How Online Gaming can help India's Economy?

source: internet matters

As per the McKinsey Global Institute,

India is required to create 90 million non-farm jobs between 2023 and 2030 in order to increase productivity and economic growth.

Further, economists view technology based development as an instrumentality to increase India's economic growth by leaps and bounds.

And, Online gaming is both: non-farm and tech driven.

So, it can help. How?

"The pandemic locked the outside scenes but jacked up (raised) the screens".

Due to this, online gaming spurred.

The gaming industry is set to cross the mark of $182 billion by 2025.

In 2021 alone, 433 million out of the 846 million internet users played games in India and 35% of the total population became online gamers in 2021!!

The Inc42 estimates >1 billion internet users by 2030.

It foresee increase in number of gamers from 481 million users in 2022 to 657 million users in 2025.

Thus,

• deep smartphone-led internet penetration in rural areas

• young demographic and

• increase of interest in online gaming

made online gaming one of the sunrise sectors (new & growing) which can fuel India's growth.

This sector got >INR 20,000 crore in investments in the form of FDI from both domestic and global investors.

Considering the growth (as discussed above) estimates, the investment value is expected to be >50,000 crore in the next 3 years.

This shows the potential of this sector in terms of the contribution to the India’s forex reserves and currency.

According to EY’s report on India's Media and Entertainment Segment, annual revenue of gaming industry is projected to be >40,000 crore by 2025.

This much amount of revenue will give ~6000 crore to the government exchequer in the form of GST.

And this will help govt. in increasing capital expenditure for infrastructure, pushing manufacturing sector, and tapping the rural economy, all of which are crucial drivers of India's economic growth in the near future.

Also, the gaming industry (there are around 400 companies) has created a lot of employment opportunites.

Coding, game designing, game conceptualization, consultancy, providing gamification training in corporates are some of the areas where jobs have been created.

The gaming industry has seen rise in the no. of employees.

Thus, the contribution of online gaming to:

1.Forex reserves

2.Govt. exchequer and

3.Employment

could fuel the India's economy.

The setting of up inter-ministerial task force to recommend policies for regulating this sector gives an indication that govt. also understands the potential and wants to channelize it in a better way.

Can you think of any other areas where online gaming can contribute and help India's economy?