A law years in the making
The India online gaming ban has been one of the most significant regulatory stories in the sector this year, and it has been a long time coming. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 passed both chambers of India’s Parliament on 20 and 21 August 2025, and received presidential assent the following day, on 22 August 2025. What it actually does, and how it is playing out on the ground a year on, matters well beyond India’s own borders.
What the Act actually does
The Act prohibits online money games outright and sets out penalties for offering or advertising them. It draws a distinction between skill-based formats, such as esports and fantasy sports, which remain regulated rather than banned, and chance-based games involving wagering, which fall into the prohibited category.
To oversee all of this, the law establishes a National Online Gaming Commission, or NOGC, responsible for licensing and regulating platforms, with individual state governments able to set up their own subordinate authorities underneath it. Any operator that wants to run a licensed skill-based platform must hold an NOGC licence, and licensed platforms are required to build in age verification, self-exclusion tools, deposit limits and responsible gambling warnings as standard.
Penalties and enforcement
Operating without an NOGC licence is not treated as a minor compliance issue. The Act sets out fines and potential imprisonment for unlicensed operation, and licensed platforms are also required to comply with anti-money laundering rules and keep user funds in segregated accounts, rather than mixed in with general company funds.
Skill versus chance, in practice
The distinction the Act draws between skill-based and chance-based formats is not just a technicality, it is the dividing line that determines whether a platform can legally operate at all. Esports and fantasy sports, both classed as skill-based, remain within the regulated system and can obtain an NOGC licence. Real money games built around chance and wagering fall on the other side of that line entirely, regardless of how they are branded or marketed. For operators used to markets where this distinction is blurrier, or simply does not exist in the same form, that is a meaningfully different starting point to plan around.
The immediate fallout
Laws like this rarely play out exactly as intended, and this one is no exception. One study cited in coverage of the Act found that offshore gambling use has jumped by 20 per cent since it passed, with monthly spending among affected users reportedly reaching more than Rs 25,000. Industry figures were blunt in their warnings at the time, cautioning that the law could “wipe out India’s real money gaming sector” while pushing users towards offshore platforms that operate entirely outside Indian oversight.
Implementation itself has also stalled. As of the most recent reporting, a firm commencement date for the Act had still not been announced, with the government missing repeated notification deadlines. In practice, this has left much of the sector in a holding pattern: the law is in force in principle, but the detailed rollout that would actually put the National Online Gaming Commission to work has not caught up with it yet.
What it means for the wider industry
For operators and suppliers outside India, this is worth watching closely rather than treating as a purely domestic story. India is one of the largest potential real money gaming markets in the world by population, and a prohibition-first approach, rather than a licensed and taxed one, sets a precedent that other large, price-sensitive markets may look to when weighing up their own regulatory options.
The early evidence of rising offshore use also fits a pattern regulators elsewhere have seen before: strict prohibition tends to shift demand towards unregulated operators rather than eliminating it, which is precisely the outcome consumer protection rules are meant to prevent. Whether India adjusts its approach as implementation continues, or holds firm on prohibition, will be one of the more consequential regulatory questions for the global industry to track over the rest of the year.
A different path to the same problem
It is worth noting that India’s prohibition-first approach sits in contrast to the licence-and-tax model many other large markets have converged on, where real money gaming is permitted under regulatory oversight and taxed accordingly, rather than banned outright. That is not a judgement on which approach is correct, since both come with their own trade-offs, but it does mean India is currently running a live, large-scale test of the prohibition approach at a moment when offshore migration data is already suggesting some of the same channelling problems that licence-and-tax regimes were designed to solve.
For more on how regulated betting markets globally are responding to this kind of shift, and for more regulatory insights from across the sector, it is worth keeping a close eye on how this story develops through the rest of 2026.
