Our Bureau
New Delhi
As both the houses of Parliament have approved the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, the payment gateways are getting ready to take a drop of 15% in their annual top line growth. It is expected that the overall transaction volumes would be taking a major hit with the drop reaching at least Rs 30,000 crore over the year.
The government has planned to ban real-money gaming apps or any online platforms that involve monetary transactions. This ban on real-money gaming apps has made a bigger impact on smaller companies and has led to industry-specific companies facing the brunt of the ban, some of the insiders reported.
As per the reports somewhere around 80% of the impacted volumes are the transactions that would have otherwise been made through the channels of Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It also reported that when calculating in volumes around 2% of the total monthly transactions of UPI will be taking a hit from this band and around 0.5% of the total transactions value will be affected going forward.
As per the website of NPCI, ‘Digital Goods: Games’ is one of the most highly-transacting categories and a large part of that included the real-money gaming transactions which are now being banned. In the month of July, Rs 10,077 crore worth of payments were made through UPI under the ‘Digital Goods: Games’ category which was around 1.38% of the total transaction value in the month.
Whereas in reference to the volume around 35.1 crore transactions took place under the given category in July, making up 2.8% of the total transaction volumes. This shows that the RMG ban will account for a loss of around 25 crore transactions which will account to around Rs 5,040 crore in a month.