On a rainy day, the pitch moves indoors. Hitherto, bats hung idle, screens lit up and players chased points in the digital arena with a slew of options, be it e-sports or fantasy games.
That familiar game plan has now changed with the enforcement of the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act on October 1, 2025. This Act, while encouraging the growth of e-sports, sweeps away money games played online in one stroke.
To understand its impact, one must first grasp the contours of the online gaming universe, which is dominated by both e-sports and fantasy games.
The Act defines e-sports as an online game that is “played as part of multi-sports events” and “involves organised competitive events between individuals or teams, conducted in multiplayer formats.” To qualify under this definition, the outcome of the game must be determined solely by the players’ “physical dexterity, mental agility, strategic thinking or other similar skills.” Take the example of FIFA 23, which drew more than 10.3 million players within just one week of its launch. The e-sport requires players to control their digital teams in matches, orchestrating passes, tactics and timing with precision that mirrors the rhythms of real football. Chess too has found new life as an e-sport, with battles of intuition and calculation unfolding at the speed of a mouse click.
While there is an assumption that fantasy games are those of chance, anyone who has dabbled with the fantasy league knows that some of them require a significant amount of skill. The debate on drawing a distinction between games which require a person’s own skill and those that are dependent on someone else’s skills is age-old. The Supreme Court of India has grappled with it since the 1950s, ruling that betting on horse-racing and playing card games like rummy required skill even though they involved a wager of money.
The internet age only increased the variety of such games which could be played, including those allowing users to create cricket teams of their favourite players in the hope that they would perform well. In fact, such fantasy games were also considered to be games of skill by the High Court of Punjab & Haryana in the case of Varun Gumber v. Union Territory of Chandigarh (2017).
Of course, there are money games which involve users staking or depositing money with the expectation of earning monetary rewards on the basis of pure chance. Unlike e-sports, the wager in such money games is on the chance of dice, not on the skill of the hand that throws it. Instead of targeting this subset of money games alone, the Act imposes a blanket ban on these games, regardless of whether their outcome depends on skill, chance, or both.
India’s decision to prohibit money games across the board, including those which are skill-based, stands out for its rigidity on the global stage. The new legislation obliterates the distinction between games of skill and chance in the online realm, without doing so in the physical space. While the reasons suggested for such prohibition are to combat instances of money-laundering and youth addiction, the fact remains that India is one of the few countries to have made such an all-encompassing prohibition.
In fact, recognising the monetary potential of real-money gaming, countries like Brazil have moved swiftly to tap into this industry and Singapore and the United Kingdom have taken a more measured approach, regulating online platforms either through licensing or by maintaining the distinction between games of skill and chance. Across Europe, private operators are largely permitted to run online money games under licence, though some nations limit this liberty to state-run entities alone. Indeed, that is not without reason. The real-money gaming industry is a multi-billion-dollar cash cow for the digital economy, generating lakhs of well-paying jobs.
Challenges to the statute are already afoot, with the Supreme Court setting out the case for hearing sometime in November 2025. Given that the Indian real-money gaming market was valued at USD 3.7 billion and projected to grow threefold by 2029, some players will come out with creative solutions to comply with the Act, while others will continue to pursue their challenge. Regardless, it is unlikely that commercial players will agree to be bowled out by the prohibition.
Nakul Dewan is a Senior Advocate and King’s Counsel.