Beyond Addiction: The Untold Opportunities in Esports and Online Gaming

India’s Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, has triggered sharp debate. The government argues that real-money gaming fuels addiction, drains family savings, and in some cases has even been linked to money laundering and terror financing.

Reports of debt-driven suicides and excessive screen dependency among youth have added urgency to these concerns. Culturally too, gaming continues to face resistance in India, often being equated with gambling and seen as socially corrosive. These are real risks and cannot be dismissed.

However, while the government has introduced a blanket ban on real-money online games—those involving stakes, deposits, or bets—it has not prohibited esports, social, educational, or casual gaming. These segments remain legal and are explicitly supported as avenues for innovation, creative expression, and economic opportunity.

Most people already recognise the negative side. What remains less known—and equally important—is the other side of the esports industry: the diverse ecosystem of stakeholders who could benefit.

Unlike in many fields where AI is rapidly displacing creative workers, in gaming and esports, artists, designers, and storytellers remain at the centre of value creation

Here is what India stands to lose if the sector is dismissed outright:

Artists & Designers:

While AI is eroding the value of human artistry in publishing, advertising, and even fine arts, esports still depends heavily on unique human creativity to design characters, skins, environments, and storylines. This sector offers artists a renewed space where their imagination cannot simply be automated away.

Coders & Developers:

With India’s globally recognised IT workforce, game development could become the next software export engine. Coding multiplayer systems, cloud environments, and AI-driven characters are billion-dollar skills in demand.

PayTech & FinTech Firms:

Every in-game purchase, tournament entry, or payout requires a payment infrastructure. Esports could provide fintech startups with a global market for microtransactions and secure digital wallets.

Streaming & Content Creators:

Competitive gaming already draws audiences comparable to traditional sports. Esports media rights in Asia are booming, and India’s youthful population could transform gaming streams into the next entertainment powerhouse.

Event Management, Tourism & Hospitality:

Esports tournaments fill stadiums worldwide, creating demand for venues, travel, sponsorship, and hospitality. South Korea has built a global reputation as the home of professional gaming, exporting its culture and hosting international tournaments that bring in millions.

Education & Training Institutes:

Universities abroad now offer specialised programs in game design, esports management, and digital art. Indian institutions could do the same, producing a new generation of digital creatives.

Hardware & Telecom Players:

Demand for high-performance devices, GPUs, VR headsets, and 5G networks grows with gaming, creating opportunities for manufacturers and infrastructure providers. Every competitive game requires advanced processors, graphics cards, and low-latency networks—pushing hardware companies to innovate and telecom operators to expand faster. Globally, companies like NVIDIA and AMD have already seen gaming drive large portions of their revenue, while 5G rollouts in South Korea and China were accelerated to support cloud-based and mobile esports. Beyond consumer devices, esports stimulates growth in data centres, cloud services, and edge computing infrastructure, all of which are essential to handle millions of simultaneous players.

Even peripheral industries—gaming chairs, headsets, keyboards, and display monitors—have evolved into billion-dollar markets of their own. For India, this represents not only a chance to attract investment in electronics manufacturing but also to embed esports demand into its Make in India and Digital India strategies, positioning the country as both a producer and exporter of gaming technology.

What Asia Has Already Learned

Other Asian countries have not turned away from esports—they have regulated, invested, and gained.

South Korea has made esports part of its cultural exports, contributing nearly US$9.85 billion in 2024 from IP, including video games. Professional gaming is treated like a sport, boosting tourism and building a market expected to reach US $27.8 billion by 2034.

China, despite strict controls, has built the world’s largest gaming market—valued at US $66.6 billion in 2025, expected to grow to US $108 billion by 2030. With over 674 million players, China has integrated gaming into its industrial and digital strategies.

Japan came late to esports but is catching up rapidly. With government backing through the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the market has grown from ¥370 million in 2017 to nearly ¥18 billion projected by 2025. Corporations like Toyota and Nissin now sponsor leagues, while schools and senior centres use esports for education and wellness.

Singapore has positioned itself as a regional hub. Hosting the Olympic Esports Week in 2023, offering IMDA grants for game development, and housing global giants like Razer and Ubisoft, Singapore has built an ecosystem where esports is both regulated and celebrated.

These examples show that when governments regulate instead of prohibit, esports becomes more than entertainment—it becomes a channel for cultural influence, industrial growth, economic development, and employment.

Conclusion

Esports is not simply about children wasting hours online or families losing money to addictive platforms. It is also about artists painting virtual worlds, coders building intelligent systems, payment companies enabling millions of transactions, and nations positioning themselves as exporters of culture and technology. South Korea, China, Japan, and Singapore have all found positive sides in this industry—be it cultural influence, hardware leadership, education, or tourism.

India does not lack talent. We are a nation overflowing with artists, coders, problem-solvers, and critical thinkers whose creativity could fuel this industry. A young esports player, if given professional opportunities, must live a life of discipline as strict as any Olympic athlete—because online competition demands split-second decision-making, muscle reflex, and problem-solving under pressure. To deny them that path would be to underestimate their potential.

Yet while we, Indians, view esports largely through the consumer lens, worrying about how it might harm youth, other Asian nations see it through the producer lens, treating it as a tool to build new economic ecosystems. This is the crucial divergence: they are building, while we choose fear over creation.

So the real question is this: are we trying to raise our children to be more disciplined and more ethical than their peers in South Korea, China, Japan, or Singapore—or are we failing to teach them how to find opportunities to build, rather than being consumed only as passive participants in other people’s innovations?