Southeast Asia’s e-sports craze hits home with biggest gaming cafe in Chennai

Nemesis Gaming announces its plans to open Southeast Asia’s biggest gaming cafe in Chennai.

The 6,500-foot Arknemesis Gaming cafe is set to house 68 high-end PC’s powered by the latest and greatest from ASUS, Corsair and NVIDIA, as well as four Playstation 4’s, besides three professional-grade snooker table, also twenty-one 4k TV’s. Due to the lot’s sheer size, it’s seen to able to host 200 people at a time.

“There is immense potential for gaming cafes and gaming in general in India. But we felt that cafes usually focus too much on e-sports games and alienate the casual crowd and thus we decided to create a place that caters to gamers, non-gamers, cosplayers and anime lovers,” reported Harish Suri, founder of Arknemesis Gaming.

Besides creating an e-sports capital in the nation, Suri has managed to achieve a feet seen by many as impossible, which is getting his own parents to invest in his gaming passion.

The industry in India is far from being niche-focused. Vamsi Krishna, Head of Consumer Marketing, South Asia, NVIDIA claimed that are there 8-15 million gamers across the nation with only 300 gaming cafes to meet their needs.

He also added, “Arknemises provides investors with a significant opportunity to address this community, and NVIDIA is working with café owners to enable them to understand the best practices in the business.”

Despite an e-sports career still being seen as a juvenile choice of career by parents of aspiring professional participants, the industry is seen by economists to reach $1 billion in value by 2021.

With the region being wildly famous for top-tier gamers across different games like Overwatch, Starcraft 3 and DoTA 2, India has found most popularity in three games in specific; Counter Strike: Global Offensive, DoTA 2, and mobile-based Clash Royale.

Not only did those games gather some of the world’s best players in India, the nation’s capital, Mumbai also was the host for the summer finale of Southeast Asia’s biggest e-sports competition, ESL.

While society still struggles with taking such an industry seriously as a career path, companies are already on the move to keep up with the trend. Nazara Games, an Indian leading mobile game publishing company vowed $20 million to develop the Indian e-sports ecosystem.

With such efforts, it wouldn’t be surprising to see India in the upcoming years keeping up with other nations in the region, such as South Korea and China.