Nobody saw it coming. Real-money gaming companies in India—the likes of Dream11, Gameskraft, MPL, and Winzo, collectively valued at about $15 billion—have all wound down their operations in stunned silence.

All of them had stopped accepting deposits from users before the Online Gaming Bill of 2025, passed by the Parliament, turned into law on 22 August. These firms will now have to return deposits worth over Rs 1,000–1,500 crore to their users, two senior executives working in these companies estimated.

The law bans users from playing any kind of game for money, whether a game of skill or luck. And that includes games such as rummy, poker, and fantasy cricket that have survived for nearly two decades. On average, Indians spend over Rs 10,000 crore a month and at least 20–25 minutes a day on these games.

As users will now line up to pull out their money, real-money gaming companies will have to rely on banks and payment aggregators to see it through. The latter will only do what’s expected and allowed of them. But when the going was good, payment aggregators such as PayU, Razorpay, Phonepe, and Easebuzz were the real allies of real-money gaming companies. For them, the easiest way to accrue volumes as they were growing was by powering gaming merchants.

Aggregators such as Cashfree and Razorpay, in fact, built a thriving business catering to real-money gaming companies, growing not just their volume of transactions but also margins. In July, online games accounted for about 350 million UPI transactions. In 2024, people spent Rs 50,000–60,000 crore on real-money games, and that was expected to double this year, said a senior payments executive. “No other sector grows as much,” they added.

Now, with the ban—which has come before the Supreme Court verdict on taxing these companies—the sudden loss of volumes and margins from real-money gaming companies will be hard to replace for many of these aggregators, which include IPO-bound Razorpay and Phonepe.

As it is, they’re all locked in a tight battleThe KenRazorpay and Cashfree woke up and chose violence, with the ecosystem now harbouring over 30 licensed aggregators to process hundreds of billions in transactions.

The golden goose

For newer payment aggregators looking to build their position, real-money gaming merchants brought in much-needed volumes, and for the bottom line-focused ones like Razorpay, it was about the margins.