While in school, Chaurasia would spend his days studying, and once his brother returned from work, he would play games on his phone from 9 pm till midnight. “My brother found the first video I made on Tekken3, saw that it had decent views and encouraged me to take it up professionally,” recalls Chaurasia. However, finding good software was a struggle; something as basic as a screen recording application wasn’t easy to find. “I would use another phone to record the games I was playing on my phone,” he laughs. The industry and software have evolved immensely since then.
A Sequoia India and BCG report says that India’s gaming industry is smaller than that of the US and China, and is 1 percent of the global gaming market. But it is generating $1.5 billion in revenue and is expected to triple to over $5 billion by 2025, on the back of the ‘mobile first’ phenomenon.
Globally, there are gamers who play e-sports and gamers who create content. Roland Landers, CEO of All India Gaming Federation, explains, “Those who create content around all kinds of games—casual, card and fantasy games—are earning money through ads and sponsorships.” Among content creation, there are some who live stream content, some who create videos and others who do both. An EY FICCI report says the number of online gamers in India grew to around 390 million in 2021, with daily players of 90-100 million; online gamers are expected to reach over 450 million by 2023.Earlier, gaming was a single-player experience and hyper casual games were fun to play, not watch. “Before 2019, these games ruled the charts, but it is different now. Three of the top five games are mobile arcade games like BGMI and these have completely changed gaming. They have the right mix of skill and strategy, and are therefore fun to watch,” says Ashwin Suresh, founder of Loco, a game streaming platform. Content creators are making the most of this by creating engaging and relatable videos."How The Gaming is a content hack,” says Mithilesh Patankar, who started his career with mimicry in college. He knew he wanted to be in the entertainment space, so he uploaded a few mimicry videos, only to realise it wasn’t sustainable. That’s when Patankar, who was always fascinated by games, decided to use it to get into the content creation space. “One of my first videos that went viral was me mimicking superstar Shah Rukh Khan, while playing PubG. So many people fell for this prank. That’s when I decided to combine my love for entertainment and gaming,” he says.He experiments constantly, adding characters to games like GTA, thereby creating a niche for himself. “If you look at the entertainment industry, to make a movie you need a huge budget, but in this case, I can download a game, create a video for it and add characters and a story line,” he adds. This has worked well for Patankar, known as Mythpat, and he has close to 12.1 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.
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