Sachin Tendulkar Invests In Metasports, Hitwicket Targets 100 Mn Downloads

Cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar has invested in Metasports Interactive, the company behind the mobile cricket strategy game Hitwicket. The amount was not disclosed.

Metasports Interactive says it will use the investment to take Hitwicket to 100 million downloads over the next three years. The game currently has more than 20 million players across 120 countries.

What Hitwicket Is

Hitwicket is a multiplayer cricket strategy game. A player picks a squad, sets tactics and competes against other players rather than against the computer.

Read More: Ayesha Gupta’s AYURZAA Focuses on Awareness and Everyday Women’s Wellness

FundingSpill Games Raises $10.5 Million Series A Led By Elevation Capitalअन्यNazara Tech Posts Loss in Q2 FY26 as Revenue Continues to Grow Strongly

Hitwicket’s format is closer to a management sim than to an arcade cricket game. That matters commercially, because strategy games retain users for longer than action titles and monetise through repeated small purchases.

Read More: Dr. Geetanjali Saxena: Bringing Tarot, Numerology and Holistic Healing Together

Metasports Interactive was founded in 2020 by Kashyap Reddy and Keerti Singh. In the last six months, the company says its revenue has more than doubled, with players spending an average of 51 minutes a day in the game.

Why the Numbers Matter More Than the Cheque

The Metasports investment amount is undisclosed. Usually means it is small relative to a funding round. Celebrity cheques in Indian gaming are often endorsement deals with equity attached.

What matters is the metric the company chose to disclose: 51 minutes a day per player. That is unusually high for a mobile game and it is the number a buyer of advertising or a sponsor will ask for first.

For Metasports, doubling revenue in six months on a base of 20 million players is also a healthier signal than a download spike, because it suggests existing users are paying rather than new users arriving.

The Celebrity-Investor Pattern

Tendulkar has backed consumer and sports-adjacent businesses for years. Gaming fits the pattern. His name carries weight with a cricket audience that overlaps almost exactly with Hitwicket’s target user.

For Metasports, the value is not the capital. It is the credibility of a player whose career defines the sport the game is built on. Is difficult to buy through performance marketing.

The risk is the same for every celebrity-backed product. Attention arrives on announcement day and decays. The game still has to be good on day 200.

The Indian Gaming Market

Hitwicket’s advantage is that it sits between two audiences. Cricket fans understand the sport without explanation, and strategy players want depth. Metasports is selling to both at once, which is a smaller market than either but a more committed one.

Metasports is building in a market that just reset. India’s real-money gaming segment took a regulatory hit in 2025, when the government banned online money gaming. That shift pushed capital and talent towards skill-based and casual formats.

Hitwicket sits in that second group. Is why it can scale without a wagering model. Its revenue comes from in-app purchases rather than from the amount a player stakes.

The audience is also the largest in the world by downloads. India consistently leads global app installs. A cricket strategy game has a home-market advantage that a global publisher cannot replicate.

What to Watch

Three things will decide whether Hitwicket reaches 100 million downloads. The first is retention outside India, because the 120-country footprint is small in absolute terms and cricket is a niche sport in most of those markets.

The second is monetisation depth. Forty minutes of daily play is worthless if the average player never spends, so the paying-user share is the number to watch.

The third is the live-operations cost. Strategy games need new seasons, balance changes and events every few weeks. That is a permanent team, not a launch project.