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HT at Esports World Cup 2026: Doors open for cricket, but ‘easy gold medal’ for India not enough incentive
For cricket to make it into esports World Cup, three factors stand out – global audience, fan engagement and the commercial value it can bring.
Paris: S. Tendeher, V. Seway, M Dhenier, G Gemphir. If you were a millennial teenager in the late 2000s, these humorous, slightly altered names must ring a bell. Couple them with the iconic ‘Toura Toura’ soundtrack, Richie Benaud and Mark Nicholas on commentary, and your evenings were sorted. Choose the surface you wanted – dry, hard, wet or dusty – or play through the 40 historical Ashes scenarios from what many consider the greatest Test series between England and Australia in 2005.
There’s yet to be a cricket video game as iconic as the OG EA Sports’ Cricket 07. The legendary Brian Lara series gave cricket video games their first true taste of greatness, and Electronic Arts built on that legacy. Unfortunately, licensing issues and several other factors eventually forced the publisher to drop the cricket series, and as the FIFA franchise continued to grow exponentially, becoming the best-selling football video game franchise of all time, cricket, somewhere along the way, became an afterthought. Ashes 2009 and Don Bradman 2014 tried to revive it, but they were as quickly forgotten as they arrived. The cricket video game series was in the pits. Until Big Ant Studios rewarded gamers with their best cricketing experience yet. Cricket 26 is on its way to getting bigger and better, but whether it can recapture the glory days of EA appears doubtful.
The Esports World Cup brings together 24 different video games under one roof at Porte de Versailles. But a cricket game is missing. In its third edition, the EWC plans to add more games, although Fabian Scheuermann, the Chief Games Officer, wants the number of titles to remain at 24 or at most 25. For cricket to make it into this list, three factors stand out – global audience, fan engagement and the commercial value it can bring.
“When we look at games, the three criteria I mentioned are important. But another factor matters just as much: the game itself. Not cricket as a sport, but its digital version. It needs to create global fandom, attract viewers worldwide and build an international community. India is one of our most important growth markets, but a game can't succeed by focusing on just one country. It needs global relevance. That’s what we’re always looking for. If someone develops a cricket game, builds an ecosystem, generates viewership, draws live audiences, turns it into a global title and works with us, we’re open to considering it. That’s the honest answer. Right now, I haven’t seen a single cricket game that meets those standards,” Scheurmann tells Hindustan Times Digital.
“We cannot artificially create fandom, right? If this new game is, and we all know cricket is already here, then everything else is already here in the Indian market. I think the global challenge is super important, right? Yes, it would probably be an easy gold medal for India in this game, but then the question is, is it an exciting competition if everyone else just gets crushed? It is like, okay, the Indian teams are here in terms of skill level, and everyone else in the world is here. That doesn't make for an exciting competition. Maybe it is exciting for you because you are winning everything, but for the rest of the world, it needs to create some fandom, right? And I think that is where we must be true and honest with each other. The ecosystem needs to be developed, but it cannot be overly localised, even though it would affect more than a billion people around the world, right? It is still nations versus nations. So, this is something I am very cautious about, just creating local hero games and pushing them into it if there is no ecosystem around them, probably.”
Unfinished business
Esports Foundation COO and Deputy CEO Mike McCabe was, in fact, involved in cricket gaming back in the day. To the extent that he developed one of the EA cricket games. However, in 2026, he has serious doubts about whether a cricket game could captivate fans as it once did, primarily because of the growing stature of competition.
“I think there is potential. There is unfinished business there. But what we haven’t seen necessarily is competitive digital cricket. I know there is really a vibrant scene in India and many other countries where it’s a premier sport. What we are seeing, though, is that other games are taking over. PUBG is the biggest. Its viewership is larger than Kabaddi's. which is the first kind of traditional game which it has been able to jump past. Same with football. It will be interesting to see which game the nation gets behind, but I’m not sure it’s going to be cricket.
As to why EA dropped the ball on cricket after 2007, McCabe remained coy but revealed just enough to explain why one of the greatest video game series came to an end.
“What happens with games is that their development cost keeps growing. And the team size expands. If you look at the EA FC team at the moment, there are 1000 people working on this game. It’s difficult to invest in multiple different sporting franchises, and hence, the developers must prioritise,” he tells HT Digital.
“Another thing that’s changed is that games have a life service now, so it’s not just building a game and shipping it like it was back in the day. Now you must maintain its life cycle for many months. The developers must be shrewd in picking their bets.”
