What India's 2025 Online Gaming Act Means for iGaming Link Building

What does India's Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 actually ban?

The Act — No. 32 of 2025, assented to by the President on 22 August 2025 — bans "online money games" outright, defined broadly enough to cover any online game played for stakes regardless of whether it's classed as skill-based or chance-based. That removes the legal distinction Indian rummy and fantasy-sports operators had relied on for years, since courts had previously treated genuine games of skill as outside the scope of gambling law. Under the new Act, that carve-out no longer exists for money games of any kind.

The ban covers three things at once: offering the games, advertising them, and facilitating payment for them, with penalties that include imprisonment for operators who continue. The Government of India's official account of the Act is explicit that its purpose is twofold — promote e-sports and online social games while prohibiting online money games entirely, which is also why the Act's own title leads with "promotion" rather than treating it as a pure prohibition statute.

Does the ban reach international operators, or only India-based companies?

The prohibition targets the activity — offering, advertising or facilitating payment for online money games involving Indian users — not the operator's place of incorporation. That's why the payment facilitation ban bit immediately and uniformly: Indian banks and payment processors were barred from handling transactions tied to these games, which cuts off revenue regardless of whether the operator sits in Mumbai or Malta.

For agencies building backlinks on behalf of offshore casino, poker or fantasy-sports brands that market specifically into India, the advertising prohibition is the part that matters most. Legal commentary on the Act's scope confirms the ban extends to advertisements for these games — and a backlink pointed at a page offering real-money games to Indian users is, functionally, advertising. There's no jurisdictional loophole worth building an India-specific compliance strategy around; the market itself is closed to this content type.

What happened to India's real-money gaming brands, and what does that mean for existing backlinks?

The fallout was immediate and severe. Dream11 — India's largest fantasy-sports operator — reported losing roughly 95% of its revenue overnight and exited its real-money product entirely, while also ending its multi-year jersey sponsorship of the Indian cricket team. Other major platforms, including MPL, Zupee, Gameskraft and PokerBaazi, suspended their real-money offerings in the same window.

If your agency or client built backlinks pointed at any of those real-money product pages, those links now resolve to withdrawn, redirected or dead URLs — the same orphaned-link problem a toxic backlink audit is built to catch, just created overnight by legislation instead of by a site going stale over time. Treat it the same way: identify every placement that pointed at Indian RMG content, confirm whether the destination still resolves to anything relevant, and stop sending any further link equity toward it.

• 21–22 August 2025 — Parliament passes the Bill; President assents; the Act takes legal effect as No. 32 of 2025
• 2 October 2025 — India's Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) publishes draft Rules for public consultation
• 22 April 2026 — the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026 are notified in the Gazette
• 1 May 2026 — the Rules commence, completing the Act's implementation

Should agencies still build links for esports or social-casino content aimed at India?

Only for genuinely stakes-free content. Esports and online social games with no real-money payout are explicitly carved out and actively promoted under the Act — it's the first word in the Act's own title. Link building for an India-facing social casino product sits in roughly the same bracket covered in our look at whether social casino apps need backlinks at all: the regulatory profile is closer to a mobile game than a gambling product, provided no cash payout exists anywhere in the product or its promotion.

There's no safe partial compliance between those two categories. A comparison or review site that links out to real-money products for an Indian audience — even products hosted entirely offshore — falls inside the advertising prohibition regardless of how the content is framed. Either the product itself carries no stakes, or the Indian market isn't currently viable for link-based promotion of that content at all.

What should affiliates and agencies with India-facing iGaming content do now?

Audit any India-targeted real-money content immediately: pull or de-link promotional pages, redirect or disavow backlinks still pointed at withdrawn operator brands, and halt any outreach or guest-post campaigns built around Indian RMG keywords — continuing them risks client money on content with no legal path to monetization.

Redirect that budget toward markets with active, enforceable licensing regimes instead. The UK, Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Sweden all still reward the same relevance-first backlink fundamentals that built iGaming SEO in the first place, and for agencies juggling several of those markets at once, this is also a reasonable moment to review how a multi-market link building program should be structured now that one major market has dropped out of the rotation entirely.