India to see 20% jump in gamers

Chennai: With the craze for fantasy, e-sports and real-money gaming growing significantly, the number of gamers in the country is expected to jump nearly 20 per cent from 420 million in 2022 to 500 million by 2025.

Gaming apps spent over ₹5,000 crore in the financial year 2021-22 on advertisements and promotional spends.

The top 15 revenue-generating companies in this segment, including Dream11, Gameskraft, Games24x7, A23 and MPL, cumulatively generated revenues of ₹9,093 crore in the financial year 2021-22. These companies spent over half of that amount or ₹5,191.3 crore in the financial year 2021-22 on advertisement and promotions, as per the data of Entrackr.

Their advertisement and promotional spends grew 27 per cent year-on-year from ₹4,197.9 crore in the financial year 2020-21, while the revenue also scaled at the same pace and grew 27 per cent to ₹9,093 crore during the financial year 2021-22 from ₹7,157.81 crore in the previous year.

Dream11 generated highest revenues, forming 42.2 per cent of the overall industry revenues. The company registered ₹3,841 crore in revenue during FY22.

With almost every leading cricketer and a bunch of celebrities as its brand ambassadors, the company spent ₹2,158 crore on advertising, accounting for 41.5 per cent of the overall ad spent by these 15 companies in the list.

The company’s ad spend grew 72.8 per cent against 50.4 per cent growth in revenue between FY21 and FY22.

Gameskraft, which runs RummyTime and Pocket52, and Games24x7, which runs RummyCircle and My11Circle garnered revenues of ₹2,112 crore and ₹1,546 crore in FY22 and spent ₹1,336 crore on ads.

Top four companies posted huge profits in FY22 whereas MPL posted more than ₹1,000 crore losses. Overall 50 per cent of these companies were profitable in FY22.

These companies are spending huge amounts on advertising in FY23 as well and this has been evident from several ads in the ongoing season of the Indian Premier League.