One of the Top GTA 6 Content Creators in the World Will Be Indian: Nodwin on the Future of Play
Asia's hottest gaming company on who is the Indian gamer, why this market won't be swayed by programmatic spends, and so much more.
Nodwin needs no introduction. A long-time behemoth of the Indian games industry, the company’s single-handedly pioneered gaming events in the country well before the battle royale boom of today. 12 years since its inception, it’s the pulse of consumer interest in the business. This is thanks to its footprint across a myriad of events such as Comic Con, BGMI Masters Series, NH7 Weekender, and Dream Hack to name a few. Along with this, it also runs popular game currency store Digi Store and manages payments for Valve’s ubiquitous Steam PC game store in India.
Naturally, I had to reach out to Akshat Rathee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Nodwin to understand how it makes sense of the market. What followed was an insightful conversation. Some responses have been edited slightly for clarity and length.
Who does Nodwin see as the Indian gamer across your esports events, Comic Con, Steam, and Digi Store? Is it the same person across all platforms, or are there diverse audiences?
On a core fundamental level, I think the Indian gamer stopped being a persona to become a superset. Whenever a segment becomes volumetrically too large, it becomes an all-encompassing superset. To me, an Indian gamer is anyone who has a cellphone, PC, console, or board game and spends at least three to four times a month playing. This includes everything from Candy Crush and Ludo King to BGMI, Roblox, Counter-Strike, and Catan.
Because this set is so big, it has become equivalent to every young or affluent person in India. If you have a cellphone, you become a gamer. Gender is irrelevant; the real question now is: what kind of gamer are you? Five to seven years ago, this was a micro-set, but now it is the entire youth sector. You have to be specific about cohorts because 500 million gamers defines nothing.
We build different IPs for different personas. For example, there is the hip-hop lover who follows creators like Scout, loves sneakers, and has an “anti-establishment” identity. Then there is the 45-year-old “cool uncle” who brings his nieces to Comic Con, enjoys retro games like Ninja Gaiden, and likes Linkin Park.
That’s an interesting way of parsing it. Given we have 500 million players on mobile, where do you see the console and PC space going? Nodwin has roots in Counter-Strike and Dota, so how does that fit into the strategy?
I don’t think console gaming is an emerging market product yet—specifically online console gaming. However, consoles in emerging markets allow people to have larger than life identities. We see players from Pakistan becoming the best Tekken players in the world, or people in Africa playing FIFA to find an identity.
On PC, the idea is different. I call it a developed market stability layer. In Europe, football is great because there are 14 divisions before you hit the top; there is immense depth. In India, the depth of PC players is small. PC will remain a team sport— it is fundamentally test match cricket, whereas consoles are one-day cricket, and mobile is T20 or IPL.
Interestingly, mobile drives PC consumption. A typical phone replacement cycle is 14.5 months. As users upgrade from an INR 55,000 to a 70,000 phone, they often face a choice: buy a better phone or invest in a PC. Once someone spends 500 hours in a mobile game, they are often forced to seek a better experience, which drives GPU-based gaming consumption. This theory blew out of the water when RAM prices became what they are.
The government has essentially legitimised esports as a career. Do you see this changing the dynamics for the next-generation of gamers coming into the system?
It has helped that the government differentiated esports from Real Money Gaming (RMG). They’ve defined it as a piece of software and established that it cannot be gambling.
Regarding the International Olympic Committee (IOC), they’ve realised they can’t easily federate esports. A traditional federation is an elected body that sets rules, but in esports, the publisher is the only real federation because they own the game, the rules, and the commercial rights. Consequently, the Olympics will likely focus on simulations of traditional sports—like virtual archery rather than Counter-Strike.
On the other side, you have the Esports World Cup focusing on traditional, publisher-led esports. We will eventually have two kinds of Olympics: traditional simulations and traditional esports games. I would actually encourage India not to have one single esports committee, but rather game-specific federations, like a BGMI Federation of India, which would be backed by the publisher and more robust.
Who is the Indian gamer of 2030? What are they playing, and are they spending more?
India won’t have a homogeneous answer; it’s like asking who the European gamer is. I see three main trends for 2030:
Language-Specific Games: Games will target specific language communities (top six languages) with domestic stories, similar to how the Indian film industry (Bollywood, Tollywood) evolved.
The Proud Global Indian Gamer: We will see high-quality games built in India. An Indian equivalent of Black Myth: Wukong is an automatic outcome of our ecosystem’s evolution.
Global Gamers from India: Indian gamers will enter new global titles on the ground floor and excel. When GTA 6 comes out, I believe one of the top five creators in the world will be Indian. Already, some of the world’s best content creators for simulators and chess are from India.
So the thought process is to essentially build it and they will come?
There is a gold rush happening. Historically, Indians have been risk-averse with their own products, which is why a company like Krafton was able to buy the best Indian cricket game company—they have the risk appetite for licensing that Indian companies lack.
The $250 million a year made in BGMI comes from the groundwork Tencent did before they left. Tencent spent about 100 crores [INR 1BN for those of you outside of India] on the ecosystem, building the creator network and teaching the market how to function.
By 2040, India will be among the top three gaming nations in the world in revenue and value. But to get there, international partners must build by hand on the ground. You cannot succeed in India through programmatic buying from an office in Berlin or New York. That’s not how you work in India.