It’s been two months since India pulled the trigger on a full real-money gaming ban. The market was already messy and chaotic. Now it’s worse. Everyone expected noise, but what they got was a structural hit that broke old chains, forced new routes and made anyone working with India seriously uncomfortable.
While the Supreme Court sorts through dozens of petitions, here’s what actually changed.
Regulation landscape
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act basically cut RMG out of India’s legal space. Operators filed petitions in several states. The government merged them into one case at the Supreme Court. The key hearing happened on 4 November, with follow-up sessions after that.
The state is aggressively defending the ban, citing fraud, AML risks and “national security threats”. There’s still no final verdict.
Operators: instant pivot
Demand didn’t disappear. Players kept playing. So operators moved fast: free-to-play mechanics, prize models, subscriptions, in-game monetisation, a quick shift offshore.
Let’s be honest: the market didn’t die. It’s used to chaos, so it adapted fast.
Offshore boom
The biggest shift is the explosive growth of offshore platforms. Traffic is moving to projects hosted outside India, pushed by influencers and surrogate ads. Crypto payments are accelerating. Apps running on foreign servers are popping up everywhere.
Offshore numbers: what the data actually shows
Recent research from the Consumer Unity and Trust Society (CUTS) makes the current shift even clearer. In a survey of roughly 1,000 active casino and betting players, offshore traffic didn’t just grow – it exploded.
Daily visits to unregulated platforms jumped from 3.4 percent to 42.3 percent after the zero-tolerance policy kicked in. Long sessions became the norm too: the share of users playing more than two hours went from 3.4 percent to 44 percent.
Spending patterns also shifted upward across every bracket:
- up to 11.1 USD: dropped from 42.5 percent to 12.7 percent
- up to 55.6 USD: slightly decreased, 49.9 percent to 47.4 percent
- up to 111.2 USD: surged from 7.6 percent to 26.2 percent
- up to 278 USD: went from 0 to 7.2 percent
- above 278 USD: from 0 to 6.3 percent
Combined with the 40 percent surge in offshore audiences, CUTS estimates the offshore iGaming market in India has expanded dramatically since the ban came into force.
Payments: fast rebuild
Payments took the first and hardest hit, but they also rebuilt the fastest. UPI Intent suffered the most. Gaming-related volumes dropped sharply, by roughly 20-40 percent depending on region and merchant.
At the same time, P2P rails strengthened. What used to be a niche is now the backbone. The market shifted to micro-topups, cascaded P2P routing, local agent networks and wallet-based flows not tied directly to UPI.
Conversion held up, even for first-time deposits (FTD), which many had already written off.
Inside view
Betatransfer isn’t watching this from the sidelines. We’re right in the centre of it. The regulatory shake-up didn’t slow our volumes down – it increased them. Over the past two months, India became the fourth-largest geo in our portfolio.
The biggest surprise? P2P rails are now converting not just returning users but first-timers too – something the industry considered nearly impossible. Our FTD conversion stays above 30 percent.
Two months later
- user demand – stable
- local RMG – constrained and shifting shape
- offshore platforms – growing fast
- payments – rebuilding around P2P and wallets
The final configuration depends on the Supreme Court. Until then, expect more engineering, more offshore, more P2P – and an industry that has no plans to slow down.
