India Just Nuked Online Gaming
(And Nazara Tech Stock Is Paying the Price)
Nazara Tech investors woke up this week to their worst nightmare: India’s lower house of parliament has passed a bill that could outright ban online games involving monetary stakes.
Within just two trading sessions, Nazara Tech stock has gone into freefall, plunging more than 21% and wiping out over half of its year-to-date gains.
If the bill clears the upper house, India’s $3 billion real-money gaming industry could be staring at an extinction event, and Nazara Tech is right in the blast radius.
On Thursday, Nazara’s shares dropped another 9.5%, hitting a 15-week low of ₹1,125.
That comes on top of a brutal 13% slide on Wednesday, making it the company’s steepest two-day collapse since its listing.
What spooked the market wasn’t just the price action, but the fine print of the bill. The new legislation explicitly states that no person “shall offer, aid, abet, induce, or otherwise indulge or engage in” offering online money games. The penalty is up to three years in jail and fines that could obliterate any operator who dares to continue.
Brokerages wasted no time sounding the alarm. ICICI Securities, one of the largest names in the space, downgraded Nazara from ‘add’ to ‘reduce’, slashing its price target from ₹1,500 to just ₹1,100.
More tellingly, ICICI cut the valuation of Moonshine Technology, the company behind PokerBaazi and other popular card-based platforms, to zero.
That’s a chilling signal, considering Nazara owns nearly half of Moonshine. In other words, the market is being told to pretend those businesses no longer exist.
The ripple effect didn’t stop with Nazara. Shares of Delta Corp and OnMobile Global, both exposed to the online gaming industry, also dropped around 3%.
But Nazara, with its reputation as a flagship gaming player in India, has become the poster child of this selloff. Its stock had been up almost 40% for the year as recently as Tuesday. Now? That gain has been cut to just 9%.
The bigger issue here isn’t just Nazara’s immediate share price. It’s whether India’s new hardline stance makes real-money gaming permanently “infeasible,” as ICICI bluntly put it.
Real-money games have always lived in a regulatory grey zone, but they’ve also been one of the fastest-growing digital segments in India, attracting millions of users and billions in venture capital. If this bill sticks, the entire business model could be outlawed overnight.
Nazara, to its credit, has a more diversified portfolio than pure-play betting platforms. It runs kids’ gaming apps, esports businesses, and even edutainment products.
That diversification might save the company from total collapse, but the brutal reality is that its high-growth, high-margin real-money gaming bets were a major part of investor enthusiasm. Strip that away, and the growth story looks far less compelling.
For investors, the question is simple: is this a panic-driven selloff that creates a long-term buying opportunity, or the start of a secular decline in India’s gaming industry?
With the bill still awaiting approval in the upper house, there’s a slim chance of amendments, delays, or loopholes that could soften the blow. But betting on that outcome is dangerous, especially when politicians are framing the issue as a matter of morality, not economics.
Right now, the market is treating Nazara Tech stock like it’s radioactive. And unless the upper house of parliament surprises everyone with a more flexible stance, the selloff may not just be a dip. It could be the new reality.
