India

India is the most dramatic regulatory reversal in global iGaming, and an operator has to understand that the market did not just tighten, it closed. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act 2025, which received presidential assent on 22 August 2025 and came into force on 1 May 2026, imposes an absolute pan-India prohibition on all online money games, explicitly regardless of whether they are games of skill or chance. That captures fantasy sports, rummy, poker and anything where a user stakes money expecting a return. The strategic point is stark: a multi-billion-dollar legal industry was legislated out of existence within days, and there is no licensing regime behind the ban.

The legal market collapsed almost immediately. Within days of the Act, Dream11, once valued around $8bn, shut its real-money business citing no legal pathway, and MPL, Games24x7, Gameskraft, Zupee and the major poker operators suspended paid play. Real-money gaming was roughly 86% of India's gaming industry, so the prohibition did not trim the market, it removed most of it. Reported fallout included hundreds of crore in stranded player deposits, lost tax revenue and an estimated two hundred thousand jobs affected. For an operator, this is the clearest possible signal that India is not a market to enter but one to have exited.

The ban is extraterritorial and criminal. The Act bans offering, advertising and processing payments for online money games, applies to offshore operators serving Indian users, and makes offences cognisable and non-bailable, with imprisonment and heavy fines. This matters enormously: an offshore operator that continues to serve Indian players is not in a grey area, it is exposed to criminal liability and to payment and advertising chokepoints that the government is enforcing at scale. The extraterritorial reach removes the offshore workaround that exists in some other prohibition markets.

The tax history set the stage. The prohibition followed the GST Council's move to a 28% tax on the full face value of bets from October 2023, which the Supreme Court later upheld along with large retrospective demands. The combination of a punitive tax and then an outright ban shows a clear policy direction against real-money gaming, which an operator should not bet against on a short horizon.

What the honest read is. India is effectively closed for online real-money gaming, and any operator serving Indian users, including from offshore, now faces criminal exposure. Legal challenges in multiple high courts were consolidated to the Supreme Court in September 2025, with substantive hearings deferred into 2026, but a court overturning the Act is speculative and not a basis for a commercial plan. The only legitimate lanes are non-money gaming, e-sports without stakes, and a long-shot wait on re-regulation. For an operator with capital to deploy, a genuinely opening market such as the UAE or a regulated one such as the Philippines is where that effort belongs.

The regional play. India sits among the prohibited Asian markets alongside Vietnam and Thailand, where the common thread is large demand and no legal route. The sequencing answer is to treat India as closed and re-deploy toward markets that license operators, as discussed in the multi-market sequencing piece.

The biggest mistake. The biggest mistake is treating India's banned but still-reachable demand as an offshore opportunity, when the Act criminalises serving Indian users from anywhere and the payment rails are being closed. The related mistake is underwriting a market re-opening on the back of the Supreme Court challenge. Treat India as closed, do not take the offshore exposure, and put capital where a legal market exists.