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A Year After a ₹915 Crore Write-down, Nazara Just Had its Biggest Quarter Ever. Four Rupees in Ten Came From Businesses it Took Over in August.

By Amit Narang

Updated on November 6, 2026
IST 5:31 pm

In the July–September quarter of 2025, listed gaming company Nazara Technologies wrote down ₹914.7 crore after the ban on real-money gaming. Twelve months later, it has reported revenue of ₹803 crore, its highest for any quarter, and a return to profit. The headline is real. So is the question of how much of it is new growth and how much is a bought-in balance sheet.

A person playing a casual game on a smartphone

The numbers

Nazara’s consolidated revenue from operations for the quarter ended September 2026 was ₹803.2 crore, up about 52 per cent from ₹526.5 crore a year earlier and up 87 per cent from ₹428.8 crore in the April–June quarter, according to figures reported by Inc42. Net profit was ₹35.4 crore. In the previous quarter, the company had posted a net loss of ₹82.5 crore.

EBITDA rose 93 per cent year on year to ₹120 crore, with a margin of 14.9 per cent. For the first half of the financial year, revenue was ₹1,232 crore, up 20 per cent, and EBITDA ₹166 crore, up 52 per cent, PocketGamer.biz reported.

Gaming is now the business. The segment brought in ₹656 crore, or 82 per cent of revenue, up 122 per cent. Within it, mobile games alone earned ₹550 crore, up 167 per cent.

Where the jump came from

Most of that growth was acquired. In March 2026, Nazara signed agreements to buy a 50 per cent controlling stake in Bluetile Games and BestPlay Systems for $100.3 million, about ₹918 crore. Bluetile makes casual and social mobile games such as Yatzy, Domino Legends, Mahjong Voyage and Spade Stars, and reported about 375 million downloads and 22 million monthly active users across 17 live games. BestPlay runs a rewarded-engagement platform used for player acquisition and retention.

In their first two months under Nazara, August and September, the two businesses contributed ₹329 crore of revenue and ₹64 crore of EBITDA. That is about 41 per cent of the quarter’s total revenue. Strip it out and the rest of the company earned roughly ₹474 crore, less than the ₹526.5 crore it reported in the same quarter last year. The comparison is not exact: Nodwin Gaming stopped being a Nazara subsidiary during that year-ago quarter, Business Standard reported.

The deal is not finished. Nazara holds a call option to buy the remaining stake by 2028 at 6.6 times trailing EBITDA, and performance earn-outs tied to 2027–2029 targets carry a most probable payout of $98.2 million, according to the March announcement reported by Storyboard18.

A change at the top

Bluetile’s founder, Raymond Stauffer, a former Google executive, took over as Nazara’s CEO and president on 16 September 2026. His first results statement set out the strategy plainly: “This quarter demonstrates the company we are building: a portfolio of high-quality games on a single, shared platform.”

That is a different pitch from the one Nazara made a year ago. In November 2025, Business Standard reported that the company had cut the carrying value of its investment in Moonshine Technologies, which runs PokerBaazi and other card-based real-money games, to ₹96.53 crore after the Online Gaming Act banned real-money play. The same quarter included a ₹1,098.46 crore accounting gain from revaluing its stake in Nodwin Gaming. Then CEO Nitish Mittersain called both “one-time items”.

The weaker parts of the portfolio

Not every unit is growing. Fusebox, the studio behind narrative games based on Love Island and Big Brother, saw revenue fall 4 per cent to ₹107 crore. The company blamed lower organic installs and a global decline in downloads of similar mobile games, even though Love Island: The Game ranked first among free role-playing games on the US App Store in July.

Kiddopia, the children’s learning-app subscription, grew revenue 21 per cent as subscribers rose 5 per cent and average revenue per user rose 8 per cent to $7.94. Its profit fell sharply because Nazara spent more on acquiring users. The adtech arm earned ₹124 crore in revenue but only ₹80 lakh in EBITDA after an anchor client of Datawrkz paused ad spending. Sportskeeda posted ₹23 crore in revenue and an EBITDA loss of ₹1.1 crore, which included ₹1.2 crore for the Mumbai franchise of the Indian Pickleball League.

Offline entertainment was flat at ₹29 crore. Two Smaaash centres closed, while Funky Monkeys opened 10 play centres in the past 12 months and plans five more this financial year.

What this says about Indian gaming

Nazara is one of very few listed Indian companies that earn most of their money from games, so its results are often read as a verdict on the sector. This quarter’s verdict is mixed. The company has rebuilt its earnings after the real-money ban, but it did so largely by buying a profitable casual-games business and folding it into a global portfolio. The titles doing the heavy lifting, from Animal Jam to Human Fall Flat, which passed 60 million players, and Bluetile’s board and puzzle games, are not the games most Indian players talk about.

The market’s reaction was muted. Nazara’s shares closed 0.37 per cent lower at ₹399.95 on the BSE on the Monday the results came out, Inc42 reported.

What to watch

The October–December quarter will be the first with a full three months of Bluetile and BestPlay, so revenue will rise again on paper. The more useful number will be growth in the businesses Nazara already owned a year ago. Watch Fusebox’s installs, Kiddopia’s spending on user acquisition, and whether the earn-out targets for 2027–2029 start to shape how aggressively Nazara pushes the new studios.