Very good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I welcome all of you present here to this inaugural edition of Exchange for Media's online gaming summit, E4M Game On. We have a diverse lineup of remarkable speakers from the online gaming and eSports industry for this two-day summit. I welcome you all to the second day. Get ready for some captivating topics and insightful speakers who will help us see the gaming world in a whole new light. So sit tight and let's dive into the world of online gaming. But before that, we'd definitely like to formally welcome all our speakers, panelists, viewers, and all the industry members of online gaming. So I'd like to welcome Mr. Nawal Ahuja, co-founder Exchange for Media Group to kindly come forward for the welcome address. A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Ahuja. Thank you, Khyati, and a very good afternoon to all of you on a nice, breezy Friday afternoon here in Mumbai. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the second day of the Exchange for Media first edition of the Exchange for Media gaming summit. As would be natural, we call it Game On. And I think one of the feedback I have for Amisha is next year, we should be doing more online gaming rather than just doing conversation. It is more interesting, more fun. My kids got excited when they got to know that we are doing a gaming conference, though they were eventually disappointed because this is all talk and no games. But the talk we do here is important because it eventually leads to something substantive in the online gaming ecosystem. Yesterday, we had a few very nice sessions, one by Girish Menon at KPMG who talked about how the gaming ecosystem in India is evolving, two panels which had a lot of brands, marketers, about how brands are increasingly looking very seriously at the gaming ecosystem. One very interesting presentation by Inmobi which talked about how brands should not just look at gamers as a different breed.  So gaming is picking up in India as we understood yesterday. Very good days I had for gaming companies, the ecosystem, the game developers, publishers, e-sports companies, people who organize leagues and tournaments. It is early days in India, the industry is already growing as we saw from the Nazara IPO I read today. It was 11 and a half times over subscribed. It's fantastic for the gaming industry. These are pioneers of the industry who are paving the way for future companies to come and build on them. So I look forward to joining you all in another day of learning in the gaming ecosystem. And one of the key reasons why we curated this event is also to look at how brands are now increasingly looking at gaming with renewed interest or with higher interest. Gaming was always seen as a niche industry, very focused on people who had access to a PC or a console, but now with such significant penetration of mobile phone gaming as really penetrated down to a very deep level in the Indian society that has meant that people are spending more time. COVID has also meant people spending more time on gaming and hence advertiser interest has gone up. And as I've learned, advertisers are also very keenly looking at this domain. It is a very interesting domain. Digital as we all know is a ecosystem with various complexities. And I think gaming adds a very important piece to that complex ecosystem. So with that, thank you for joining us again. Thank you to InMovie for having partnered with us on this event. Back to you, Khyati. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Hoosier, for setting the context. Ladies and gentlemen, we heard yesterday from our speakers, eminent speakers, talking about the different kind of gamers that are there in the gaming ecosystem. Which one are you? Are you the committed gamer? Are you the occasional gamer? Or are you the casual gamer? I definitely am a casual gamer. Tell me about you. We will be talking more about the gaming industry and how brands are also collaborating with gaming companies and more on that. But before that, I'd like you to join our online conversation using the hashtag E4M Game On. Don't forget to tweet to us. Tell us your key takeaways from the sessions that are coming up. Right now, we'd like to start the day by thanking our partners because as we all know, no event is possible, not even a virtual one, without the support of its partners. We'd definitely like to thank our co-powered by partner in-movie, Driving Real Connections, and our co-partner for the event, India Today. Thank you to both of you. We'd like to showcase the audio visual here for our partners. Can we have the AV, please? Technology has always shaped how we communicate with one another. The wheel, the printing press, the Pony Express, the telegraph, the telephone, the computer, and mobile devices. Technology changes, yet one truth remains. We want our communications and interactions to be meaningful and have relevance. Today, however, Driving Real Connections are easier said than done, but we help brands do that to drive real connections. With our platform technology and exclusive mobile data, InMobi helps you understand, identify, engage, and acquire your customers. InMobi, Driving Real Connections. India is getting ready for its biggest e-sports championship. India Today Gaming presents e-sports Premier League three months, eight teams, one championship. The battleground is ready. Are you, do you have it in you? Can you be the next undisputed champion? Coming soon. Thank you to our partners InMobi and India Today. Moving forward, ladies and gentlemen, get ready for our first keynote speaker who will come here to talk about digital marketing techniques to acquire customers in Asia. So sit tight. As I welcome Mr. Chris Wieners, managing partner Hogo Digital. A very warm welcome to you, Chris. Hi, Cathy. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be involved in the event today. And thank you to everyone who's gonna be listening in this morning, this afternoon in my conversation. So thank you so much. So I'm going to share my screen. So today, I'm going to be speaking with you all about, as Cathy said, focused on digital marketing and techniques that we utilize to acquire customers in Asia. Just a little bit about myself. I've been working in the gaming industry. I was previously working in Macau with the Las Vegas Sands Corporation and Land-Based Gaming. And I migrated and moved to the digital marketing side back in 2011. And since then, I've been working with various customers in the digital space, looking at, again, how to utilize digital channels throughout Asia to acquire customers and build their brand. So today, it's going to be a short conversation. I have approximately 20 minutes or so to chat. So I'm going to really walk through some of the key areas that we find gaming operators, both the pay-to-play online casino side of things, e-sports, social games, et cetera. Some of the key platforms and channels in the digital space that we see them utilizing throughout Asia Pacific is sort of what some of those mean in terms of returns on investment and where some of the better advertising opportunities lie. So today, I'm going to talk quickly through the difference in regulated and unregulated markets as it relates to advertising in particular and how working in these different market places does affect your abilities and the types of advertising that you are able to place into the market, as well as the overall costs and some of the expectations on player retention and return on investment. Going to talk about display media. So looking at how brands in the eye gaming space utilize both programmatic advertising, digital media buys, direct buys, retargeting, et cetera, and how those should be placed to have the best possible return on investment and how we measure those. Going to walk through social media as well. So talk a little bit about the platforms, but really more the use of social media in the world of eye gaming and e-gaming, e-sports, et cetera, and talk a little bit about live stream marketing, the different types of influencer marketing, VTubers, et cetera, that have really come up onto the scene really over the past couple of years and are now sort of powerhouses with regards to their ability to help build digital media or digital gaming brands online. And then I'll talk a bit about search because I think that organic search marketing, specifically for the eye gaming industry is a bit unique and some of the opportunities and some of the techniques that are utilized in organic search are very particular. So each of these categories or each of these channel types could be spoken about over very long periods of time. So I'm really only going to be able to touch on the surface level of each of these specific items, but I welcome you of course to please ask questions or please be in touch should you have any further information or any questions that you need. Again, we're gonna go very surface level here over the time that we have. So I'm gonna start by one of the things that may appear obvious, but when we've worked or when I've worked in the past with different eye gaming brands, one of the most important things is to understand of course the market regulations. Now, regulated versus unregulated markets, when we're referring to regulated markets, we're referring to those which allow some level of eye gaming. And again, it could be eye gaming, it could be e-sports, we could be talking about social games, each of these falls into its own unique category. And markets where those are regulated, generally will have very well documented regulations and rules around how that advertising is going to work, how it can be placed, where it can be placed and the types of advertising you can run. Generally you'll have very clear requirements from some of the premium sort of industry advertising networks. So Google, Yahoo, those types of programmatic advertising platforms, they'll have very straightforward and clear requirements for eye gaming operators to fulfill in order to operate and run advertising in those markets. The nice thing about those regulated markets is it gives us the ability to directly promote our pay-to-play platforms. So very straightforward eye gaming, lottery, sports betting, any platform or excuse me, any brand that is offering a very straightforward pay-to-play model can then be directly promoted in those markets. Strong influencer marketing opportunities. So in regulated markets, influencers are very generally, very clear on what they're able to do or not do, what they can talk about, what will allow them to maintain monetization on their end. So on platforms like YouTube, you look at platforms like Twitch, which are, again, starting to really have significant influence in the eye gaming world. It's important again in regulated markets to know that we're gonna have, we're working with influencers that are very clear on what their capabilities are in terms of what they can say, what they can do and really how they can promote your gaming platform. The last point for regulated markets is really important and it sort of ties in with the third point about the ability to promote the pay-to-play platforms. And that is that tracking return on investment is much easier. So basically if we're able to run advertising directly to pay-to-play platforms, this means that we can track direct registrations, we can track first-time deposits if we're talking about eye gaming in particular and everything that is done from an advertising perspective is then optimized based on the goals or the KPIs that the platform is set. So again, if those are registrations, if those are FTDs, whatever those are, financial or registration-based, they can be easily tracked and then the advertising can then be optimized based on those goals. If we look at unregulated markets, the problem that we have, which unfortunately for better or worse is a very significant portion of Asia-Pacific is limited or no documentation and this is more the legality around eye gaming. There are some markets where it is very straightforward, I physically at the moment, I'm sitting in Japan in a place where it's a bit opaque with regards to what can and can't be done in the world of eye gaming. So it does muddy the waters a little bit with regards to what is actually able to be advertised. Generally the premium networks are going back to the Google's Yahoo! The big advertising platforms that exist will not allow you to run ads in these non-regulated markets or they will be incredibly strict with regards to what you can or cannot do. So for again, if I use this market as an example, the only way that you can run an ad in Japan for example would be you'd have to be a licensed operator of say boat racing or horse racing, which is legal to be promoted here online. So again, you have generally, the majority of the major players would not be, or major brands I should say would not allow you to run advertising on their platform in these sort of unregulated markets. In that case, you might be required to promote your free to play platforms. And I say risky because with free to play, there is always going to be additional costs to then generate conversion to your paid to play platform. If that's where you ultimately want to drive customers to, but that is a requirement in many cases to be able to operate freely in these unregulated markets. In the influencer world, there's a lot of confusion because influencers just like the advertisers are not necessarily sure what they can and can't do. So that then becomes more difficult and more time consuming to negotiate and discuss with individual influencers. And then again, if we compare the ROI ability to track, now you're tracking things like free play registrations or brand awareness, which means that now you've got additional costs as I mentioned to convert players to the pay to play model if you're looking at eye gaming in particular. Again, if you're looking at things like social games or e-gaming where you're not necessarily looking at a paid to play or casino style product, then those rules might be more relaxed. But if we're talking about specifically eye gaming and casinos, you can actually see here, I've pasted, I won't go through this in detail because at the time, but these are just some, for example, of Google's definitions of different types of casino or gaming related content bits and how they treat each of those with regards to the ability to advertise. And then within each country, Google has its own individual rules and regulations as does Yahoo, as does Facebook, as does all of the major operating platforms. So I'm gonna jump into display media. So when we talk about display media, there's sort of three key areas. I'm talking about programmatic solutions, direct buy and then of course, online affiliates, which are gonna be key. So programmatic solutions primarily forms such as Google, Yahoo, et cetera. And what they do is they allow for pixel-based tracking and targeting. So when you run ads in a particular market, so again, we're in a regulated market because we're running ads with one of these guys, we're going to be able to target very specific, very specific audiences based on the players that we're trying to acquire. And what it means is we can retarget to these audiences based on behavior or based on things that they do. So for example, if we wanna optimize based on registrations to a particular eye-gaming platform, what we can do is when we install tracking pixels through these programmatic solutions, we're basically able to say, okay, we're gonna run on these various networks based on the targeting, the age, the gender, the likes, the other types of brands these people are interested in basically drilling that audience down very specifically. And then we'll be able to see where those registrations are coming from or where those first time deposits, those FTDs are coming from. And then we'll be able to optimize and spend our advertising dollars more on the solutions which are driving those return on investment. The downside, of course, as I mentioned previously with programmatic solutions is that they're often very limited, especially in Asia Pacific with regards to the requirements for licensing in each target market or prior approval by the platform. So again, Google, Yahoo, Facebook all require pre-approval to run any of these types of solutions if you're offering a pay-to-play product. If you're offering something which is more along the lines of esports or along the lines of social games, much more liberal in terms of the requirements and much more open in terms of the requirements to promote an application or a platform which has registration to something that is not considered casino gaming. So it varies greatly based on whether or not we're talking about casino gaming, even social games, for example, here, you see this area says social casino games in the bottom right-hand corner of the slide. So these are games where there is no pay-to-play. There's no casino element. However, the games promoted are of a casino fashion. So again, depending on the type of game that you're offering, programmatic solutions will vary greatly based on the requirements. Now, Direct Buy solutions in my experience are primarily where a lot of operators of online gaming and iGaming go when it comes to focusing on players in Asia in addition to affiliates, which I'll talk about. So Direct Buy is basically very straightforward. It's negotiation with third-party platforms that are operating in both regulated and unregulated markets. So in some cases, we don't have the targeting abilities or the optimization opportunities. However, we're talking about very specifically targeted audiences. So these are unique networks. So for example, websites that may target, you know, sports betting enthusiasts or websites that target lottery enthusiasts or poker enthusiasts or general gaming enthusiasts outside of the affiliate world. And in these cases, oftentimes you're negotiating directly with them for a flat buy. So you're not necessarily paying a cost per click or something that's more traditional that you might pay for over here in programmatic. You're going to be negotiating flat rates. So I guess the bottom line with Direct Buy is that there are more opportunities. A lot of Direct Buy networks as well, I have here sort of, we call it high risk or adult network. So all that means is they're networks that really focus on the gaming industry, alcohol, tobacco, et cetera. So those networks do exist and they do allow you to run advertising in a variety of markets. And oftentimes, although a little bit more expensive than standard programmatic, they are incredibly successful at finding very targeted audiences based on, again, based on the types of websites that they represent. So in our case, we see a lot of the eye gaming companies that are entering, you know, the Asia Pacific market, specifically some of those which have operated in other markets throughout the world, moving to these sort of Direct Buy solutions that exist in virtually every country throughout Asia Pacific. Ultimately, affiliate solutions are key for any operator who's looking to enter the market. You know, this is very specific to the eye gaming world, but, you know, for those that are entering new markets, we oftentimes recommend people to work, you know, to start working in the affiliate world. So, you know, various affiliates in all the markets and every language exist in a variety of shapes and formats with different revenue plans and negotiation tactics. So when getting involved in affiliates, you know, it's really important to ensure that you've got, you know, the local market knowledge or somebody on the ground to help you basically with the expertise to partner with valid and legitimate affiliate operators in the market. So again, affiliates range greatly from the types of customers they target. You know, if you're looking at, you have e-games or live dealer, sports betting, lottery poker, et cetera. All of these different types of gaming formats are represented by various affiliates in every market that exists here. So affiliate solutions are the easiest and probably the fastest and one of the most important ways to enter the market when launching a specific product. However, these other solutions working backwards Direct Buy is incredibly important and incredibly profitable with regards to the ability to drive customers and programmatic the most difficult because of the regulatory requirements, but also very, very important. I've included a link here. I won't review this, but this is again, just for Google in particular, if you go to their support page, you can actually view every single market that exists every country and you can read these specific requirements based on the type of platform that you represent.  And it's actually incredibly clear how to apply and how to work with, in this case, Google, the same rules and regulations exist for different platforms, as I mentioned, Yahoo, Facebook, et cetera, also have very similar rules and regulations. Social media, so social media, in terms of the platforms, the three key areas that we break it down into, we look at the usual suspects, what I'm referring to your common social media platforms, your Facebook, your Instagrams, et cetera, blogs and affiliates that exist out in the market, as I mentioned, there are a variety of those and influencer marketing, which I'll spend a little bit more time talking about here. I think what's important to talk about with social media, when eye-gaining companies go to enter, specifically eye-gaining, where we see success for eye-gaining in social media is when it is not used as a platform to simply promote the product or the brand. So what does that mean? That means creating and focusing on a community relevant to your offering. So for example, some of the things that I've seen in the past that have worked very well, sites that are offering digital lottery products. So instead of promoting their digital lottery, they are specifically focused on creating a network, a news platform, where they have various announcements about global jackpots in the markets they operate, announcing winners and basically lottery news and information. And their goal on Facebook, in this particular case, is simply to grow a large-scale database of users who are interested in following lottery-related content. And that works out very well in the sense that they basically develop this massive database of lottery enthusiasts, of which they can then market to later upon reaching some level of critical mass. The same goes for eSports, sorry, for a sports book, excuse me, the same goes for sports book. Again, I've seen websites, websites, social media sites, pages that focus on specific sports stats. And again, the whole goal there is really in market to develop a, in market, in language, of course, to develop a community of followers who are interested in the particular offering that you're ultimately going to be pushing to them. So as I said, developing a critical mass before you attempt to hard sell a particular offering, eye-gaining offering, and then very important, similar to the programmatic side, really making sure you understand the content guidelines by region and by platform, because we've seen companies that have spent a lot of time and money building a community only to then try and run ads to have their page blocked or banned by Facebook or Instagram or any other social platform. And that is catastrophic. And very often it is more often than not, it's very difficult to reverse those decisions by the platform operators. So very important to be mindful of that when you're looking at social media. One of the questions that we get asked a lot is how much do influencers cost?  There are various answers to that, various answers to that based on the markets, based on the platforms. We see the majority of influencers on two or three key platforms, depending on the markets. TikTok is one for social media, but also YouTubers and VTubers, which exist on YouTube as well as platforms like Twitch, which have grown exponentially. And this number is by no means indicative, but it's one of the top questions we get asked when people try and enter the social media market or the influencer market, what do I have to spend? Again, I have here some very indicative numbers. This is what we see generally in the Asia Pacific marketplace. Again, it varies greatly, but it just gives you an idea of the types and investments that eye gaming operators need to make when looking at this. The final piece I'm gonna touch, and I've got about a minute or two left here, is search marketing. And I'm specifically referring to SEO, so increasing your page ranking on key search platforms in market. So what I have here is really just some, really again, high level, you could talk about SEO for hours, but really some high level items. And here we look at any company, whether they're doing it direct or working with an agency, regardless utilizing really strong third party tools to drive your SEO strategy. So it's very hard to do this. When I say on your own, you can do it as your own brand, but utilizing some tools that exist out there that will help cut through a lot of the work and help make your work much easier and identify the low hanging fruit for you. Understanding metrics across the competition. So not only your own competition, but global best practice sites and using platforms to understand, what are they doing? How are they targeting specific search terms? What types of websites are they linking to? All these things that matter. And I know that some of this is a bit generic to SEO in general, but it is incredibly important if you want to overall increase your search ranking and ultimately decrease your reliance on paid advertising, which is the ultimate goal of SEO. Of course, in marketing language, research, understanding, link back opportunities. So not only affiliates, a lot of people in the eye gaming world, we see them focused primarily on affiliate marketing when it comes to SEO. And affiliates are important, but understanding the other opportunities that exist in market to link back to or link back from, excuse me, is very key. Again, understanding the competitor's keyword ranking in by market and by language to develop your strategy around SEO and ultimately ROI forecasting. So if your goal is first time deposits or your goal is registrations and you have a value for those registrations, you should work on platforms that can run scenarios where you can say, okay, if we increase the word online sports book in the Indian market in English by two points or by two spaces or two points on a particular search engine, what does that mean to our bottom line? What simulation will we see with regards to increases in registrations and returns on investment in terms of deposits? All of these things are doable using third party tools and it's important to integrate that into your overall strategy. So again, I went very quick and very high level today and I just run over time. So I just very quickly as a summary, looking at the key things here, understanding the difference between the regulated and unregulated markets, opportunities and regulations there, social media, creating a community that's relevant to your products. You can create an amazing database of leads and then utilizing influencers to showcase your platform to the masses, running display media and advertising that is optimized specifically for your goals. So conversions or first time deposits. And remember that you could look at those traditional non-traditional networks which we consider high risk, we call them high risk but really related to the gaming industry. And again, really focus on the SEO side of things to overall decrease your reliance on paid advertising and focus more on your organic content. So I apologize, I've run a little bit over but I think I will ask, I'm back to Katie. Thank you, Chris. I know 20 minutes is really short time to explain what digital marketing can do for a gaming industry but thank you for being so sporting and giving us an overview on what all main points that we need to take care of while thinking of digital marketing for online gaming. So thank you, Chris, for your time and for being here present at the game on first edition. We would hope to see you again next year. Absolutely, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Chris. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I know there is a lot of information that's coming your way but make sure that you attend the next session as we are going to talk about esports being the number two Indian sport of the next ticket is that true? We will find out by our speaker, Vinit Karnik, business head entertainment, sports and live events at Group M. A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Karnik. Thanks, Khyati. Thanks, exchange for media. Hava Lahuja in particular to have put this fantastic forum together and what a way to start a fabulous journey in the entire available gaming ecosystem that we have. So great. I mean, absolutely grateful to be here. Thanks a lot for the invite. Let me try and share my screen. Can you see my screen? Yes, we can. Super, great, Khyati. So thanks again once again. So I think the topic is pretty straightforward and a bit provocative and I actually wanted to be provocative today because we have been talking about the esports, the gaming landscape for a while in India, but now it's a time for us to really scale this up and take it to the next level is the feeling and the sincere point that I wanted to make through this forum. And that's the reason why I thought of a very, very provocative topic today, saying that can esports be the number two sports in India? And I have lots of data through the next 10 minutes to support the provocation actually and see directionally which way do we go in terms of data versus reality? So let's take a deep dive into some of the key aspects. So in 2019, Mr. Mukesh Ambani said that gaming will be bigger than music movies. I mean, imagine Mr. Ambani making a statement like that is absolutely fabulous, isn't it? I mean, that's a great segue into what we want to eventually achieve in this business. Looking at some of the hard-coded data, we have seen 14X kind of an exponential growth in the Indian online gamers since 2010. So 14X kind of a growth from 2010 onwards. India is basically all more India is ruled by the mobile gaming gamers. I mean, the numbers on the screen are absolutely sensational to talk the least. So we have 250 million mobile gamers in India looking at 22 hours of time spent weekly viewing eSports online. 123% growth in price money in Indians eSports in 2000, from 2016 to 2018. 35 million, 35.8 million dollars raised by the eSports start-ups in the last five years. Three, average three number of mobile games on most Indians mobile phones. I mean, that's incredible, isn't it? With 80% India playing a mobile game on a daily basis. We have already seen Nazara's IPO doing extremely well this week itself. That itself is a great segue to the topic that we have today. Now let's look at what COVID-19 has done in terms of exploration for the growth of the gaming industry to us. 11% increase in eSports users per week. 21% increase in time spent by each user on eSports. 61% increase in eSports live stream viewership in week one of lockdown. 45% of Indian gamers started playing mobile games during lockdown. 50% spike in daily active users on platforms like GameG during lockdown. I mean, isn't that an incredible segue? Why do we not believe that we're looking at these numbers that we can't be a very, very competent compare ourselves with a lot of live action that's happening in the sporting ecosystem around the world and in India? So therefore, if you look at it, the announcement of the Asian Games 22 recognizing eSports as a metal sport, okay? It's a fabulous news for all of us. I think we should take that advantage of the momentum around it at an Asian game level and see how we can create magic around making it as successful as we all want it to be. So a couple of booster shots in addition to the Asian Games part in terms of the way we are seeing me personally and we at Gupema seeing in terms of how will, how can all these things help grow the entire eSports market is by legitimacy. I mean, the entire Asian Games initiative and whatever we are talking in terms of federations in terms of conferences like these, it basically brings legitimacy to the entire ecosystem, right? I mean, it brings acceptability as a metal sport, it builds careers, okay? That's a very, very important point because raising the price money pool, growing the competitiveness of the entire business actually is going to be very, very important. We all know that 50% of India is below the age of 25. I mean, if you look at India as a young country with an average age of about 26.8 years and we all know that youth today is driving the eSports subculture. And I think we should spend significant time in making sure this momentum is maintained for some time till it becomes a very, very established kind of a sector, yeah? Internet penetration in India we know arguably, I mean, we have the cheapest wireless internet in the world. The kind of increasing accessibility is driving the growth in eSports participation and consumption. I mean, that's a no brainer, right? Imagine the, look at the smartphone penetration. I mean, smartphone market in India is buzzing. I mean, whether it was COVID or lockdown, people were wanting to use various devices by those devices. So that's one sector which is buzzing with some really, very competitive smartphones access for Indians. Gaming and eSports startups, I mean, I just spoke about Lazara's IPO, right? I mean, the rising number of Indian startups in the gaming and eSports ecosystem is only growing. And in time to come, I think it's going to explode if I have to see some of the data points that are available in the public domain. So these are some of the booster shots we believe are going to be catapulting the entire industry over time and a lot of effort from all of us from a marketing standpoint, from a publishing standpoint, we'll have to come together to make sure this becomes, that this dream becomes a reality at some stage, yeah? So let's look at eSports and while we're looking, while we're talking about consumer participation and while we're talking about all the numbers in terms of how consumers are embracing data, embracing mobile phones, embracing gaming, can we look at eSports as a media product? Okay, that's another provocation that I wanted to bring to all your notice. Can eSports become a media product and create a platform for itself to look at multiple layers of engagement within the consumer ecosystem, within the industry ecosystem, within the framework that we all operate in, yeah? So therefore, one of the examples I thought of taking is and possibly look at a comparison of eSports is with live action, okay? So can eSports as a media product, it mimics the traditional sport, right? In five ways that I would talk about, okay? Today we have seen significant amount of numbers for live eSports viewing, yeah? eSports is unique, yeah? So you look at any live sport in the real world, okay? It's unique to its fans, it's unique to its consumers, it's watched live in the stadium, it's watched live on television sets or on streaming platforms. I think it's common, it's mimicking the traditional sports model. It's very seasonal, okay? Most of the sports around the world are seasonal from a timeline perspective, right? There is a fixed timeline of calendar that operates. So most of the tournaments worldwide and maybe in India also it would take shape, have got a seasonality, have some kind of a calendar that has to. The narrative itself is very, very similar, okay? So we have all seen the rags to riches story in the entire traditional sports ecosystem. We have seen a massive amount of grassroots talent coming right from the bottom of the pyramid from the rural areas to possibly become the poster boys of that country or around the world, okay? We see a similar sentiment echoing in the entire eSports and the gaming ecosystem, okay? The narrative is very similar to the rags and riches story tomorrow. I mean, nobody knew some of the top talent from India and around the world some years back, but today because of the entire ecosystem and the streaming platform that are showing the eSports tournaments live, these guys have become stars, superstars, yeah? More importantly, we see top quality sport in the traditional ecosystem, okay? We see the best talent in eSports as well competing actually with their peers either on console, either on PCs or on mobile phones, right? So I think that these five points are actually mimicking the traditional sport model, live, unique, seasonal narrative and quality in terms of competitiveness. It's, we are actually headed in the right direction towards making it one of the biggest consumable sporting properties worldwide. Just to give you some perspective in terms of the numbers from a YouTube point of view from March 2020 to January 2021, okay? Look at a comparison between sports and gaming, okay? The traditional sports and the gaming ecosystem. Monthly, average monthly views in the period from March 2020 to January 2021, 742 million for traditional sports against 3,338 million for gaming. Now I understand one of the points that people may have in their mind that sports is normally watched live, right? But that's the case with eSports as well. But today, even if you look at this chart as a comparison of content which is driving user interest, okay? Or a consumer interest, it's a great starting point to look at it for the increasing amount of interest the community is showing towards watching videos, watching various different products on gaming on YouTube. Look at the average monthly subscribers, okay? Or to some of the top channels while sports is at 2.8 million, gaming is at 20.5 million, almost 7.3x of the live sports economy. Look at the average monthly downloads, okay? 8.5k to 15.6k. And that's the reason why I thought of making this more provocative in terms of can eSports be the number sports for India in time to come. We spoke about the talent who's young. The whole philosophy is around catch them young and watch them grow. It's a very, very age-old theory. And I think it's very, very relevant to the eSports ecosystem as well. So let's look at some of the advertisers worldwide who have bought the entire frenzy on eSports quite early. We have seen significant amount of investors from Dell, Coca-Cola, MTV, Acer, Airtel, Red Bull, Intel worldwide. We have seen similar sentiments on some of these advertisers on the chart in India as well. They have taken positions in India already, okay? So the whole philosophy, the whole theory that I want to bring to the table is you need to ride the eSports bright wagon very, very early for you to reap benefits. Today is the time for you to evaluate various different opportunities and how can one relate to this target audience of the guys who are playing the eSports and embracing this medium going forward and look at building your brand affinity with them all time. So if you look at what's on offer, the key stakeholders in this ecosystem being the streaming platforms, the game publishers, teams which are created through various different individual talent pool, talent themselves as one of those influencers or endorsers the way you want to look at it. And of course the eSports tournaments. Or if you look at these five buckets, they're actually addressing multiple problems from advertising from a marketing perspective, okay? You can look at these five buckets from an endorsement standpoint. You can look at these buckets from a sponsorship standpoint from programmatic advertising standpoint from an exclusive content. And so this is what it delivers to the marketing community, to the advertising community, to the media community, okay? Now look at it from a point of view of programmatic advertising which is a pipe through the digital ecosystem. Collaborative content is something which drives a lot of eyeballs and we have seen the numbers on the previous slide in terms of the kind of downloads and the kind of time spent people are doing on YouTube. A serious amount of money is also being channelized through the in-game advertising ecosystem, or streaming integration, experiential marketing. Now these are all important facets of our everyday life in the media, marketing and advertising industry. Can we look at gaming with the same lens the way we have looked at sports in the last two decades? Is the provocation that I wanted to possibly set on this platform, okay? Therefore, I remind of one of the phrases that the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed at this point in time. And this beautiful quote comes from William Gibson who I have tremendous admiration for. Now, I mean, look at it, the future is all set. The data is all there. We are all seeing the momentum. We are all seeing the kind of conversations on various different platforms in the right direction. Can we now embrace this as a business opportunity? Can we now embrace this as an industry in India and just take off from here and look at scaling the entire product offering in the gaming and eSports ecosystem? On that provocative note, I wanted to thank you all for giving me the support to share my thoughts on this platform. And thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Mr. Karnik. It was a wonderful session. We'd love to hear more from you. And I want to ask all our audiences, what is your take on this? Will eSports become the number two sports in India? We know through statistics that India has taken 13% stake in the overall global eSports category. We are expected to reach $2.8 billion by 2022 and we have the youngest crowd in our country. So there is all the elements that require this industry to boom is already here with us in our country. So let us know what you think about it. We'd love to know and join our online conversation using the hashtag eForumGameOn. We'd love to hear your thoughts as well. Thank you so much, Mr. Karnik once again. And ladies and gentlemen, we're going straight into our next panel discussion, which we'll talk about how mobile is revolutionizing gaming in India. Charing this session is Mr. Nawal Ahuja, co-founder Exchange for Media. We have with us a stellar panelist here on this platform. I'd like to welcome Mr. Rajan Nawani, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, JetSynthesis. Mr. Siddharth Roy, Chief Operating Officer, Hangama Digital Media. Mr. Varun Mahna, Founder and CEO of Dungal Games. And Mr. Nitin Goel, Country Manager, Indian Subcontinent Game Loft. So very warm welcome to all of you. And I'd leave the screen to you, Mr. Ahuja, to take the discussion forward. Thank you, Khyati, and warm welcome to all the panelists. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for taking time out. I know Siddharth has a hard stop at 3.15, so we'll keep the panel crisp and short. Let me get straight into it. Gaming has become a huge area of interest. And to those of you who are listening, let me just share two or three pointers. One of the key reasons gaming has become so big is that globally gaming earns more money than all the other entertainment media put together. That's how big globally gaming is. And naturally, the inference we draw from there is that India has also headed the same way. So relatively it's a smaller industry, but guess what? One of the reports that I saw yesterday said by the end of this year, which is this financial year or the coming financial year, FY22, we'll have 500 million gamers a year. That's a huge number. And just like Vinay just said, 80% of people who have mobiles in India are already gaming. So from a pastime activity, which was seen as only kids would do to then graduating to people who had access to only PC and consoles, gaming truly has gone mainline. It's gone mass. And COVID naturally has given it a very big fillip. So we are here to discuss how mobile has really given the gaming world a huge massive win in the sales. And on the other side, what are the challenges yet to be sort of overcome? So let me start with Siddharth. Siddharth, it is an obvious one that penetration of mobile has really helped pick up of gaming habit in India. The mobile penetration is huge. People are accessing games on their mobiles. And as we know, now the need for a PC or console has gone away. People have decent quality smartphones which can be used for gaming. Beyond these obvious pointers, what are the two, three other things in which mobile is really helping the gaming ecosystem lift up? Thanks, Naval. Thanks, Exchange for Media for giving us, giving me a chance to be part of the panel. I believe overall, Naval, anything to do with gaming and the fact that India is one of the youngest countries in the world, I mean, it is completely correlated in that sense. The fact that India is expected to be over 800 plus smartphone base, that's a very, very large and potent play with regards to connectivity and then gaming being brought in as a entertainment construct in that sense. Any kind of data, in any way you slice it, you would see that 75 to 80% of consumers who pick up a device and get connected are looking at some form of entertainment and gaming becomes in that sense a very, very default entry point. And casual gaming in India is a very large play keeping in mind we have a young country, propensity to pay may be low, but they are willing to consume advertising to be able to consume casual gaming in that sense. So all of that links to what even Vinit spoke about prior to this, which was listening to his data sets and all, all going well because when you even talk about esports, it's actually a set of games that drives that entire ecosystem. And consumers are consuming all formats of gaming be it immersive, be it casual and that's driving that opportunity. In India, the advantage is the fact that as younger consumers are coming online, there is definitely a format of consumption that is being driven. With people being locked in COVID, there were over 45 to 50 million new consumer gaming consumers that came in in FY21 itself. That was because other formats of entertainment was not necessarily because if you look at film entertainment or you look at music, which comes out of our movies, if content is not being released, then what's the kind of content that consumers are consuming? So that's one. The second big play out has been time spent and that has been increasingly growing, exponentially grows growing. Any kind of data set that you read, people are talking about roughly about eight and a half hours per week of casual gaming happening on mobile devices. Binge consumers are gaming as much as three hours a day. All of that is reflective of a certain sense and direction that is being created. So in a nutshell, as an opening statement, it's great timing. The fact that there is a community out there that is consuming gaming, does Indian gaming community, both from the developer standpoint and the publisher standpoint, have the ability to go out and put out products which became sustainable business playouts in the future. Yeah, fair point, Siddharth. I'll come to you in a short while on that. Just to buttress your point, yesterday again, the report I'm talking about in-movie presented a report which said time spent, weekly time spent on gaming is three hours, seven minutes, and that compared to three hours, 42 minutes and television was four hours. So as you imagine, gaming is already up there in terms of time spent with other media and very soon India is possibly going to be the second highest number of gamers in the world. So that's a huge number. Nitin, let me come to you and ask you, as a gaming company, of course you are, I'm sure you're bullish on India, what's happening, but what are some of the challenges in the market that you see when it comes to scaling up? You know, it's like how the mobile story in India started 80 years back, the initial adoption was very fast, but for the market to kind of get to a stage where monetization is possible really well, it's a long time. So what are the challenges that you foresee coming in the way? Thanks, Nalo, for the invite. Yeah, with respect to just coming straight on to the point, with respect to the challenges that we are actually talking about, with respect to the gaming in the Indian market, there, we have been like present in the market for almost like 15 years. And one of the things that we have identified with the mobile gaming aspect is the element of disruption which actually it has gone through over the last 15 years. Like Zain, being the part of like the global company and earlier having World BDA, what we actually witnessed like massive disruption which happened across in like 2010 when Google and Apple came into the market, that actually eventually helped the mobile ecosystem evolve to the state where in today, like the mobile gaming is the biggest source of revenue generation, then we look at the overall gaming space. Or when we look at the Indian market from the mobile gaming perspective, what we have identified as the biggest challenge is the monetization for us. Like Zain, they have been like a neighbors which are falling in place in terms of like the initial issue that I remember I say in 2010 when we used to have and I used to prepare presentations where we used to talk about like the data connectivity being a big, big issue. We had just like 15 million GPRS connected devices at that point in time, particularly like we are talking about like 700 million users who are connected. That has actually helped, like in terms of growing the usage, there are more players. Now we're talking about different set of numbers which come across like it's about the users, like some say 300 million, some say 350, but that's the best number to talk about, right Zain? Another aspect that you actually identify is basically the availability of the quality handsets. So which is also a good enabler, which has happened, which is actually drawing in a lot of people actually towards more hardcore gaming now. And there have been certain positive developments that we have seen across over the last two years. I would say there's a lot of learnings which are coming across through some of the work done by the competitors in the market. We are also in our way trying to absorb those kind of things which the people are trying to do. However, for us like the biggest challenge I would say is the fact, we tend to actually compare also with the European markets or the Western markets or the US market. And in terms of like the realization per user is much higher than what you actually derive out in the market. And second that we also identify as one of the big challenges is the retention among the users, right? So that's another big issue considering the fact the game sizes that we have like so be a bit heavier in size, like some like two gig in class, which we identify as one of the issues when it comes to retention among the gamers on their side and we see a significant chance coming across. So these are the kind of things that we need to address on our side. And I believe the potential is massive. There are new monetization mediums which are evolving in the market. And it's somewhere as an organization as a pair. We have to think and adapt ourselves into the new evolution which is happening across in terms of monetization. Like just to give you an example, like say you have these cases of real money gaming aspect which is actually doing massive out here in India. I think that could be one of the things to look at. So just to put it in perspective, I was looking at R2 numbers. India R2 is less than a dollar right now per gamer. Globally that average is almost $65. So there is naturally a very big ground to cover and let me bring in Rajan. Rajan, we've had a chat about what kind of gaming world ecosystem is evolving in India. How do you think that there are some of the ways in which this gap between Indian R2 per gamer versus the global one can be covered over the next few years? Yeah, thanks. It was a pleasure to be here with you. You know, I think you raised the point that I think everyone in the gaming industry is trying to find an answer to. And I think the best way to really look at it is, how do you really look at the journey or the lifetime value of a gamer around the game? And I think the way we've looked at it particularly is that we went pretty aggressive and invested across the entire ecosystem because being able to catch a casual gamer, then work the journey with that casual gamer to being a mid-core gamer, and then to become a professional gamer through eSports is one way in which we have looked at the journey of the gamer. So that really takes care of the value you can derive from the gamer as a consumer of your product or any other entertainment product. So that's what's the second angle to this is the entire brand sponsors, endorsement, all the other industries that can benefit from this gamer and this user. And I think that one is a big one to get unlocked in India because if we look at it until now, the entire area of advertising as well as sponsorship, et cetera, on the gaming side has been so far compared to anywhere in the world and even otherwise, it's a very negligible number. I mean, digital itself is a very insignificant number when it comes to the total marketing dollars that are spent, but growing rapidly. So I think there, the models that will come in because of this multi-format, multi-platform ways that the same gamer is monetized, can become a big difference that will happen in the future. I think gaming from a media angle is also becoming a very strong aspect today. So advertisers are really looking at that in case of the audience. Again, what you just said, right? The time spent by a gamer is very clearly indicative of what value advertisers will derive. The key problem has of course been, we do not have like a bark on the digital world earlier when those ratings came up and now there are other challenges and issues around that in a country like India. So how do you really validate the impact that brands are having on through these platforms? Where are the credible publishers? Where are the localized content? So I think it's absolutely a long journey and India in the relative scope of the gaming industry as you rightly pointed out, it's some 1%. Even if you just take the traditional gaming industry which comprises mobile, PC and console, PC and console, we completely messed up. But I think with 5G and with other technologies that are going to drive this, the key change now is the social aspects that gamers have found coming out of the pandemic. I mean, so many gamers have made new friends in the pandemic through gaming community. So I think it's the new social wave. So there are many aspects to gaming that are thriving. But we are all at sub parts, a lot of catch up to do. And I think how we fuel this as an industry is something that we all probably need to work together. And I think that's something that we're trying to do, work with government, work with other industries, stakeholders, as well as the community that's going to shape this. And I think the monetization, the value creation are all things that we're definitely going to follow. And we're already seeing trends towards that. Yeah, I think perception built up is an important part of what you sell to advertisers. Gaming, as I mentioned at the start, has always been seen as a very casual, non-serious activity in which people don't sort of very seriously engage. But I had two eye-opening statements made yesterday or data points to me, which is that in India, almost 40% of the population that is gaming is women. So that's a very important key number for advertisers to remember. And the other aspect about gaming also is that the advertising that you're serving inside of games, a large number of people are choosing to consume that advertising because of the fact that you don't want to pay to skip that advertising. And hence the recall of those ads is very high. So I think these are two important data points that some advertisers might be missing and it might need reinforcement. Let me ask, now jump across to Varun. Varun, you are a co-founder of a gaming company. And I'm sure, I mean, Nazara has been a sort of a past-breaking company in the domain and the IPO doing well, really augurs well for the industry. But how do you think the gaming industry can cover this path from being in a nascent stage when it comes to monetization to start delivering value for shareholders? Thanks, Naval. Thanks for the introduction and pleasure to be on the panel. Though the stage where we are with the Indian gaming industry, you rightly said we're at the nascent stage, the utmost importance right now as a gaming operator is to educate the users, educate the masses about what really is gaming. So there is a perception between gaming and gambling. There is a slight confusion as to which is what. So it's important to clearly differentiate what is gaming and what is gambling. It is important from an operator point of view to keep driving the point that, you know, there is a stark difference between gambling and gaming. And hence we have to get that taboo out in the people's mind that this is something which is wrong, this is something which has bad connotations. Traditionally, when we guys were in school, say a couple of decades ago, gaming and, you know, playing video game was often seen as a bad habit to have in a child. But now that is changing. Gamification is actually something which is involving a lot of, you know, positive impact, speed in the corporate world, speed in schools, speed in education. So it has different impacts which are there. When it comes to real-money gaming, it becomes slightly more trickier because when money is involved, there are different connotations which will be applied. So from an operator's point of view, it's very important to distinguish between the skill-based gaming and the gambling aspect which is the illegal part of it. Also something which is very important from an operator's point of view when it comes to real-money gaming, I believe, is inculcating responsible gaming within your platforms.  It has to be an utmost priority apart from technology, product, what promotions offers you're giving. Responsible gaming plays a very important role to educate the users that, you know, you have to be careful also while playing games on certain platforms. And I believe once we start delivering responsible gaming with technology and user education, we will start seeing hordes of people coming on board and playing on different platforms, trying out their skills and engaging with the platforms at a better level. To give you an example, fantasy sports, prime example, six years ago, no one knew about fantasy sports in India. It was a new subject. People, you know, had zero idea if you can make money from your knowledge as well. But Dream 11 took the onus of educating the masses. They reached out on mass media to millions of consumers and educated them that, you know, this is a game of skill you can play and you can win some money out of it. And now it's something which is very common. I mean, even in tier two, tier three, tier four cities, we are seeing massive population playing fantasy sports in India. That is something which has to be done for different aspects of real-money gaming. And once that happens, coupled with responsible gaming, I'm sure we will see tremendous value for the shareholders who are invested in different gaming companies because the market is right. The Indian market is right now, I believe at the cost of that explosive growth where in another five to 10 years time, this would be a main sector like your e-commerce or like your head type or fintech. Gaming is going to be that big, big sector where we are going to see millions of dollars being invested. And we've already seen a couple of unicorns, but hopefully many more are in the pipeline. Yes, just to put that in perspective, given the small size of the industry right now, real-money gaming is almost 60% of the industry revenue. It's not bad because the industry size is small, but as you rightly said, RMG as real-money gaming is called, is likely to face a lot of headwinds, especially regulatory headwinds, unless and unless this perception is corrected. What would you say about that, Nikin? What are the challenges that the real-money gaming industry can expect over the next two years? Yeah, I think the most important aspect is, as well mentioned, it's about ensuring that it is taking into consideration that the societal aspect of it is taken care of. And there is a definite gray area which exists, and that's something that we identified internally in our system as well. When we were actually talking to our guys in HQ, they associated it to gambling. So how do you actually ensure that you are able to dissociate it from gambling and showcase it as a competitive skill-based gaming, which is actually based on pooling of participation fee by the users rather than actually dependent on sponsors as it's mostly the case with these folks. Basically, in that case, and that's why I see this actually has been able to grow to the level it has grown over the last two, three years. And so when you come across with respect to the eSports, more about like this sponsored event wherein you are actually going and getting the grants to invest into those kinds of initiatives, which is like difficult thing to achieve. And that's where we have seen this kind of significant uptake coming across with the real money gaming. Only aspect that we need to take care of is to ensure that how you make sure that it's a responsible gaming, how do you ensure that the people don't lose out big in this. So the platforms have to evolve on their side and regulate themselves. In order to ensure that these issues are well taken care of. Yes, Siddharth, anything you can add to that? I actually what Rajan was saying was so apt that at the end of the day, I think the overall ecosystem is still continuing to grow. And in terms of revenues, where do the revenues lie? Now let's talk about gaming. The fact that the total advertising block has a sizable amount of demand to supply play out. There is supply that is growing exponentially and there's not enough ad dollars chasing that. So when a brand looks at touching community, it doesn't make a difference that he touched from gaming or from video or any other space. He's looking at the quality of consumer segments that he can drive into. Now when that happens, what is the amount of gaming and sessions that are being done? That is a given. I mean, India is exponentially exploding in terms of consumption. Now is there enough money chasing that effective supply for sustainability of the game that been put out? And to me, that's the journey. Today, when we talk about it, we get very excited about the fantasy gaming spaces or the real money gaming space because the fantasy gaming space for whatever it's worth, if you were to look at the business models of those, they are today on a growth-driven model. Each of them are writing sizable values as negatives into their book because their focus is very different about creating large communities and growth in that sense. And there is money at play because there is the pool and then there is that earn that happens off of the pool. In real money gaming, it is the unit economics. Yes, there is a play out that happens where real money game are built across casual, across immersive, across all formats of real money gaming. And there is that great that every form of gaming may turn to be real money, which is not the case. There are very large IPs globally that have been built. And people like Rajan and us and Nitin, all of us, have in our own way built in-app, published large games over the years which have made money in play. It could be in the form of IP-based Bollywood titles that have come in of certain size and scale, Krish, MS Dhoni and others. And game law is a classic example where they've got global IPs that they've brought in and from the time that Edge was there where browser-based gaming was happening through the entire journey, gaming has been there and it's actually had sustainable economics. Currently, I believe the way to look at it is that there is a short-term view and a long-term view. The short-term view is gaming in every form in India today is growing. If fantasy and real money and others are investing in their effective growth and they're driving their business and funneled objectives, the casual gaming, which in my mind is literally the largest community out there. And when you talk about another and you say 40% women, it is bang-on because globally, women drive casual gaming. It's a known fact. The entire social space of casual gaming that came in through, if you remember, the browser play on Facebook. Allah, Rajan, if you remember three, four years, five years back, it was largely driven through women as high as 65, 70% in play. So that to me is where the journey is. So I don't believe casual gaming and Indian publishers and gamers who are developing games do not have an ability to build out gaming which has sustainability. I mean, Rajan and me were on another panel together sometime back and Rajan, if you remember, we talked about Ludo as an example. Ludo is a form of, I mean, Ludo King is a classic case study on how a game is built, which is extremely socially relevant and localized for the Indian market. And is brought in as a manifest into casual gaming, which can have single gaming all the way into multiplayer and you can build out on how you wanna go and build out the IP in that market here. I think fair points. I've just been sent a message we have over the last two minutes. So what I'll do is I'll go around to each of you and ask you one simple question. Next, three, five years, forecast. The industry is projected to be $2 billion in revenue by the end of the next financial year, which is only 12 months away. Three to five years, what's your forecast of the industry size? And what do you think will require for the industry to accelerate itself towards that number? Siddharth, since you're already talking, maybe you can start with this. I think it's gonna be very exciting. The way I look at it with 300 million gamers already, I believe we'll be about 500 plus gaming gamers growing at an average CAGR of about 40 to 60 million users being added year on year in that sense. I believe the add-dollar play out will come to the party. The question is, will the gaming sessions and the gaming community and segments give them the equitable cost to reach that they're seeking? And I believe we will be able to give because globally, gaming as a format delivers for brands. So there again, as you rightly said, Indians are willing to see advertising to get their effective coins and bonuses. I believe gaming is a great way to communicate that entire funnel. In fact, right after this, we have a session from David Daniel who's part of Timler Globally and Mercedes as we all know is one of the brands that really use gaming really well. Rajan, quickly on to you. What's your take? No, I completely resonate what Siddharth said. I think the gaming industry today, as I said, it's a sub-billion, $170 billion or $180 billion industry as you look at it. So the catch up for India is massive. And just data tells you, right? If we have 13% of the world's downloads on mobile and mobile is the fastest growing platform there, there's no question that India will continue to grow. So I look at the CAGR, exactly in the range of 40 to 50% annually. And if you were to compound that over five years, you can imagine where India could be, particularly as a size of industry. More interestingly, there are many global gaming studios that are using Indian talent. So I think India becoming a part of the global supply chain in the gaming industries. Another very interesting format in eSports. We are one of our companies that we started five years ago not doing gaming. It's already the third largest eSports company in the world. And I think you have Siddharth speaking later on this, even in terms of value and the way things are happening. So there's no question about it that over a period of time, if we combine all these different facets and aspects of gaming, India will be center stage. Really, how do we handle our definition of gaming? India is a great country where all models exist. How does the government, the states, we are seeing states, gaming being a state subject. All of these could be not, I wouldn't say impediment, but they could be different people coming in with different views. And all are fair, all are right in their own way. I think for us as an industry, it would be to benchmark against what is the law of the land? How are we able to create within that ecosystem? What is right for India? What is right for the Indian gamers? And that way, capture a share of the global market. But I would really be surprised if maybe not five years, but at least in a period of a decade, we don't get into the double digit of the global gaming world. That would be a huge thing. You've got a number to aim at, Nitin, you are closing thoughts on this. So what we believe potentially, the growth is going to come across where the monetization mediums, where an IAP had been dragged for a while, but we believe that would be a significant uptake, which would come across over the next few years as the gamers evolve in the Indian market. Besides the view, there are new monetization mediums which are evolving, which are coming across in India and India being a very competitive market. I believe that should also help bring in a significant growth. With respect to the advertising, I believe the value add would come across through innovations and the native kind of integrations that we can bring across because the current advertising stack, if you look at the commodity add-ins, I think there are too many players and too much of inventory which is there, which doesn't really help from the gaming industry perspective. So, but I simply agree with respect to the kind of growth that we project, it's definitely gonna be somewhere in the range of like 30 to 40% CAGR over the next five years for the Indian market. Lian, Varun, you are a founder, you are an entrepreneur, and all of this must be music to the ears, but running a company with different kettle of fish, what's your take on this? So, now I agree with Rajarjan and then over the numbers because I'm very bullish about the sector. I feel we might even see a higher growth percentage and we might be crushing the $3 billion mark in less than 12 months, actually. From a gaming ecosystem point of view, I would like to point out a couple of things which probably haven't been touched upon so far. So, point number one, we'll see a lot of gaming companies, a lot of startups around the gaming ecosystem coming in the next five years for sure. I feel this is the decade of for the gaming sector in India. Definitely a lot of publishers, a lot of operators, a lot of people who are into advertisements. We'll see a lot of startups around the gaming ecosystem. Probably employment wise, the sector will drive a lot of employment for our country in the next 10 years in this sector. We will see a lot of professional gamers coming out of our country representing us at a national, international level. Ecosystem wise, I feel we are right there now to start exploring. From the legal aspect, there are a certain regulations which need to come in now. I think the government has to take notice of this sector and start regulating it in the near future so that we can actually build a more responsible gaming ecosystem for our gamers and the consumers. I also feel another two, three years down the line we will see some big mergers, some big acquisitions happening in the sector as well. I do see it happening in the real money gaming sector in the next five years for sure where we will see clear leaders emerging in the next half a decade. And I'm very bullish about the sector. Definitely there are challenges involved because it's so young, people haven't really seen what challenges lie ahead. So that is the fun part of being an entrepreneur as well. And I personally feel we will be crushing the 30, 40% CAGR growth easily in the next five years. Fantastic on that optimistic note. Thank you to all the panelists for joining us. Sorry. It seems like early days of internet go lots to look forward to. Thank you. A lot of growth expected from the domain. Thank you to all the panelists for joining us. Thank you so much, Mr. Hoosier, for stirring this very interesting conversation. And once again, we'd like to thank all our panelists for taking out the time and sharing their insights. The gaming industry seems to be looking up. We have such optimistic views from our panelists as well. Tell us about your views or your key takeaways from the session so far. Thank you so much, Mr. Hoosier, for sharing this very interesting conversation. And once again, we'd like to thank all our panelists for taking out the time and sharing their insights. Using the hashtag E4M game on. Do tweet to us and join our online conversation. We're now moving towards our next session, which we'll talk about insights on gaming from a recommendation engine perspective. We have with us Mr. Nath of Perry, Vice President, Global Brand and Agency Development, Tabula. Please join us from Tel Aviv. A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Perry. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much, Exchange for Media for inviting me to participate in this event. I'm honored. My name is Nath of Perry. I'm the VP of Brands and Agencies globally here at Tabula. And today I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes to share some of our findings around how the gaming industry can really succeed on the open web with Tabula. Let me share my screen. So interestingly, 2020 was a year of a global pandemic, a year of economic crisis, a year of significant headwinds in many different businesses and many different industries, including the advertising industry. Research, however, suggests that with this coronavirus lockdown phenomenon, global gaming grew in revenue by almost 10% to a total of $159 billion revenue industry. Asia continues to dominate this global gaming industry and accounts for about 49% of that. Now, interestingly, just like the gaming industry flourished, we also saw a surge in media consumption in the open web. At the peak of the first lockdown, we could see that readership on the open web for news and other online content grew by 46%. Until today, the year-on-year growth on readership is substantial at about 28% higher versus last year. Not only do we see that people consume more news, consume more content online, but actually by examining our Tabula data, we can also see that behaviors are changing. For instance, people are reading content when they wake up. They don't wait for midday or the afternoon. They start to consume content first thing in the morning. Another interesting example is that readership happens scattered throughout the week. If before COVID, people were reading more on the weekends, now they're reading all throughout the week. What does this mean for the gaming industry in India? Well, it's been very interesting to follow that because in 2020, we've seen exponential growth in interest for gaming content on the open web in India. I'll give you some numbers to digest. Page views and site visits on gaming sites and on gaming related content have grown by 32% versus 2019, 32% increase. Engagement, I think about CTRs and clicks on gaming related content has grown by 53%. People are much more interested to engage with gaming related content. And very interesting point in India, 40% of the spend that was invested in Tabula in the gaming industry was invested in regional websites addressing people across the country in their local languages. So the open web is a massive opportunity for the gaming industry. And we wanted to give you three things to remember which we think are the key success factors for gaming advertisers. Scale, safety and specificity. Let's talk about each of them separately. Scale, our scale at Tabula is undeniable. We reached 1.4 billion people monthly globally. We power over 1 trillion recommendations per month and we've partnered with over 9,000 publishers across the world to create a very, very broad network of partnerships that can allow advertisers to reach scale. In India, this translates into 350 million monthly users that go through our network. This presents a significant reach and scale opportunity for gaming companies as they try to increase their market share. Safety. So underpinning our platform is the power of control. We have worked very hard on producing cutting edge, brand safety and suitability tools to give advertisers, our partners, the power to choose their experience. Meet the specific brand safety and suitability needs for each campaign. You can control your ad adjacency, you can control the context and the content in which your ad will appear, and you can today verify brand safety verification criteria with third parties that you trust such as IAS, Moat and others. Finally, specificity. We believe that different marketeers have different needs, and what we proud ourselves is that our platform delivers the capabilities through the marketing funnel, from awareness through conversions, through first date deposits, loyalty, and everything in between. Whether you need to increase your awareness for a brand new game, whether you want to drive traffic to your site or drive a high ratio of registration, the high ratio of registrations to deposits, Tabula has the targeting solution, the ad formats, and the optimization algorithms to get you to your goal. Don't take my word for it. We wanted to bring you some examples of gaming clients, both based in India as well as global ones, that will help you illustrate the three points that I've talked about, scale, safety, and specificity. Now it's really interesting to see that we have clients from all over the gaming industry, browser and mobile, casual gaming as well as fantasy sports, Rummy and poker, and they have diverse KPIs, which we've been able to serve from registrations to deposits, to installs, etc. So let's look at a few examples. InnoGames. InnoGames is a great company based in Germany, approaching and addressing the global markets. Their objective with Tabula was to grow their user base and reach new potential players. InnoGames worked with Tabula first on PC and then saw success and moved into the mobile space, both in Europe and the US markets. Perrin, the senior marketing manager quoted, we started user acquisition for our mobile games on the Tabula network. Our first campaigns showed promising volumes and quality and Tabula became a mobile partner for InnoGames for the existing and upcoming titles. So we have the scale. Your own Made in India, My 11 Circle. This is one of India's top three fantasy sports platforms trusted by 17 million sports enthusiasts. And if you look at what Siraj, the VP of My 11 Circle said, is with Tabula's focus on brand safety, we were sure that our ads will appear next to the relevant ads and we don't have to sacrifice brand safety with continue as we continue to extend awesome game-playing experiences to more players. Brand safety is paramount to the success of our campaigns and we're happy to deliver cutting-edge brand safety solutions. And finally, Good Game, another European client. They needed to really focus on quality of users to improve engagement and existing users globally. For them, it was all about quality and Tabula, with our specific solutions, were able to deliver 300% increase in player growth. As Mary J. Kim from Good Game said, instead of focusing solely on conversions, we started seeing a bigger impact from users inside that already play and engage with the games. So we're talking about a lifetime value optimization here. Look, my time is about to run out. I wanted to remind you that the open web is a massive opportunity. In fact, people spend 20 to 25% of their time online reading editorial content, reading things that they are interested in and want to discover about. I hope I was able to demonstrate that Tabula can drive scale, safety, and specificity to drive your marketing objectives. Come talk to us. Thank you very much for your time and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope all of you have been joining our online conversation using the hashtag E4M Game On. We have another session coming up, which is going to be a case study on gaming and marketing possibilities. To do so, may I please welcome and invite Mr. Amit Thehte, Journal Manager, Marketing and Customer Journey, Mercedes-Benz, India. A very warm welcome to you. Yeah, thank you so much for that short introduction and first of all, even before I start, I must thank E4Media and all the participants for, you know, giving us this opportunity to be here and also join with my colleague, David, who is helping me on the presentation. He is basically responsible for gaming, so I would say he's an expert of the topic. I was present at the conference a bit before only and I also was witness to the panel discussion that happened and also the previous talk that was there and to, I mean, it was only beneficial to me in terms of, you know, a lot of knowledge and, you know, I could actually make out that, you know, the gaming industry is going in absolutely right direction and there are so many facts and figures that, you know, one could hear that only goes to build up the confidence as a market here for me. So in my short presentation, I'm going to focus on, you know, more of strategy and the marketing approach to it. Of course there are certain details that we have from our internal, you know, analysis as well as, you know, researchers. So first of all, I would say that gaming as a perception probably from our point of view is not an area that we have ventured too much in India, but yes, globally it has already started to be taking on board and it's no more a child's way. It's definitely much more evolved, a matured platform wherein, you know, if you just have a glance at the figures around 165 billion dollar industry and it's actually overwhelming. It's because of the accessibility because of, you know, one can actually get on to the gaming from the place of his own convenience it has become so popular that, you know, the industry is going at such a rapid pace. Also, our understanding is about, you know, around, say, 50% of the gaming is contributed from, say, mobile phones and at the same time, I would say that with today's cloud technology it has basically only been contributing to expanding the gaming world and that basically becomes gaming a very convenient platform for engagement and it accesses basically it fuels your accessibility. It also you know, if you go to see the kind of popularity the gaming world has right from your clash of clans, etc. Where in, what is the reason behind it? It's basically, you know, it's easily accessible. Anybody can just get on to it. From there to your professional gaming, I think it's more of, you know, more of the engagement that people are trying people are finding interesting day-by-day and that's the reason I think we also believe that, you know, it's the platform that one has to be going next. So if I move to the next one, yeah here basically what I'm trying to say is some figures with our you know, internal analysis wherein the age group for gaming is very, very young. So around 85% of the audience is around 18 to 34 years old. 34% of them are they are more fans with full time career. So that means these people alongside managing their own careers, successful entrepreneurs, they have their own businesses, they still manage gaming because of course it consumes a lot of time then you also have around 32% of them are into higher income bracket. So maybe the maybe the conceptions around gaming that you know, somebody who doesn't somebody who's into gaming is not a successful professionalism myth. These are very, very highly successful professionals and they are still managing their passion for gaming and I heard on the panel that you know in India 40% is the audience which is female audience for gaming. Globally the figures are around slightly skewed around 71% is what our understanding is male dominated target audience. Now at the at the helm of eSport, these are all very, very highly educated, tech-savvy kind of millennia at present. They belong to very affluent backgrounds they understand what gaming means. They understand the facts figures analytics behind it. They are extremely modern. They want to be in the area where they actually have they have found their own passion and this also is somewhat similar to our own target audience. So the traditional brands if you see like us or maybe say Red Bull, everybody is entering gaming globally. The reason is we have kind of overlap of that target audience and this also is probably because the online gaming works is very, very similar to any other sport traditionally has been working. So it is layered. There are people who are who are the sponsors there are teams which are professionals there are amateurs there are people who enjoyed only watching it. There are people who really like to participate and as a brand we are taking the cognizance of the same and we understand that this could be definitely a way to go ahead. So we go to the next one here basically as regards to the Mercedes Benz environment globally we have a type with online gaming in 2019 I think we had one on-ground event with ESL at Mumbai and David both of us were part of that event and it was quite a good success. However of course I mean I feel that the target audience needs to be slightly more matured for the luxury brand in India. However we are on the set of getting into gaming in India as well when we saw that during the time of pandemic the on-ground events were not happening. For example Formula One was a big challenge and Mercedes Benz is known for its seventh year undisputed championship at the Motorsport Formula One and that's where we shifted on to online Formula One as a sport and it gained immense viewership. The figures tell me around say 30 million people were watching this online and our best of our race drivers were actually participating there. Apart from that also we are also working on say GT racing etc in terms of simulators and how to take them online from on-ground. That also is happening parallely so that it's being viewed very very seriously. As regards to the future now being a car company the gaming has to have some integration definitely with the car. So if you see a picture on extreme right is basically something that we are working upon is in car gaming and recently in one of the forums it was announced of course it is at a development stage. So imagine a traffic jam and then you don't have much to do and you can play a game on your you know the console of the car. I mean it's going to be really cool. So this is probably the technology where we are looking at and in future when autonomous driving also comes in frankly you just have to tell your car to take you from point A to point B and then all you are left with doing in a car is probably to play a game. Of course at a conceptual level and still being worked upon. That said I have a short, very short promotional film if we could play that next product as to how do we play the music. Each one unique with astonishing power in a league of their own unstoppable master warriors shall die seeking glory we live it, we breathe it we have each other's battles battles are not one alone together we become legends icons of a new generation yeah so that is how you know an integration of gaming along with the right set of product presentation was just one of the examples that I wanted to show coming to my last slide it's basically now what are we trying to do here in India. So as I already mentioned we associated globally ESL and the first event happened at Mumbai 2019 and unfortunately after that it couldn't continue because of the obvious reasons but as I said right now the audience needs to be little more in place for the luxury karma. However we definitely see a future with online gaming and we would like to think about this as a platform as regards to a little different aspect and a different virtue for gaming. So what you see in the center there is an image where a gentleman is actually team of the golf game of golf we have a 20 year old property called Mercedes Trophy which is a corporate golf tournament for our customers extremely top and exclusive experience and we had to unfortunately discontinue it last year due to pandemic but this year we thought that we should take it at a different level and give a little different kind of an experience. So we have taken it online as in it's going to be a simulator where the customers will come to Mercedes Benz showroom they will play a round of golf and the winners from there will be titled to play on-ground tournament which is a national final and then they can further go to represent the team India at Germany and this for a golfer it's a very big what do you say peg or very big thing to look forward to now why am I mentioning particularly this topic here is though it's not a pure purebred online gaming however it is somewhere very close in the same area where in there is a physical physical interaction also there is a digital interaction and this is how I think a marketer can make the best use of both of these environments the way ESL was organized where in physically people were present on ground we had our product displays there we could interact with the people and that's how we can look at similarly Mercedes Trophy with its physical kind of an outart where in we can get to interact with our customers they can come, they can see our products they will be hosted at the dealership so that there is a product integration at the same time they can play a game on a simulator the scores will be calculated online they get their analysis etc so it's a different level and it's a different thought in the similar area to kind of appraise the round as to what as a luxury brand we are also trying to do going forward it's going to be as I mentioned it seems to be quite promising as a platform that we definitely look forward to and we would like to experiment here definitely we would like to study the platform little more ensure that it's right now getting matured for the target audience and then we would like to venture into it and as regards to our presence in terms of online gaming in India as I already mentioned it's right now it is limited to global types extension in the local markets and that's how we are looking at it but overall I would say as a marketer I am quite positive about online gaming and its deployment in the country so I think that's more or less from my side and yeah, that's it should you have any questions I am happy to answer and thank you very much again once again for this opportunity and having us here, thank you Thank you so much Amit that was a wonderful presentation unfortunately because of time we can't do questions but we would definitely like to thank you for your time and sharing these insights here with us on the first ever edition of eForum Game On, so thank you once again thank you so much have a nice day thank you ladies and gentlemen we have one last presentation or rather panel discussion to go for the day but before we do that we would definitely like to once again thank our partners without whose support this virtual event would not have been possible so thanking our co-powered partner in Mobi driving real connections and our co-partner for the event India Today let's quickly take a look at the audio of our partners and then we dive into our last panel discussion for the day can we have the AV please easier said than done but we help brands do that to drive real connections with our platform technology and exclusive mobile data in Mobi helps you understand, identify, engage and acquire your customers in Mobi driving real connections one championship the battleground is ready are you, do you have it in you can you be the next undisputed champion coming soon thank you once again to our partners in Mobi and India Today ladies and gentlemen we are diving straight into our last panel discussion for the day which will talk about the new world of eSports chairing this session is Prateek Gupta co-founder of Mobi and India Today we have with us on our panel Anirudh Pandita founder Pocket ACES Dr. Rishendra Sinha CEO and founder global eSports Vinit Sharma category director Mountain Dew PepsiCo Amit Doshi chief marketing officer Lenovo Ankit Panth Red Bull Athlete and Siddharth K.D. our chief executive officer not been gaming with us gentlemen a very warm welcome to all of you and I'd like a moderator to take the session forward hi good afternoon everybody can everyone hear me clearly yeah good afternoon okay so okay so I know it must have been a long day for everybody but I think we're gonna 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 you know 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 you're getting some feedback Vinit I think there's another one Mike that's that's on if I'm not wrong no I'm actually on only one connection so I don't know who else is connected someone else is connected on Vinit's link yeah that's possible okay I think it's better now 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 eGaming company we have the hardware side of things and obviously very importantly we have the brand side which is what everybody is 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 this session by basically understanding the ecosystem of eSports right where it is currently sitting what it was about five years ago and I 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 actually 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 you'd like to tell us a little bit about how you think the eSport community is moving I think eSports community first of all 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 I think with mobile really going deep that was a big explosion and once people started gaming participated in gaming they were always 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 ten times from 2016 when we started off so our participation has almost grown ten times and personally we feel that in fact we didn't do the on-ground like the last couple of years because we feel with the virtual environment it will be far bigger and therefore what we are trying to do is to say how do we really take it virtual in terms of really capturing the billions of people which eventually won'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 is 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 to 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 the amount of people who play games like PUBG and Free Fire really marry skill and strategy and are there for fun to watch which was primarily a 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 also 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 entertaining 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 were the two big places which traditional media could not service right, 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're 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 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 Roshinder where you know you guys are creating platforms and these platforms I mean I was trying to figure out how to define Nordwind Gaming 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 didn't 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 you know only the elite could afford to play or to watch going forward from a five-day to a one-day to a 20 where cricket got truly democratized the first time that you saw not just Hindi but vernacular came in commentary across it became 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 or did 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 right 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 player 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 thing 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 4 years back I was at Viacom Akshad our founder at Nordwin used to be still running Nordwin and he came to us and he was talking about media rights and I asked Akshad what's the kind of viewership that you get and Akshad because if I'm going to buy media rights or something I need to understand the viewership Akshad said 50 and I'm looking at him saying the unit thousand million lakh crore 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 you know 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 behold our peak viewership last year in some of our tournaments crossed 1 million and that's the journey eSports has seen in the last 3 to 4 years and when you see that journey that's why Nordwin is where Nordwin is we have created the market we have created this industry in India we have created the eSports media 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 so Amithi is 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 thanks thanks Prateek and great to be with this panel here look I think Siddharth and Anirudh said the context beautifully we don't have much to add and we've also seen the ripples of that in our categories we are present in gaming PCs we also have presents in tablet smartphones and it's an impact that the whole category and we as a business felt we had to in fact as Lenovo completely reimagine our gaming business the way it was about 5 years 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 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 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 able to 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 odd months and having 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 it's evident to us in terms of how people are actually moving in that sort of a space so Rushinder how have you utilised 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 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 you either needed it 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 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 the 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 the game like PUBG Mobile which was a great which was a great entrant 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 the 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 light 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 their pocket 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 or I know he would hate to be called one but Ankit what do you think is the space that 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 you know scam events where some Bollywood and some singers were invited and there were teams from all across the world they're present one of the top teams at that point of time, counter swing 1.6 and Moscow 5 was there so now there was a time where everyone started saying 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 okay let's play 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 1000 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 land 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 from a players perspective I can tell you now yes Norden Gaming is doing some events there was Dew Arena which was 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 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 Cipher that was aired on MTV after that I started signing multiple 7 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 maybe he's going to a gaming cafe and I should stop him why because they saw people were abusing drinking smoking being aggressive shouting until 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 by when my parents see that okay he's a known guy in the community respected guy and he has fans the brand is 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 last 3-4 years and it's a good thing that now we have global esports, Nordwind gaming in view 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 really stand out in a conversation like 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 consumed 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 we 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 8 hours 27 minutes a week on gaming and the Indian number has now averaged to about 8 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 2 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 2 or 3 years because the 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 are 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 are 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 3 or 4 years while everybody was investing in setting this ecosystem up we'll now start to pay dividends but what is it that we are 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 you know Sony first and now star what they have been able to achieve and of course all the brands contribute to that right so if you look at the e-sports ecosystem e-sports ecosystem is essentially right here right in front of us there is an amkit sitting here there is a Dr. Rishinder Sinha sitting here we need many more of those how do we get many more of those when on one side e-sports and gaming becomes more and more of a viable career option it becomes more often more of a viable career option because companies like Nordwind gaming put up bigger and better tournaments bigger and better prize pools whereby both fame and money gets added to the lives of Ankit and Dr. Rishinder 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 Nordwind gaming so the brands have to have more and more faith in the world of e-sports 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 5 years rights to BCCI Star is going to recover that money pre-dominantly 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 right 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 was cricket is to India so that's that's really how the future is going to shape up and it's happening right so we have come a long way as an industry in the last 5 years just to add to what Ankit said the first tournament that Nodwin 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 that's some hard words there so like I'm I'm fairly enthused by what esports has to offer and before I come back to Ruchinder and Anirudh and the rest I would like to know what does this mean for a brand like yours like you have to 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 sort of 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 are playing that's true Pratik we see our role in two ways first is Braastax 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 asking the customers the community and ourselves are we leveling up are we doing the best that we can to adapt to what players want as 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 it's akin to in the you know we've done a lot of comparisons with cricket you know that's what the bad manufacturer 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 but in tablets in smartphones and 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 a 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 solutions 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 in 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 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 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 e-sport 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 e-sports and gaming ecosystem I think you know the traditional way of thinking about the balance pits one against the other where exactly 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 same table as their first class citizen on that table so as 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 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 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 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 you're sitting in a you're 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 only 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 see 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're going to see the fruits of that very soon when you're going to actually have guys that you know Meenit can really really say probably that yeah I am associated with this person and I think we're 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 and you know pubg you're a free fighter so they will start seeing where what 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 to have that 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 the 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 concurrence 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're going 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 Wales 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 everyone can do it everyone knows it's big but these guys are on to a secret so you will see them getting 10x the returns of the guy who comes 6 years from now and at that point it will not be a 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 like for him the people who backed him from the start of his journey those are the people who will leave back legacy and it's always retrospection is 20-20 vision but I think that all of you are sitting over here and like Vinit's brand says I think you guys have already moved in that sort of a direction so Vinit for you do you really think that the massive statements made on this panel like the statements of esports is the only