- Indian gaming company Gameskraft has been fined by the Registrar of Companies (ROC) for an administrative filing delay of over two years.
- The relatively small fine comes as the company is grappling with a series of much larger crises, including a significant drop in its annual profits due to the 28% GST rate.
- The company has also been forced to shut down its entire real-money gaming ( RMG) business following India’s new national ban on the sector.
- Compounding its problems, one of the directors penalised in the filing order, Ramesh Prabhu, is reportedly missing after being accused by Gameskraft of siphoning over $30 million.
- The combination of events paints a picture of a company facing a perfect storm of regulatory, financial, and internal governance challenges.
Gameskraft, once one of the giants of India’s real-money gaming scene, has been hit with a regulatory penalty for a major administrative breach. However, the fine itself is the least of the company’s worries, serving instead as a symptom of a much deeper, multi-faceted crisis.
India’s Registrar of Companies (ROC) has imposed penalties totalling nearly ₹250,000 (approx. $2,800) on the company and its directors for failing to file a mandatory company resolution form for 886 days. While the fine is minor, it comes at a time when the company is facing a perfect storm of catastrophic challenges.
The Trifecta of Crises
The administrative penalty lands as Gameskraft navigates a series of far more severe issues on three distinct fronts:
- Regulatory Annihilation: The company has been forced to completely shut down its core real-money gaming business. This is a direct consequence of India’s new Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, passed last month, which imposes a blanket ban on all forms of money gaming.
- Financial Pressure: The company’s profitability has been severely hit by the government’s punitive 28% Goods and Services Tax (GST) on deposits. In its latest financial report for FY 2024-25, Gameskraft’s profit after tax fell to ₹706 crore (approx. $85m), down from ₹947 crore in the previous year.
- Internal Governance Failure: In a dramatic turn of events, one of the directors who was personally penalised in the ROC’s order, Ramesh Prabhu, has reportedly been untraceable since March 2025. His disappearance came after the company itself accused him of siphoning over ₹270 crore (approx. $30.4m) in an alleged massive internal fraud.
An Uncertain Future
The combination of these events paints a grim picture for the company. The small fine for a procedural lapse is a minor footnote in a much larger story of a business that has had its core product outlawed, its profits squeezed by high taxes, and its governance rocked by an alleged multi-million dollar fraud.
The future for Gameskraft, like that of the entire Indian RMG sector it once dominated, is now deeply and profoundly uncertain.
