PUBG mobile championship’s success sets ball rolling for e-sports market in India

PUBG, the popular mobile game has become such a rage in India that it saw more downloads than apps such as YouTube, Snapchat in the first quarter of 2018 and was the most downloaded game on Apple’s App store.

The popularity of the game even led to Chinese conglomerate Tencent conducting a tournament for college students in Bengaluru, in partnership with Playtonia. The tournament saw 250,000 participants registering for it from over 1,000 colleges across 30 cities.

And it was no small tournament. The winning prize pool for the tournament was Rs 50 lakh, with the winning team ‘The Terrifying Nightmares’ getting a cash prize of Rs 15 lakh, along with an Oppo smartphone each. There were smartphones and several other freebies given away as well. Apart from the contestants, there was a constant footfall of over 3,000 people during the span of the entire event and a cumulative count of over 10,000 people to witness the Campus Championship Grand Finale.

This was also the world’s first PUBG tournament, according to Playtonia. The massive success of the tournament has now prompted not only Playtonia, but others as well, to cash in on the PUBG craze in India.

A mobile gaming team from Guwahati, Assam, Team 8bit, is also reportedly organizing a PUBG tournament called ‘PUBG India Prestige League’ with a prize pool of Rs 50,000. Sponsored by Omlet Arcade, this is a free game with registrations open till November 22.

While PUBG has garnered quite a lot of popularity among mobile gamers, the market for mobile gaming itself is skyrocketing in India. According to games and e-sports analytics provider Newzoo, there were 222 million mobile gamers and 89% of all game revenues in India were generated by mobile games in 2017. 

A report speaking of India’s opportunity also states that annual mobile gaming revenues in India are set to grow from $1.1 billion in 2018 to $2.4 billion in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 49%. This makes India the fastest-growing mobile games market in the world by overall revenue.