With inputs from Sharveya Parasnis and Prabhanu Kumar Das
In a sudden development that is shaking up India’s real money gaming industry, the Lok Sabha has passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025. This bill seeks to prohibit the offering, operation, advertisement, and promotion of online money games. The intent behind it is to protect individuals, especially the youth and vulnerable populations, from the adverse social, economic, and psychological impact of such games.
MediaNama has created a detailed explainer about the bill, and in this post, we sum up the key concerns that might arise if this bill were to be implemented as it is.
1) The broad scope of online money gaming:
Under the bill, an online money game has been defined as:
“An online game, irrespective of whether such game is based on skill, chance, or both, played by a user by paying fees, depositing money, or other stakes in expectation of winning, which entails monetary and other enrichment in return of money or other stakes; but shall not include any e-sports”
Further, it defines other stakes as anything recognised as equivalent or convertible to money and includes credit, coins, tokens, or other objects (whether real or virtual) that a user may purchase directly or indirectly as part of or in relation to an online game.
When looking at these definitions together, one could argue that games that offer services like loot boxes containing rare items, which the user may then sell either within the game or on third-party platforms in exchange for money, would also fall within the definition of online money games. While e-sports are excluded from the scope of online money games, this exclusion could become complicated to implement due to the ambiguities around the classification criterion.
Similarly, activities like opinion trading, which are not necessarily games, may also fall within the scope of online money games. This is because they involve a user depositing money in the expectation of winning.
For context, opinion trading allows users to place bets on the outcomes of events through yes or no-based polls about a myriad of events, ranging from cryptocurrency to sporting events. Let’s say there is an ICC World Cup match between India and Australia going on. Here, you would be able to place a bet on India either winning or losing the game, and depending on what the outcome is, you would win or lose the staked amount. A range of platforms in India currently provide opinion trading services like Probo, and MPL Opinio.
2) Ambiguities in the criteria for categorising online money games:
The Government intends to establish an Authority that will determine whether a game is an online money game or not. This Authority will make this determination either when it receives an application from a specific gaming company or on a suo motu basis. This means that a gaming company that classifies itself as an online…
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