Snapdeal and Titan Capital cofounder Kunal Bahl argues that India’s sweeping ban on real-money gaming has unexpectedly sparked a wave of new startup formation. His case is straightforward: the RMG industry concentrated some of the country’s sharpest product managers, growth marketers, and data engineers. With their core market shut down, many are leaving to build in adjacent categories—fintech infrastructure, consumer apps, sports tech without wagering, and enterprise SaaS—bringing battle-tested scale skills to new problems.

Bahl’s comments frame a larger pattern: regulation can redirect talent rather than extinguish it. Investors report an uptick in pitches from former gaming teams emphasizing profitability discipline, event-driven growth, and sophisticated analytics stacks. For India, this redeployment could accelerate innovation in sectors aligned with long-term policy goals, while avoiding the social risks that triggered the ban. It also broadens the entrepreneurial map beyond a few metros, as gaming workers return to home states to build.

The optimism comes with caveats. Building outside gaming means finding new demand, distribution, and compliance paths, and not every growth hack transfers neatly. Yet the skills honed under severe unit-economics pressure are transferable: A/B testing, fraud prevention, CRM automation, and community management. If capital remains available and regulators provide clarity in new categories, the next two years could produce standout companies formed in the wake of the ban—a reminder that constraints can be a forcing function rather than a dead end. The strongest signal to watch is paying customers: teams that succeed beyond gaming will do it by solving urgent problems quickly, ethically, and at scale. If that occurs broadly, the ban will be remembered less for lost valuations and more for the founders it propelled across India’s digital economy. That outcome would validate redeployment.