Can Indus rival BGMI in India's increasingly competitive Battle Royale gaming space?

Made in India battle royale game Indus.

India's booming esports industry lacks one crucial element - a homegrown game that showcases the country's unique flavour.

Pune-based game development studio SuperGaming looks to fill that gap with Indus, a Indo-futuristic Battle Royale title that aims to rival Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), the top title in the genre in which online players fight to the death until only one remains.

"The Battle Royale player pool in India is estimated at about 300-350 million. We are going to attract a portion of these players but it's not just an India opportunity, it's a global opportunity," SuperGaming co-founder Roby John told Moneycontrol in an interview.

John said more than a billion players worldwide play a Battle Royale shooter game. "That's the opportunity that we're going after. It's fairly large," he said. Other games in this genre include Free Fire, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends.

Indus was launched in India on October 16, more than two and a half years after its initial announcement in January 2022. It garnered about 14 million pre-registrations since January 2023 and achieved one million downloads across iOS and Android platforms within a day of its launch.

Early reviews, however, indicate that the title has received largely negative feedback until now. Key complaints include subpar graphics, poor game mechanics, lag, connectivity problems, and multiple in-game glitches. The company has stated plans to address many of these issues through app updates.

The company faces a challenging road ahead as competition intensifies in the lucrative Battle Royale genre in the country. BGMI and Free Fire were the top two grossing Android apps in the country in 2023.

Esports push

Along with the launch, SuperGaming has also charted out a year-long esports roadmap with upcoming tournaments like ‘Clutch India Movement' with a prize pool of Rs 2.5 crore. It will be followed by the Indus International Mahasangram in October 2025.

"Our first tournament will happen in February and the next one in October. These are called first-party tournaments run by us. But we have also opened out to third-party tournaments. We will run licensed tournaments later. We will make an announcement in February after the first tournament," John said.

He added that every game attracts its own audience. "We're kind of building a community. When we think of games, they are really community driven. No matter what marketing goes in, ultimately it's the community."

The company has grown one of its shooter titles, MaskGun, to about 92 million users over the past eight years with the power of community and minimal marketing. "We've probably spent like $50,000 in marketing. That gave us a clear idea on how we wanted to think about Indus as well," he said.

Since its launch, the gaming studio has courted controversy over its reaction to feedback and reviews from players and streamers. The company though issued public clarifications stating that it is "100 percent open to feedback, whether it is positive or negative" and sought a copyright strike against videos by a creator for including "hate speech, personal abuses, and inappropriate content".

Esports expedition

It wasn't long ago when India became the top market for the now-banned games such as PUBG (Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds), which at its peak had recorded as many as 5 crore users in the country and around 1.3 crore clocked in every day.

A ban on the game disrupted the esports market but then came Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) which is exclusively available in India. This too was suspended for about 10 months before its relaunch in May 2023. It has since then garnered the top rank in app store downloads in India and has around 100 million cumulative players.

Other than BGMI, games like Valorant, FIFA, and Pokémon UNITE also have well-established ecosystems in the country. These games by international gaming studios are all vying to get a bigger piece of the growing esports as well as gaming pie in India.

In 2023, the number of online gamers in India reached 455 million, which is the second-largest gaming user base globally, after China. Of this, 100 to 110 million are estimated to play online games daily, according to an FICCI-EY 2024 report. Online gamers in India are expected to reach 491 million by 2024.

Esports industry in India stood at Rs 1,100 crore in 2022 which reached to Rs 1,200 crore last year and is estimated to grow to Rs 1,400 crore this year, as per the report.

With multiplayer games making a comeback, prominent esports titles almost doubled to 19 in 2023, with 1.8 million Indians participating, and which were available across 20 platforms.

With more titles, bigger player pool, major esports tournaments have seen a significant boost in prize pools as well. The prize pool of 2024 BGIS (Battlegrounds Mobile India Series) that took place earlier this year doubled to Rs 2 crore in the last one year. Prize pool for Krafton's BMPS 2024 was also Rs 2 crore, while Nodwin Gaming's BGMS (BGMI Master Series) 2024 offered Rs 1 crore.

Global expansion plans

Indus is available only in India, although the company is testing the game's beta version in a few international markets as well, John said. "India is a great place to get feedback. In a multiplayer game, it is important that you have enough players to test out all of the game features. You've got to tune them over a period of time. While Indus is for the world, we first want to build it out in India before we scale it to the rest of the world.

John said they have beta testers in Brazil, Singapore, and South East Asia, markets which have similar player behaviour to India. "We've tried testing for other regions also now, and probably once we get enough feedback and the KPIs (key performance indicators) right, then we will launch in those regions."

‘Baazigar moments’

Indus is also aiming to attract gamers with unique features such as Cosmium and Grudge. Cosmium is an in-game item that grants victory to anyone who captures it during the last few minutes of the game. This allows players to win the match without being the last one standing. Grudge, on the other hand, is nothing short of making game playing like a reality show. It allows players to declare a grudge against someone that killed him/her in the game.

"The next time that he's playing, we'll put you in the same game as him. So you can track him, resolve your grudge, fight against him," John said.

On its debut day, Indus claimed that it recorded 2,01,217 grudges across 80,349 total matches that were played in the game. "We added these features to introduce Baazigar moments in the game. The day we introduced our Grudge feature, people who were playing for one hour began playing for four hours. We did a whole esports playlist called Grudge Wars. With Grudge and Cosmium, we've created two distinguished features which might push players to test our game," John said.

SuperGaming's game plan

It took as many 150 people for Indus to see the light of day and as long as eight years to build the game. The Pune-based gaming studio which was setup in 2019 has raised around $6.8 million so far and has developed mobile games like Silly Royale, and Tower Conquest as well as its own gaming engine called SuperPlatform for running hyperscale, real-time multiplayer games.

The company is backed by investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Bandai Namco, Akatsuki Entertainment Technology Fund, Skycatcher, BAce Capital, and Dream Incubator. "We've raised a little bit of money from a lot of people and that's allowed us to grow," John said.

He mentioned that Indus is not a pay-to-win game. "This means a lot of our monetisation is still cosmetic (in-app purchases). We are looking at battle passes for monetisation. We are happy with how our monetisation tests performed in our closed beta."

Last year, in-app purchases revived significantly due to the launch of BGMI, as per the FICCI-EY 2024. Shooting games remained India’s favourite, generating 24 percent of in-app purchase revenues, followed by strategy games. Revenue from in-app purchases stood at Rs 900 crore in 2022, Rs 1,400 crore a year later, and is estimated to reach Rs 1,800 crore by this year.

As SuperGaming bets big on Indus, it is also working with a lot of anime IP (intellectual properties). "With Bandai Namco invested in us, we're working on a very large Japanese anime IP which I think is the future of content for us," John said.

Ownership of digital assets

John said they are bullish on the Web3 gaming space, especially leveraging blockchain as a technology. "My interest in Web3 is mostly to give people true ownership of their digital assets. If they spent money or grinded/crafted digital assets (like virtual skins), they should have the ability to own it and sell it at a cost advantage. We don't think about Web3 in terms of crypto."

SuperGaming has previously dabbled with Web3 through a game called TCME (Tower Conquest: Metaverse Edition, previously called Ethernia) that was launched in 2022, just ahead of the global digital asset downturn led by crypto rout.