This decade of gaming in India is full of advantages & opportunities: Nitish Mittersain

Gaming has now evolved to be one of the most prominent cultures in the country and the world. With 252 million unique visitors to games-related sites in March 2021 (as per ComScore), India is among the top five mobile gaming markets in the world.

Adgully turned the spotlight on this sunrise industry with its latest property – GAMEXX 2021 Summit & Awards. The inaugural edition of this largest gathering of stalwarts from the fast-growing gaming industry that has risen to become a part of popular culture was held on August 12, 2021.

GAMEXX 2021 turned the spotlight on Investment and Investors for the gaming industry in India in a special fireside chat that saw Akshay Chachra, Co-Founder, Business Head & CFO, Hashtag Poker and Mind Sports League, in a freewheeling conversation with Nitish Mittersain, Founder & MD, Nazara Technologies.

Opening the conversation, Akshay Chachra congratulated Mittersain on achieving India’s first gaming IPO, which was oversubscribed 175 times. When asked to share his views on achieving this milestone, Nitish Mittersain said, “It was superb! Nazara has been around for two decades now and has gone through a lot of evolutions since then. We have been waiting for a long time for the gaming industry to come up in India; Nazara Technologies was started with a dream that India will become a gaming nation one day. I believe that the IPO was a very important milestone in our journey and we were very happy to achieve that milestone, but at the same time, it is a new beginning for us and has brought a lot more responsibilities now. We have close to a hundred thousand investors and this number is increasing every week and every month. This is a decade of gaming in India, where we can take the full advantage of opportunities that we have with us.”

Talking about the challenges faced during the IPO, Mittersain said, “The company started thinking about the IPO around 2017 and we have grown well along with being profitable for many years. At that point of time, profitability was important to the public in India, but now things have changed a bit. We made our first attempt for IPO in 2018, which didn’t go well due to multiple reasons, including the market situation at that point of time, due to which we put this idea into a backburner for three years and started building our business further. We finally started rethinking the idea of re-launching an IPO in 2020. It took us about 7-8 months and we managed to execute it in March 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, which was the third most oversubscribed IPO ever.”

Elaborating on the key attributes that investors look for before investing in the gaming industry in India, Mittersain noted, “Micro trends for the gaming start-up in India are extremely favourable and are very important game changers. The penetration of smartphones, low cost data and an evolving digital payment ecosystem in our country, along with the 1 billion-strong population of young demographics, are making a lot of global investors excited about the gaming opportunities in India. $350 million is just a tip of the iceberg as of now, we will get to see potential billions of dollars coming in over the next few years. From the gaming company’s perspective, investors are now looking for growth and scale because of the market opportunities that already exist and they want to see founders who can execute those scales.”

“It’s unlike how Nazara started 20 years back, when the market didn’t exist and we had the luxury of time to slowly figure out what to do with life, but now things are changing faster, you need to dream big, execute well and then send your basic depending on which business model one is running, like engagement matrix, virility, monetisation, conversion, etc., are the important things for the investors,” he added.

Watch the entire fireside chat below: