Last week's PUBG India Open[1] was India’s first official PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) online tournament, organised by Delhi-based GamingMonk. Considering the game released via Steam Early Access barely 10 months ago with a full release in December[2], the very existence of the tournament is in ways a testament to the game's quick rise in popularity.
According to PC gaming service Steam, PUBG is currently the most played game on the platform with over three million daily active players globally including India[3], rivalling established heavyweights such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO) and Dota 2.
Aside from PUBG India Open, GamingMonk has organised online tournaments for FIFA, Call of Duty: World War 2, and CSGO in the last year. Gadgets 360 spoke to Ashwin Haryani, Co-Founder GamingMonk, who talked about the company’s origins as well as PUBG’s India potential.
Although GamingMonk is now a full-time tournaments organiser, that's not how the company got started.
“We started doing gaming tournaments just to promote sales. We didn't have a lot of funds to actually run those tournaments, so we started taking an entry fee for these events,” says Haryani. “When we started in Jan 2015, I believe we got about 70 to 80 FIFA gamers for our first FIFA tournament, and since then we continue to increase the number of the frequency of events and we kept getting a better response each event.”
The company pivoted to tournaments full-time last year, and received an undisclosed amount from venture capital firm AdvantEdge. It used the funds to launch its subscription-based e-sports portal, hosting online tournaments for FIFA[4], Counter-Strike: Global Offensive[5], Dota 2[6], and Clash Royale[7]...