Chennai-based e-sports company Skyesports, considered among the biggest esports brands in India with a grassroots play, has been acquired by gaming firm Jetsynthesys.

The company has a hold on India’s professional gaming market, and intends to use the acquisition of Skyesports to build a base at the grassroots level, said Rajan Navani, vice chairman and managing director of JetSynthesys. He did not disclose the deal value.

“Someone starts off as a casual gamer, then becomes a mid-core gamer and eventually looks at how they can become a professional gamer. I think e-sports really addresses that, where the game is a sport,” said Rajan Navani.

The CMO of Skyesports, Gnana Shekar affirmed the acquisition while hinting at strengthening their presence in India and creating more IPs in South Asia.

“We will work together to create many IPs for the gaming and esports enthusiasts in the country.” Skyesports’ tweet read.

The new entity, Jet Skyesports, will hold a stake of 65%, whereas the founders will have a 35% stake.

The CEO and co-founder of Skyesports, Shiva Nandy, said “This is a well-timed partnership, and we are very happy that JetSynthesys and Skyesports’ vision are on the same track. The esports and gaming market is growing at a rapid pace in the country and the investment comes as a strategic move and at the right time to explore bigger opportunities.”

JetSynthesys also built mobile games and had partnered with Square Enix to build Ludo Zenith earlier this year. Furthermore, it is also the developer of mobile games such as Real Cricket and Sachin Saga. Navani also claimed that the company wishes to add more complexity to its mobile games.

“India is still playing catch up when it comes to PC and console games because we never had high bandwidth connectivity into homes, which is why Korea etc. grew. And consoles, of course, had cost hurdles. But India is catching up massively in mobile. About 17% of all games downloaded on Google Play last year were from India,” he said.

This move came up after an August 2021 report that declared India as the top market in terms of mobile game downloads in 2021. India accounted for over 4 billion game downloads, followed by the US, Brazil, and Indonesia with just over 2 billion downloads each.