In April 2025, four figures from India’s gaming and esports industry gathered at what appears to be a business conference to discuss where the sector is heading. The panel includes Wamsi Krishna, founder of The Esports Club; Anurak Kurana, founder and CEO of New Gen Gaming; VJS, a legal professional working in gaming policy; and Vishalok Nath, founder of social audio platform HeyPal and formerly of India Today Gaming, where he was involved in bringing Free Fire to the Indian market. The conversation covers AI’s role in competitive gaming, toxicity, the road to Olympic recognition, career pathways, and the structural challenges facing India’s esports ecosystem.
The parental perception shift
One of the panel’s opening observations is how dramatically parental attitudes toward gaming have changed in India over the past five years. Where gaming was once treated as a distraction or an eye-strain risk, it is increasingly understood as a potential career path. The panelists attribute part of this shift to the legitimization of esports through major sports events — gaming has been included in the Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games, and an Olympic Esports event is scheduled for 2027. The argument is a straightforward one: when a government recognizes something as a competitive sport with medals attached, parents pay attention.
The comparison drawn in the panel is to cricket. The suggestion is that gaming will follow a similar cultural trajectory — something played casually in childhood becoming a source of national identity and organized professional competition as the generation that grew up with it reaches adulthood with money to spend. Whether that analogy holds depends on factors the panelists acknowledge are not yet resolved, including infrastructure investment, government policy, and whether the titles popular in India align with those selected for international competition.
The broader pattern of gaming gaining parental acceptance is not unique to India. ESA research in 2025 found that the majority of American parents now play video games themselves, and attitudes toward gaming as a career have shifted across most major markets as professional esports salaries and viewership numbers have become harder to dismiss. In India, where mobile gaming is the dominant format and the player base is estimated at 150 to 200 million active competitive players, the scale of the potential is particularly significant.
AI in esports: what is actually happening
The panel’s exchange on AI is one of its more interesting moments, partly because the panelists genuinely disagree. One position is skeptical — AI as implemented in esports right now is essentially software detection rather than intelligence, and its real impact is still some years away. The other position is that AI is already embedded in the competitive scene in ways that are not visible to most players.
The examples cited are concrete. Riot Games’ Vanguard anti-cheat system uses behavioral analysis to flag abnormal mouse movement and reaction times rather than simply scanning for known cheat software. FACEIT, a third-party competitive platform for CS2 and other titles, has been developing an AI moderation tool trained on millions of chat lines and voice recordings, capable of detecting toxic behavior in real time rather than after a manual review process. Krafton’s PUBG Ally, an AI companion for the mobile version of PUBG, learns individual player behavior and generates bots that mimic human playing styles — including voice communication and in-game humor — to fill team slots when human teammates are unavailable.
The coaching application may be the most commercially significant near-term use. Reaching professional level in competitive gaming typically requires either an expensive human coach or an enormous amount of self-directed practice. AI coaching tools, which can analyze gameplay footage, identify specific weaknesses, and suggest structured improvement routines, lower that barrier for semi-professional players who cannot yet afford or access human coaching. Several such platforms are already operational, and the panel suggests their use is growing among players trying to bridge the gap between amateur and professional play.
The more philosophical question raised by the panel’s legal voice is worth considering separately. Humans watch esports for the same reason they watch any sport: the interest lies in human performance under pressure, the unpredictability of human decision-making, and the narrative of individual and team development over time. An AI playing Counter-Strike at superhuman level is technically feasible and practically uninteresting to watch. The competitive gaming ecosystem depends on the human element remaining central, which means AI’s most durable role in esports is likely to be infrastructural — improving anti-cheat, moderation, coaching, and broadcast production — rather than replacing the players themselves.
Toxicity and what to do about it
The panel’s discussion of online toxicity is grounded in a figure that recurs across multiple research contexts: approximately 80% of online multiplayer gamers report having experienced some form of toxic behavior. The panel treats this as a structural feature of competitive online environments rather than an aberration, and the discussion of solutions is similarly structural.
The distinction one panelist draws between sledging — the verbal competitive pressure that has always existed in sports — and genuinely harmful toxicity is a real one that the games industry has struggled to operationalize. Where is the line between competitive trash talk and abuse? How do you build automated systems that draw that line consistently across different languages, cultures, and competitive contexts? These are harder problems than they first appear, and the panel acknowledges that current solutions are imperfect.
What has changed is the technical capability to respond faster. Manual review systems, where a reported player’s logs are checked after the fact by a human moderator, are inherently slow and inconsistent. The FACEIT AI moderation system described in the panel operates during matches rather than after them, with a credit-score-style profile system that tracks behavior over time rather than treating each incident in isolation. The parallel to financial credit systems is instructive — persistent behavior has consequences that single-incident reports do not.
The India-specific dimension raised in the panel is significant. A tournament between India, Pakistan, and Nepal produced chat behavior driven by national rivalry rather than in-game competition. Cross-border toxicity in esports is a real phenomenon in South and Southeast Asia, and it presents moderation challenges that go beyond standard competitive abuse — involving national sentiment, political context, and languages that may not be well-represented in training data for AI moderation systems.
India’s I4C (Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre) provides a mechanism for filing online harassment complaints that routes directly to the appropriate jurisdiction, bypassing the friction of a traditional police complaint. The panelist who raises this is making a practical point: players who experience serious harassment online do not have to accept it, and the infrastructure to respond exists even if it is imperfect.
Olympics and the title problem
The Olympic Esports question generates the panel’s most substantive disagreement. The general enthusiasm for gaming’s Olympic recognition is tempered by a practical concern: the titles being considered for Olympic Esports competition are not necessarily the titles with strong competitive communities in India.
India’s esports ecosystem is predominantly mobile and predominantly built around a small number of titles — BGMI (the Indian version of PUBG Mobile), Free Fire, and to a lesser extent Valorant. The titles most likely to feature in Olympic Esports competition skew toward PC-based games with established international competitive structures: CS2, League of Legends, Dota 2, and FIFA or its equivalent. Several of these have thin competitive bases in India. BGMI, despite having a massive player base, is not the same title as PUBG Mobile and would not automatically qualify Indian players for international competition under that banner. The panel notes that Dota 2’s competitive scene in India has essentially collapsed, CS’s professional community is small, and League of Legends has almost no organized competitive presence.
The two-year window before the 2027 Olympic Esports event is both an opportunity and a constraint. Building a professional competitive community in a title from a near-zero base in two years is possible but requires coordinated investment from tournament organizers, organizations, and ideally government support. The panel’s view is that the private sector can move faster than government, but cannot reach the scale required to discover and develop the best talent across 200 million gamers without public-private partnership at both central and state level.
The comparison to India’s trajectory in Olympic sports more broadly is made explicitly. India began winning medals in individual Olympic sports when private sector investment in athlete development supplemented rather than replaced government support. The argument is that esports needs a similar model — government setting guidelines and providing infrastructure, private organizations running the competitive ecosystem.
Career pathways beyond the player
One of the panel’s more useful contributions for younger audiences is its systematic treatment of career pathways in gaming beyond competitive play. The professional player pathway is narrow — top salaries for T1 BGMI players in India reportedly exceed 12 LPA (approximately $14,500 annually), but the number of positions at that level is small. The panel is direct about the fact that most people who love gaming will not have careers as professional players, and frames this as a feature rather than a problem.
The roles described include coaching, broadcasting and commentary, content creation, graphic design and visual production, server administration, game administration for tournaments, journalism, marketing, legal work, and organizational management. One panelist notes that every person in his 66-person organization is a gamer — gaming knowledge is the baseline requirement, with professional skills layered on top. His first interview question is how many hours a day an applicant plays and which games they play.
The content creation pathway has particular visibility in the Indian context. CarryMinati, cited in the panel as an example, began as a gaming content creator and has become one of India’s most prominent YouTube personalities, collaborating with international creators at scale. The panel uses this as evidence that gaming is a legitimate entry point into broader creative industries, not just a dead end for people who were not good enough to compete professionally.
The structural point underlying all of this is that esports organizations generate revenue primarily through sponsorship, and the sponsorship case rests on audience reach. Brands targeting younger Indian consumers increasingly recognize that gaming audiences are difficult to reach through traditional media. Players, particularly those aged 16 to 25, are not consuming news, print media, or general-interest television at significant rates. Esports tournaments, streaming platforms, and gaming content are where those audiences are spending time, which makes them genuinely valuable to brands trying to reach that demographic — a dynamic that is driving both tournament prize pools and team salaries upward as the sector matures.
The infrastructure gap
The panel’s discussion of India’s gaming development capacity is candid about the country’s current limitations. India has more than 800 independent game developers, and the sector is growing, but the capital and technical infrastructure required to develop major commercial titles does not yet exist at scale. The production cost of GTA VI is cited as an example — an estimated $2 billion in development spending, representing a scale of investment that no Indian studio is currently positioned to match. The honest assessment from the panel is that India’s game development ambition for the next five to ten years is likely to remain focused on mobile titles and mid-scale productions rather than AAA console or PC games.
The mobile dominance of Indian gaming is partly a hardware access issue. A PlayStation 5 costs approximately 50,000 rupees — roughly $600 — at a time when India’s median monthly income remains well below that figure. Mobile gaming’s popularity is not simply a cultural preference; it reflects the reality that a mid-range smartphone is the most accessible gaming platform for the majority of Indian players. Any serious analysis of Indian esports must account for this structural constraint, because the competitive titles that are easiest to monetize internationally are often the ones least accessible to the broadest base of Indian players.
This tension — between a massive mobile-first player base and an international competitive ecosystem built primarily around PC titles — is probably the central challenge facing Indian esports as it attempts to convert player numbers into international competitive results. The panelists do not resolve this tension, but they identify it clearly, which is a more useful starting point than pretending it does not exist.
The full panel discussion is available on YouTube. The event took place in April 2025.