Yours truly had an interview with an Indian gaming website called GamesOrbit recently along with my good friend Elroy Pinto.

Here’s a snippet

Game Orbit: Lastly, Talking particularly about Starcraft, where and how do you think India is lacking behind? As an individual gamer, what measures can be taken to bring this game up? And probably adding up to the question, how exactly can E-Sports in India rise?

Karthick Gopal: Elroy wrote it well in the thread. We are not serious. We don’t have a single top tier competitor player that can compete with the best in the world. We thus have no exposure to anything in tournaments. As Indian or south Asian players, we need to unite the community participate in foreign tournaments spread the word among friends, make it a mission to bring one new person into the game and spread the joy of gaming together. This is a social sport, just like you play cricket and compete, we should infuse that same spirit. As an individual I think we should learn to become better at the game and strive for excellence. The highest league is Grandmasters which no Indian player has reached, if we have 15 grandmaster players, and then we have a good competing field and a pool of talent to help other players come in as well

For E-Sports to rise we need an ecosystem of gamers, organizers, marketers, players and support from people to take it to the next level. We don’t lack talent, we lack unity and organization. For those people that have passion the means to do this are currently very hard because of the lack of support. Once this picks up though, I see no reason why we can’t be world level or elite. But it starts with professionalism, social cause and then unity to bring people together for a greater good, uniting people through gaming not just winning tournaments.