The series launched to relatively strong reviews from nearly every large Indian publication. Still, few other streaming services have managed to capture as much cultural cachet in Indian entertainment as quickly as Netflix seems to have done with Sacred Games. That’s almost certainly because of its price: A Netflix subscription in India costs about $7 a month, compared to $15 a year for Hotstar and Amazon Prime Video each. And Hotstar, a streaming service controlled by 21st Century Fox, which gives away most of its content for free, reportedly has more than 75 million subscribers.īy comparison, estimates of Netflix’s Indian subscribers are more modest, at 300,000. Amazon Prime Video, one of Netflix’s biggest rivals in the US, is also pouring money into India and rapidly churning out original content, like a series about cricket, and a reality show featuring prominent Indian stand-up comedians. Some of them include local production houses like Balaji Telefilms, which has more than 2.5 million paying subscribers, according to a recent CNBC report. Netflix desperately wants to dominate streaming in India, but it has more than 30 competitors in the country thanks to aggressive telecom wars that have slashed data prices to pennies. Netflix seems to follow a similar formula with Sacred Games.

Narcos, a hybrid Spanish-English show based on the life of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, has been one of Netflix’s biggest shows since it debuted in 2015. “We want to make Sacred Games a great, global success like Narcos,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told reporters during his first visit to India at the time. Indeed, Netflix has been hyping Sacred Games ever since the service launched in the country in 2016.

The company is promoting the series with enormous billboards in major Indian cities - something it rarely does with its shows in the US. Netflix has already ordered it for four seasons, and it’s Netflix’s biggest production so far in India, whose nearly 500 million internet users are an important market for the company. Netflix has produced a handful of smaller films in India in the past, but it’s taking an aggressive gamble on Sacred Games, a project that features some of Bollywood’s biggest stars and two of Bollywood’s biggest directors. It's a crime thriller based on a critically acclaimed novel about a weathered cop and an enigmatic gangster set in the gritty urban sprawl of Mumbai.

The show is in Hindi but has been dubbed into four international languages, including English, and has subtitles available in 24. Sacred Games, Netflix’s newest original show and the company’s first original series produced in India, debuted in 190 countries - nearly every place where Netflix is available - on Friday.

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