Esports

Esports are organised competitions in video games, in which players and teams compete in leagues and tournaments that audiences watch live. The word is short for electronic sports. In India, most esports are played on phones, in battle and shooting games, because almost all Indian players play on phones. India's Online Gaming Act 2025 banned online games played for money, but it supports esports.

Here is how it works in general. The company that owns the game, its publisher, allows or runs tournaments in it. Teams first qualify in online rounds, which anyone may enter. The best teams meet in the finals, often played live in a hall or an arena. Commentators, called casters, explain each match, as in cricket commentary. The matches are streamed live to viewers. Sponsors, ads, ticket sales and fees for the streaming rights pay for the prize money and the event. Professional players are usually paid a salary by their team, and they practise for many hours a day, like other athletes.

Esports fit games that run for years as a live service game. The publisher keeps adding new maps and characters, and a tournament gives players a reason to keep playing and watching.

Take, for example, a college team that enters a national phone tournament. It plays its qualifying rounds from a hostel room, and only the finals are held in an arena.

Consider a viewer who follows a team on a game streaming platform. The viewer watches the final live on a phone, with commentary in Hindi, and the platform earns from the ads shown during the match.

Say a game publisher runs its own league each season. The league becomes part of the game itself, with special items in the game that fans can collect for their favourite team.

How are esports different from real-money gaming? In real-money gaming, each player pays an entry fee and competes for prize money taken from those fees, as on a cash tournament platform. The 2025 Act banned this in India. In esports, players do not pay to bet on their own result. The prizes come from organisers, sponsors and publishers, and most of the audience watches rather than plays. Esports also differ from sports media rights in one way: a cricket board owns its sport, but a game publisher owns the game itself, so no tournament can run without the publisher's permission.