dawn to get ready for his 8AM shift, 25-year-old Hari Raman is grateful for the customary mask covering half his face. A doctor at a government hospital, Hari is an unlikely internet celebrity living a reclusive life in Purushanur, a village in Tamil Nadu’s Villupuram district and the P in PVS Gaming, his YouTube channel followed by 1.93 million subscribers. V stands for his mother Vijaya, a farm worker who believed in him even when his teachers asked her to pull him out of school after he failed Class 6, and S for Selvaraj, his grandfather, who thought the poor could not dream. When you are as popular as Hari, fame has a way of following you into the remotest 4G-powered corners. “I have had young patients recognise me and ask for a selfie, much to my embarrassment and the shock of my colleagues,” he says. “I really want to keep the two sides of my life separate, but it is getting increasingly difficult.” For someone who live-streams Free Fire, a multiplayer battle royale mobile game, every night for three-to-four hours, with incessant and breathlessly urgent banter in Tamil to boot, Hari is unusually shy. As the lone Tamil-speaking medical student in Himmatnagar, Gujarat, he discovered the world of multiplayer games where he could hang out with fellow Tamils on the internet. Not content to be a dilettante, however, he started streaming in the hope of making some money as a YouTube gamer. “My first video of Free Fire tips and tricks hit 100,000 views in a month, and then it hit a million. When I got my first cheque from YouTube for $3,000, my mother suspected it wasn’t legitimate money. My family still cannot fully understand the potential for fame and money in streaming games.”

Hari clings as much to his day job for social legitimacy—“Who would marry a gamer? A doctor drawing a salary of ₹ 60,000 has much better prospects,” he says—as he does to gaming for companionship and personality development. Streaming has disabused him of his quiet, introverted nature, even if he is still shy playing with the face-cam on. “I went to live in a hostel when I was just 10, and I have always lacked the love and attention of family members. My father, a TV mechanic, was busy trying to put food on the table. My mother worked in the fields every day. Games, even simple ones like Mario, filled a void.” His stream, he says, is popular not because he is a particularly accomplished player, but because he makes the viewer feel like a family member. “My viewers are between 13 and 30 years of age. I have fans half my age who are much better players. They come for the funny familial banter in their mother tongue,” says Hari, who often hosts matches where up to 48 viewers can play along with him. “I am good with children and I hope to pursue a postgraduate degree in paediatrics.”

For a generation of Indian teens and youth, gaming has emerged as the candy shop of possibilities, providing cheap distraction from schoolwork, emotional succour, a conduit for friendship, and the thrill of competitive sport. It was PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) Mobile that democratised the visceral panic of encountering an enemy round the bend. Before the Indian Government banned the game in September 2020, over 180 million Indians had sought out the absolutely terrifying and violent experience of constantly escaping death, which often came quickly, without warning, and at random. And they are doing it all over again with games like Garena’s Free Fire, and PUBG’s relaunch last month as Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), which has since attracted over 35 million registered users.

Online casual gaming in India, a ₹ 6,000-crore industry in FY21, is projected to reach ₹ 16,900 crore in FY25, growing at a CAGR of 29 per cent, according to a KPMG study released in June 2021. The report adds that online casual gaming—defined as gaming that does not involve real money or monetary rewards—accounted for 44 per cent of the country’s total online gaming industry in FY21, with over 400 million gamers playing battle royale games, Ludo King, Candy Crush, FIFA, Real Cricket, etcetera, on their phones, contributing to the explosive growth of the sector. The other major categories in gaming are esports, which is the business of conducting tournaments with the best players competing to win and managing media rights to these mega virtual events, and the somewhat murkier world of real money card games like teen patti, rummy and poker and real money fantasy platforms like Dream11, which happens to be India’s first gaming unicorn, and the Mobile Premier League (MPL), which is poised to be the second despite the fact that it is not listed on Google’s Play Store. Several state governments have banned real money games; in some cases, paternalistic decisions have been overturned by courts that have backed arguments to paint the games in question as skill rather than chance-based. In one such case in June 2021 that set off dozens of memes on social media, the Bombay High Court sought the response of the Maharashtra government on a plea seeking to establish the legitimacy of Ludo, which had become a pandemic staple, especially among women, as a game of skill.

A newer adjunct category that is fast emerging to fill the gap between pros like Naman ‘MortaL’ Mathur and Animesh ‘8bit Thug’ Agarwal and casual gamers is casual game streaming, where players like Hari create content in Indian languages around the most popular games, splicing playthroughs with unique challenges and direct viewer engagement, besides jokes, memes, songs and pop culture references. Over the first weekend of August 2021, Rooter Sports, a streaming platform with a regional language focus, saw 240,000 downloads. With over 23 million registered users (7.6 million of them are active users), an average daily watch time of 26 minutes and 1,000-plus streamers with more than 10,000 followers, Rooter nurtures the creator ecosystem by encouraging players to turn streamers. “Since we got into this category in March 2020, over 1.5 million unique players have streamed on our platform. Over 5 million people are attempting to become streamers as we speak. As many as 17.8 per cent of the people who download our app end up streaming. Gaming is not just a distraction for them; it is a vehicle for creative social expression,” says Piyush Kumar, the 41-year-old founder and CEO of Rooter.

Hindi, Tamil and Telugu are India’s preferred languages for streaming, with battle royale being the top genre, which in turn is led by the undying tribalism of PUBG. Rarely do slower games and single or two-player titles make for interesting viewing. “It is the equivalent of watching five-a-side football when you can watch the full version of the game,” argues Akshat Rathee, cofounder and MD of Nodwin Gaming, one of India’s biggest esports companies. Battle royale games played among multiple players or squads are to young India what action movies were to the generation before them. The young like violence as a genre. They are also switching from watching cricket to watching pro gamers play games they themselves are proficient in. “Just as F1 and baseball are not watched by 20-year-olds, and the sweet spot for basketball viewership in the US is at 37 years of age and golf at 52, cricket viewership among Indians under 25 has fallen substantially,” says Rathee. Top esports companies like Nodwin make their money off the 200 best esports players in the country. “The rest is gully cricket,” he says. While the pandemic saw a surge in casual gaming in India, it also led to better talent emerging at the top, improving the overall quality of esports broadcasts and resulting in an increase in view times. “Our watch time went up 200-300 per cent during the lockdowns, and it continues to hover in that range. It has become our new normal,” says Rathee. He compares the impact of the two seismic shifts of demonetisation and Covid-19 on gaming in India to how Doordarshan kicking off colour transmission ahead of the 1982 Asian Games fostered a culture of cricket viewership starting with the 1983 World Cup. “We are the hottest gaming market in the world today. No other market is growing at an aggregate of over 20 per cent and we are growing at 80. With esports already the second most watched sports category after cricket in India, India can be a ₹ 20,000 crore esports market in a few years’ time.” Pro esports athletes are typically 19 to 22 years old and retire at 25—“your hands are too rigid by then”—and the average viewer in India is no more than three years older, Rathee says.

The esports market in India is currently worth about ₹ 1,000 crore. Recent investments in the Indian gaming industry include $225 million in Dream11 in September 2020, $90 million in MPL in November 2020 and $68 million in Nazara Technologies in January 2021. Nazara, a 22-year-old Indian gaming and sports media company, also raised `583 crore in an IPO issue in March 2021. Nazara’s subsidiaries, Nodwin Gaming and HalaPlay, have meanwhile raised funding from Krafton—the South Korean company behind PUBG—and entrepreneur-investor Milan Ganatra, respectively.

Unlike real sports, however, esports do not carry with them an entire nation’s sense of self. Not yet, at least. The rise of a handful of indie studios has, in fact, done more to put India on the world gaming map than players ranked by the Esports Federation of India. And yet, in his address to Toycathon 2021 in July, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for made-in-India video games based on “Indian values and stories” to seize the moment, he failed to make a distinction between building for India and building in India. “The past three years have seen many indie success stories emerge from India. But Indians are far from enjoying such experiences. Perhaps it is to do with the age of the average Indian casual gamer, or the fact that Indians tend to play during commute and do not look for a narrative in a game,” says Chirag Chopra, 29, of Lucid Labs, a Delhi-based studio whose 3D puzzle game Possessions won Indie Game of the Year at the India Game Developer Conference 2019 and became a top game on Apple Arcade. Indians play casually, but do not pay casually, and independent studios cannot thrive in such a market. “We have been fortunate to find a niché market for the kind of games we like to craft,” says Chopra, whose team of six developers from around the world is now working on a game based on the cultural anomalies of modern India. “It is an interactive drama, the story of a girl from a small town who aspires to be a photographer and must navigate the cultural nuances of marriage, living up to parents’ expectations and other pressures that are specific to India.”

If made-in-India games are a rare breed, those set in India, or featuring “Indian values and stories”, are about as rare as a blue supermoon. nCore Games’ FAU-G, India’s first major action title to be launched in the aftermath of the PUBG ban, features scenarios from India’s border clashes, including the recent face-offs with Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley. It is yet to add support for battle royale and team death match modes, however, and relies more on close combat rather than on shooting. Pune-based Nodding Heads Games’ Raji: An Ancient Epic, an action-adventure console title launched last year, borrows story arcs and characters from Indian legends and myths. As the first Indian game to be nominated—for Best Debut Game—at The Game Award 2020, it is a bright new signpost in Indian game development history. While the studio is working on adding Hindi voiceovers, the game will remain out of the reach of most Indians as there is no mobile version. Other new Indian titles like GameEon Studios’ Mumbai Gullies, which appears to be a Grand Theft Auto-like game showcasing the contrasts of life in Mumbai and the Hindi game for Android, Bhai the Gangster, have found inspiration locally, but success is another story altogether.

“We are clear that we are building for the global market. Only one per cent of our customers are from India,” says Himanshu Manwani of Xigma Games. All four of the Bengaluru-based indie studio titles, including Bonfire and Bonfire 2 which together have seen five million downloads, have been featured by Apple. “The best games often combine art, music, aesthetics and technical skills. The Indian market is not yet attuned to the kind of flat art and minimal design that we employ,” Manwani says. “To most Indians, games are just a way to socialise with friends they cannot meet in person.” Indie developer Armaan Sandhu, who crowdfunded his game Forgotten Fields, featuring a struggling novelist who visits his childhood home in Goa before it is sold off, says 70 per cent of the over £10,000 he raised came from non-Indians. “I do want to create a mainstream game that Indians would enjoy playing—perhaps a folk RPG set in Punjab, with the horror aesthetics of The Witcher,” says the 29-year-old. Meanwhile, with global cult PC gaming titles such as Apex Legends and VALORANT about to enter the Indian market with mobile versions, the battleground is set to be further bloodied.

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V Shoba

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