Reliance Jio and MediaTek have concluded their 70-day Esports tournament named Gaming Masters. The Gaming Masters tournament started on January 13 this year for Garena’s Free Fire game. The tournament went on for seven weeks and saw 43,000 teams take part in the event. A prize pool of Rs 12,50,000 was awarded during the seven-week tournament, broadcasted live in Hindi and English on YouTube, JioTV HD Esports channel, and Booyah. “The tournament received an overwhelming response from gaming enthusiasts all over the country," the organizers said in a release. Head Hunters won the Gaming Masters tournament and were awarded the Gaming Masters title, along with a Rs 3,00,000 winning amount.
“The competition was very intense as the top 24 teams of the server were competing for the grand prize. Players are always waiting for a platform to showcase their skills and talent, and JioGames provided them a huge platform; looking forward to more such Tournaments in the future from JioGames,” the winning team said after achieving the feat. Gaming Masters was organized by JioGames from Reliance and MediaTek.MediaTek, in a statement, said that it is proud to be a part of the tournament that emerged as one of the largest online gaming events on the JioGames platform. With over 43000+ registered teams, the Esports tournament garnered tremendous response from the masses and has emerged as one of the largest online gaming events on the JioGames Platform in 2021. The success of the Free Fire Gaming Masters powered by the JioGames Esports tournament reiterates the popularity of the growing e-sports industry in India,
which has witnessed a significant surge in user base and is estimated to continue to grow significantly in a post-pandemic world.Esports has emerged as a whole new industry in the past couple of years, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic that forced people indoors last year, leading to many taking up gaming as a full-time profession.
The Indian gaming industry is witnessing its first commercial upsurge. Over the past few years, the boom in affordable, faster internet, along with increasingly affordable smartphones, has seen exponential growth in the field of online gaming. Mobile gaming has been gradually producing gamers with serious gaming intent. Given that an overwhelmingly large section of all Indian smartphones run on Android, Google is the automatic benefactor of this boom in the industry.
On this note, News18 spoke to Sharan Tulsiani, business development manager of apps and games at Google Play, regarding Google’s perception and stance in the gaming industry of India. While he avoided making a direct correlation to Google as a gaming industry giant in India and even refrained from revealing any details about Stadia — he affirmed Google's perception of India as a force in the international gaming industry. Here are the key excerpts of our conversation.
How have you seen India’s potential as a gaming market grow over the past few years?
With increasing access to affordable broadband mobile and greater smartphone choice across price bands, the mobile gaming industry has seen an upsurge in the last few years. According to a report by Nasscom, India's mobile games market is expected to reach 628 million users and be worth $1.1 billion by 2020, up from $290 million in 2016. Among all the emerging markets, India is the largest in downloads, with over 2.8 billion game downloads in the first half of 2018.
Globally, Android has over 2 billion active devices, and over 250 million apps are downloaded every day from the Play Store. There remains a huge opportunity for developers across the globe to develop successful and scalable businesses across the platform. In India, the developer ecosystem is on the rise. Google Play supports Indian developers throughout their lifecycle — from indie to big-name.
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