Brands Can Tap First-Mover Advantage In India’s Esports Industry

UCypher is a brand new bi-annual eSports league, spearheaded by Screwvala, and is due to launch in January 2018. The entrepreneur told Afaqs! that there are “immense sponsorship opportunities in a sport where brands can be integrated seamlessly”.

“eSport is sticky, unlike other game formats,” he explained. “In cricket, there is one over; in football, you don’t even have a gap for a commercial; with kabaddi, it’s even worse where you need to get an official time-out.”

“Here, the ability for us to integrate brands and have commercial breaks while the game is on is very high.” While usual suspects such as Amazon, Puma and big spending mobile brands are obviously on his radar, we can’t rule out major FMCG players such as PepsiCo and Britannia leveraging on this platform. First mover advantage will be king if gaming becomes mainstream in the nation. However, there are some major challenges, particularly in live eSports events where attendances have not hit commercially viable levels yet.

The new UCypher league will be very different from existing ones in several important respects. For the first two seasons, the league is going to own all the teams and players, until – according to Screwvala – these assets can be valued.

Tournaments will be shown on television but it’s not going on sports channels: Screwvala has selected MTV citing “We want to get more people into gaming… but not a sports channel at this stage…”.

Ultimately, Screwvala hopes to make e-sports popular with the masses – “beer, not malt whisky” is his strategy – a journey he expects will take several years. Despite investing US$4.6m to US$5.3m into the first season, he is not rushing to monetise the project, “After two seasons we will have a very good idea where the sport lands, what the viability is for it along with the sponsor interest, viewership and player interest,” he said.

And he has no specific plans to invest in publicising the new venture. “Instead of going and doing a marketing campaign to promote the league, we are treating the first season itself as a marketing campaign.”