Raunak Sen, Balaji Ramnarayan, Omkar Urunkar, Dhvanit Negi and Moin Ejaz spend at least eight hours a day playing Dota 2, an online multiplayer video game where teams battle one another to defend their bases. It’s no hobby — the 20-somethings, who call themselves Team Signify and play as a ‘clan’, get a monthly stipend from a gaming company that covers their expenses, as well as giving them 70% of the prize money they win in competitions.Professional gaming has turned into a career in India with players of online video games forming teams that are employed on a regular salary by corporates.They take part in national and international competitions where the earnings in prize money can range from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 20 lakh-plus per tournament. The total prize money pool announced for various domestic tournaments in the first four months of this year has already crossed Rs 3.5 crore.Team Signify lives together in a house in Mumbai’s Andheri paid for by e-sports company Cobx Gaming , and spends almost every waking moment together practising. Cobx pays the team about Rs 75,000 a month.The four began gaming competitively as individuals about eight years ago. Three years ago, Cobx hired them, sparing no expense on turning them into a team by providing everything from uniforms and custom-built chairs to top-of-the-line technology and new servers. They’ve since won multiple local and international competitions. “In the past three months, we won two tournaments — one in China and the other in Indonesia ,” says Sen.The number of professional gamers with sponsorship has grown rapidly in India the past two years. Cobx estimates there are 30 professional teams today, up from 12 in 2016.Nvidia, which designs graphics processing units for gaming and organises gamer connect events, pegs the number of professional gamers at between 500 and 1,000. In December, a gamer connect event organised by Nvidia in Hyderabad drew 5,000 gamers, says the company’s head of consumer marketing for India, Vamsi Krishna.US tech giant Dell backs Team Brutality — formed by Ankit Panth , 26, Arun Kandpal , 28, and Apurva More, 26 — one of the country’s strongest teams in Counter-Strike, a multiplayer shooter game with teams of terrorists trying to perpetrate an act of terror while counter-terrorists compete to prevent it. They’ve won tournaments in India and the Asia-Pacific region, and “prize money in crores”.The teams don’t like to disclose exactly how much they’ve won so far. Team Signify’s Ramnarayan simply says “lots”. But competition organisers are more forthcoming. Cobx gaming founders Rajdip Gupta and Mujahid Rupani say the prize money in many global e-sports tournaments is upwards of $20 million. “In India, the amount is obviously less, about Rs 1 crore. But it has grown a lot in the past few years. Two years ago, the amount would have been around Rs 3 lakh,” says Gupta.Rajan Navani, MD of JetSynthesys, a gaming development company that co-owns Nodwin Gaming, says the acceptance of online sports as a career option for youngsters has increased with e-sports getting a slot in the 2022 Asian Games.It’s no surprise that companies have jumped on the gaming bandwagon. Live-streaming of online games is popular across YouTube, Facebook and Twitch — and the audience is massive. Newszoo, an e-sports research firm, estimates that 11 million hours were spent in March alone on YouTube to watch League of Legends, a popular online battle game. On Twitch, this number was 28 million hours.Navani says a two-hour live-streamed e-sport show on a TV channel generates 1 million views in India. In Europe, football teams such as Manchester City, Wolfsberg, Manchester United and West Ham have signed e-sports players to represent them.Cobx is launching teams for games like CounterStrike and League of Legends as well as organising a southeast Asian tournament for Dota 2 and CounterStrike this year, with prize money of Rs 1 crore. “We have already received 200 registrations. The point is to create a platform for gamers to compete on,” says Gupta of Cobx.Cobx plans to invest $10 million in the next three years to get the best gamers from India. Nazara, a mobile publishing company, has also announced plans to invest $20 million in Indian e-sports, and launched an e-sports league. Ronnie Screwvala’s U Cypher has announced an e-sports championship with prize money of Rs 51 lakh this year.Recruiting professional gamers helps companies like Cobx and Nvidia earn more sponsorship — the better a player performs, the more sponsorship the company gets, Rupani says. He gives the example of South Korea and the US, where brands like Samsung and Coca-Cola sponsor winning players and teams in e-sports. Newzoo estimates that brands will contribute 77% of all the revenue in e-sports globally.