The Indian entertainment landscape is undergoing a monumental paradigm shift. No longer confined to the traditional rules of passive distribution, the modern audience—led by Gen Z and Gen Alpha—demands active participation. At the epicenter of this evolution is the gaming industry, boasting a staggering scale of over 8 billion mobile game downloads in India alone last fiscal year.
To unpack how gaming communities are redefining fandom, why long-term brand integrations beat short-term sponsorships, and how regulatory clarity is paving a safe runway for non-gaming brands, Insidesport caught up for an exclusive conversation with Mr. Karan Khurana, Head of Publisher Business at Scara.
In this candid dialogue, Khurana breaks down why visibility alone is a metric of the past and how Scara is fundamentally designing participation-first experiences for the future.
The Architecture of Shared Memories: Why Gaming Communities Dominate Engagement
Insidesport: Gaming communities are emerging as some of the most engaged audience ecosystems today. Why do you think this shift is happening?
Karan Khurana: Previously, the traditional entertainment industry led the charge, but recently, the gaming industry in India has seen an unprecedented boom. The most honest way to explain this is through a pivotal moment in 2020 that completely changed how the entertainment sector views community.
When Epic Games hosted the Travis Scott concert inside Fortnite, roughly 12 million people didn’t just watch a broadcast; they were inside the experience. They witnessed the same visual milestones together and talked about it for weeks. That is an engagement-heavy, in-game moment that creates a shared memory. And shared memories are the true bedrock of any real community. In traditional entertainment, the focus has always been on distribution—getting content in front of as many eyes as possible. Gaming is built differently; it is fundamentally rooted in co-creation and connection.
From Spectators to Creators: Gen Z’s Move to Participation-Led Engagement
Insidesport: Younger audiences are visibly moving away from passive consumption toward participation-led engagement. How deep does this behavior go?
Karan Khurana: What makes this moment genuinely fascinating is how deeply ingrained this behavioral shift already is. Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t just consume culture; they actively build it. They drive the narrative through memes, fan edits, grassroots tournaments, content remixes, news reactions, and localized Discord servers organizing their own competitions. All of this grassroots engagement was happening well before mainstream brands even recognized gaming communities as commercially valuable assets.
India is currently leading the world in mobile game downloads, crossing the 8 billion mark last fiscal year. While that number highlights our sheer scale, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Downloading a game is actually the very last step in a deeply social process. People download a title because their squad is moving there, their friends are playing it, or their favorite creator streamed it.
For brands and publishers, the most effective strategy is to build campaigns inside the spaces where the audience is already showing up. Look at live streaming—viewers can now interact directly with creators, shaping the live stream by advising them on strategies, picking the next game, or sharing tips. At Scara, we design participation-first experiences for our clients because the formats that consistently outperform are those where the audience has a genuine role to play, rather than just an invitation to watch a screen.
The Resilience of Fandom: Lessons from the BGMI Community
Insidesport: Can you give us an example of how resilient these communities actually are in the face of disruption?
Karan Khurana: The clearest example of this in India is Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI). When the game faced a temporary ban in 2022, the community didn’t dissolve. Instead, it stayed vibrant and active across Discord and YouTube—debating meta shifts, creating content, and keeping the core culture alive. When the game returned in 2023, the player base was entirely primed to jump right back in.
This resilience stems from a sense of emotional ownership; BGMI wasn’t just a leisure activity, it was a part of their daily social lives. At Scara, our publisher partnerships consistently prove that the communities with the deepest engagement are always the ones where the audience feels they co-own the experience.
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Insidesport: Over the last three years, we’ve seen mainstream non-gaming brands—like automobile and lifestyle labels—enter esports. However, some brands, like Philips OneBlade or Realme, exit after a few months, while others, like iQOO, stay heavily invested. What can brands learn from gaming fandom culture?
Karan Khurana: The most crucial lesson gaming culture teaches brands is the difference between renting an audience and building one. Right now, a majority of brands are merely renting. The repeated pattern we see is a brand activating heavily around a single tournament or a flashpoint moment, generating superficial numbers, and then going completely quiet until the next fiscal campaign cycle.
Gaming communities expect year-round consistency. That is the only way genuine loyalty and brand consideration are built; it cannot be a one-off IP play. Brands need to move beyond simple logo placements on a broadcast overlay and look toward meaningful, custom integrations. Are you creating original content with the players? Is your product organically featured and amplified within the narrative? What can you do dynamically on screen that genuinely hits home?
You hit the nail on the head regarding long-term players. iQOO is a fantastic case study here. They aren’t treating this as a quick transactional play; they do things year-round—from team sponsorships to owning original IPs and executing smart licensing deals. They show the community that they are invested in the ecosystem’s growth, not just extracting quick value for themselves.
Insidesport: Why are community and belonging becoming stronger drivers of long-term loyalty than raw visibility alone?
Karan Khurana: There is a stark difference between reach and community. Reach is simply how many people you can talk to. Community, in my eyes, is measured by how many people would talk about you if you suddenly disappeared tomorrow.
Indian gaming started as a tight, niche ecosystem. Whether it was old-school Counter-Strike LAN parties or early BGMI squads, these were intimate spaces like Discord or private servers where everyone knew each other’s names. Now that the Indian ecosystem has scaled to hundreds of millions of players, a unique tension has emerged between scale and belonging. When everyone is a part of the crowd, a community can easily start feeling like just a passive audience.
The platforms navigating this best are building structured tiers of participation, giving players ways to feel they have earned their place. Interestingly, we are seeing this play out beautifully in the chess ecosystem right now. Esports organizations are signing Chess Grandmasters, bridging one of the oldest, most fanatical competitive communities with modern digital platforms. Chess has a system gaming actively tries to replicate: the absolute weight of a rank. When you see a player ranked 1200 versus 1600, you view them through an entirely different lens. Visibility helps people discover you, but community is what makes them stay.
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Insidesport: We are increasingly seeing an intersection where gaming, creators, traditional sports, and mainstream entertainment overlap. How is Scara capitalizing on this cross-cultural shift?
Karan Khurana: The younger generation doesn’t restrict themselves to a single subculture. A young kid from Lucknow can be deeply passionate about gaming, hip-hop, and cricket all at the same time. This intersection is already our reality. Look at how mainstream platforms like JioCinema or the IPL have integrated creators and stand-up comedians directly into their supplementary broadcast feeds. It’s a deliberate strategy to capture the younger demographic.
Creators aren’t just showing up at IPL stadiums as casual guests; they are being woven into the very fabric of how traditional sports reach a younger India. Globally, the Esports World Cup is a prime example of this model. It features a massive $60 million prize pool, but it functions equally as a massive intersection of competitive esports, pop music, culture, and non-competitive lifestyle gaming.
Going forward, success lies in blending these distinct subcultures. At Scara, the most fascinating client briefs we receive today are no longer asking us to choose between an esports tournament, a sports activation, or an entertainment campaign. They are explicitly asking us to build immersive experiences that intersect all three.
From BGMI to IPL: Why Scara Is Banking on Cultural Relevance and Community-Led Brand Equity Inside Sport India.
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