Krafton Game Union, the representative of the currenty-banned game PUBG mobile, now invested a huge 164 crore into India-company Nodwin Gaming. Esport firm Nodwin is all set to embark on its another phase of success. With Krafton picking up a minority stake in Nodwin, Nazara Technology’s stake in the company will get diluted.
Nodwin Gaming’s CEO Sidharth Kedia has stated that they would use these funds to grow gaming in multiple regions such as India, South Asia and Africa. The huge transaction will help the company to scale up their level not only in India but globally.
For Krafton it was needed to make its presence in India after the ban of their most popular and success game PUBG, the ban was made because of the Indo-China border dispute.
“Whether the PUBG games comes or not comes to India is going to be Krafton’s problem. They understand the value of esport and the value companies like Nodwin bring to esports. To us, this partnership is more global than just India,” Nodwin Gaming co-founder and MD Akshat Rathee said in an interaction with exchange4media.
Nodwin Gaming CEO Siddharth Kedia added that Krafton has evaluated this deal completely in isolation of whether or not PUBG returns to India. He also revealed India and international expansion plans of Nodwin Gaming.
“We will launch more IPs. We will develop the whole ecosystem. We will make more esports content whether that means that we will take hold of the influencer ecosystem, launch bigger and better IPs, increase the prize pools in our IPs. That’s on the domestic side,” Kedia said.
“On the international side, we want to expand in Africa and the Middle East and the thesis being that these are emerging markets which are essentially mobile-first and young demographics. These are also the markets that are getting disrupted in a similar fashion as India whether it is data pricing or smartphone prices going down. Similar disruption is happening in those markets and they are where India was a few years back and hence they are the right markets for us to get into. It will be a mix of both organic and inorganic
“Whenever prospective investors used to ask how big is the esports market going to be? Akshat used to say that the market will be as big as we want it to be because we were literally creating the market in India as we were building our company,” Kedia said.
