The gaming community of India is a diverse group of people from different states, age groups, and economic backgrounds. There are more than 400 million of us, nearly one-third of the country. Most of us are not playing on PlayStation and Xbox, computers, but on mobile devices - why? Because that's affordable! Hundreds of thousands of us also stream gaming content generating billions of hours of content for small streams of revenue that help us sustain ourselves. By increasing the GST 20 times, you are essentially turning this into a rich man's game taking our only source of entertainment from our hands. We, the gamers of India, petition you to reduce the tax liability on the gamers and keep gaming accessible, affordable, and enjoyable for us. 

While some of us have already represented India on a global stage, there are thousands of us who want to continue doing so. And competitive gaming is the only way to challenge ourselves and hone our skills. The prize money only goes towards entering more competitions. You were already deducting 30% TDS on every Re. of our winnings! Now you are adding a 28% tax on every game, you are making it impossible for us to continue with what we enjoy, our choices, and something that we have poured years of time and a considerable amount of money into - we have lakhs of live streaming channels that hosted paid gaming tournaments.

By putting us in the same bracket as gambling, you have disrespected our entire community. We are not gamblers. We, the eSports enthusiasts, are not gamblers. We, the competitive multi-player gamers, are not gamblers.  It’s extremely disrespectful for govt. to label our profession and passion a ‘Sin’ activity and completely disregard the years of hard work gone into developing skills in a game and garnering an audience on our channels. 

The gaming influencer community has worked hard to live-stream and create content that you all loved, and now this tax policy is directly affecting us. All of us, around 50-60 Crore young gamers playing games online, and this tax policy is hindering our ability to enjoy gaming as it has become too expensive now and beyond our means. The cheapest entertainment that we used is now being taken away. 

We already pay income tax and TDS on every winning, and now we are supposed to pay 28% GST even before starting a game. For example, in a game of Ludo, if we lose 100 Rs. in one tournament, we lose the entire amount, but if we win, we only receive Rs. 20 after putting in Rs. 100!! This is very discouraging for the entire online gaming ecosystem of our country. There are many illegal betting companies who have started scavenging over innocent online gamers, and actively promoting that their products won’t charge any GST or TDS.

Esports has been recognized as a full-fledged sport in the Asian Games, but India did not participate in it because we lacked players, partly due to the stigma surrounding online gaming as detrimental to society. Now, online skill gaming has been wrongly associated with gambling and casinos, which not only takes away an avenue of entertainment for us but will also impact our financial opportunities. Everything from social media, and games, to mobile phones is considered addictive, but being adults, we should have the freedom to decide for ourselves. With this tax policy, we will have to pay 20 times more tax to the government, which is very unfair to our gaming community.

Let’s sign this petition and come together to create a respectful and thriving gaming ecosystem in India; otherwise, participating and winning in the Asian Games will always be a distant dream for us. If you cant make jobs for us dont take our opportunities and entertainment.