Rise Of The Gamers: The Indian Gaming Creator Ecosystem

The gaming creator ecosystem has seen a sharp expansion, from 200 million a few years ago to around 450 million now, India’s gaming population has been growing rapidly. A large share of them have also become gaming content creators. In another two years, there will be 650 million gamers in the country and the creator ecosystem is expected to develop at a similar pace.

Photo by Gabriel Dias Pimenta on Unsplash

But why has this staggering growth taken place?

There are various factors that are responsible for it. Piyush Kumar, Founder and CEO, Rooter says that one primary reason has been the precedence of strong creator ecosystems across categories. “The Indian social media user is a robust content creator, and agilely adapts to multiple content formats and platforms – the growth witnessed by Youtube videos, Instagram Reels etc is a healthy indicator of this. Continuing this trend gaming too is now witnessing a huge surge in people eager to become content creators. Secondly, content-led social platforms (like Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram etc) have grown on the back of the time and investment made by creators to generate engagement. With the growing number of top esports players, gamers and icons in the industry, who have picked streaming and content creation as active ways to interact and engage with their followers and build their brand value, the ecosystem has seen a boost,” Kumar explains.

Another contributing factor is the strong gaming community in India. A recent report by Lumikai recorded that 43 per cent of gamers have watched live streams and 68 per cent of viewers have tipped creators at least once.

One way to recognize the potential of game streaming as a scalable creator economy play is to look at global precedence from more mature markets. Leading platforms like Twitch, which boasted of 3 million monthly creators just four years ago, have scaled-up to having close to 9 million creators every month, even as monthly active users grew to 150 million. In the same period, the platform’s revenue rose from 800 million to 2.6 billion. Compare this with a top content platform like Tiktok, which generated revenues of USD 4.6 billion from 1.2 billion monthly active users, and you realize that the revenue per user for Twitch is 5x that of TikTok.

Jai Shah, co-founder, Orangutan Gaming echoes the same belief about streaming growing from strength to strength in the future. “Streaming has become one of the most lucrative sources of income for Esports athletes. Hosting regular tournaments, interacting with fans virtually and in-person, and having constant contact with them via streams have helped creators shape the gaming market. As streaming platforms grow and start generating revenues, top creators will definitely benefit from the creator payouts, brand partnerships and user gifting opportunities they’ll generate,”, Shah explained to us.