India's online gaming industry has gone through one of its sharpest contractions in years after the Online Gaming Act, 2025 — which received presidential assent in August 2025 — imposed a blanket ban on real-money online games while carving out room for e-sports and social gaming. The law effectively shut down the core business model of several well-funded unicorns almost overnight, and the layoffs that followed have been large and fast.

Who's been hit

Mobile Premier League (MPL) has moved to cut around 60% of its India workforce, affecting close to 300 of its roughly 500 employees across marketing, finance, operations, and legal, according to Outlook Business. Games24x7, the Mumbai-based parent of RummyCircle and My11Circle, has begun cutting roughly 70% of its staff, around 500 employees. Zupee laid off about 200 employees as part of a pivot toward social, non-money games, and other platforms including GamesKraft, Head Digital Works, PokerBaazi, and Hike have made similar cuts. Industry estimates put the total number of direct and indirect jobs affected across the real-money gaming ecosystem at more than two lakh.

Why the ban landed so hard

Real-money gaming companies built their entire growth model — user acquisition spend, in-app monetization, and large customer-support and risk teams — around games where users deposited and withdrew real cash. Once that revenue stream was cut off by law, most of the associated headcount had no equivalent function to move into within the same company. Firms that had already diversified into skill-based or social games, or that moved quickly to relaunch with free-to-play formats, have managed to retain more of their teams than those that hadn't.

Where affected employees are landing

Recruiters tracking the fallout say the skill sets built inside these companies — growth marketing, payments and risk, mobile product management, data science for user engagement — transfer reasonably well to adjacent sectors. Fintech and payments startups, D2C and e-commerce platforms, and the e-sports and casual-gaming firms that the new law explicitly permits have been absorbing some of the talent. Companies building compliance and trust-and-safety functions, an area regulators are now scrutinizing closely across tech, have also been hiring from this pool.

What this means if you're job hunting from this sector

• Lead with transferable functions (growth, payments, data, mobile product) rather than the gaming-specific framing on your resume — hiring managers outside gaming may not immediately map your experience.
• Target e-sports, casual/social gaming, and fintech firms directly; several are actively recruiting from the real-money gaming talent pool.
• If you worked in trust-and-safety, KYC, or payments risk at one of these platforms, highlight that specifically — regulated sectors value that experience highly right now.

The broader lesson for anyone in a regulation-sensitive sector — gaming, lending, crypto-adjacent fintech — is that a single policy change can move faster than a company's ability to redeploy its workforce. Diversifying skills toward functions that exist across sectors, not just within one business model, is the most durable protection against this kind of shock.