Digital tech elevates gaming-friendly India
India’s digital ecosystem, which has already seen a massive transformation in recent years, is on the cusp of what has been described as a “massive acceleration” following a multi-year partnership between tech giant Google and India’s leading telecom provider Bharti Airtel “to expand India’s digital ecosystem by boosting network capabilities, ensuring last-mile network distribution and payments ecosystem, and making technology truly equitable.”
Google will reportedly invest up to $1 billion in Bharti Airtel as part of the agreement, which will see the two giants co-create an India-specific 5G network use cases to help enhance the cloud ecosystem for businesses across the country. This is particularly applicable to industries like gaming: Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon forecasts cloud gaming as one of the biggest use cases of 5G.
It isn’t just cloud gaming that will benefit from the commercial rollout of 5G in India—it’s the whole online gaming market especially as more and more desi consumers are going the digital way for work, to keep up with the latest news, and even check the cricket prediction of their favorite cricket teams as a way to pass time especially with the ongoing pandemic.
Even India’s favorite sport—cricket—is going digital
At the rate it’s going, India—which already has around 40 percent of its Internet users gambling—is poised to surpass the United Kingdom in the number of people gambling, according to Parimatch International CMO Dmitry Belianin.
“In some form or the other it [gambling] has been part of the culture and has been passed on down the generations. As time progressed and technology made advancements, the iGaming world also progressed along with it, making India the second largest market for iGaming across the globe,” Belianin told the Times of India.
Belianin isn’t too far off the market. There are now 365 million mobile gamers in the country, according to government statistics, putting India in the top 2 spot among the largest mobile gaming markets behind China.
Sports betting is one of the verticals that currently enjoy a rise in popularity, particularly the industry cash cow that is cricket betting. There’s no denying that India has a true “love affair” with cricket, and betting on the India Premier League (IPL) already outperforms other sports segments in the country. An in-depth ENV Media report on sports betting noted that “an estimated 80% of the sports betting market in the country is cricket-based.”
“Without a doubt, cricket has become an intrinsic cultural trait of the overwhelming majority of Indians. Equally, for urban and small-town betting communities alike, cricket matches are seen as an opportunity to earn some quick money,” the ENV Media analysts wrote, explaining that faster internet and affordable mobile devices have enabled players to bet on any imaginable aspect of an Indian cricket match “even on global gambling sites based in countries that register no interest in the sport whatsoever.”