NODWIN Bet Ishaan Arya Could Sell Comic Con With Esports

NODWIN Gaming named Ishaan Arya vice president of sales and partnerships on June 14, 2024, to raise the commercial value of Comic Con India beside its esports IPs. Two years later, on June 25, 2026, OS Studios named him country manager for India.

The 2024 brief was not a vacant chair. NODWIN had just bought a pop-culture festival and needed someone who already knew how to sell a hall to hardware and cloud brands.

NODWIN Hired a TEC Founder to Sell Comic Con With BGMS

Arya came in as a co-founder of The Esports Club and as the operator behind The Arena, the consumer gaming festival TEC took into India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The company also listed a parallel seat as head of business development at Bangalore firm Basik Marketing.

His NODWIN job was written as IP value, not as a generic sales patch. The brief named BGMS, DreamHack India, the NODWIN India Premiership, Valorant Challengers South Asia and Comic Con India, then added new brand deals and new formats across gaming, esports and lifestyle.

Akshat Rathee, NODWIN’s co-founder and managing director, tied the hire to ownership. “As a founder himself, Ishaan not only brings a wealth of knowledge and experience but will also drive innovation and growth across key verticals of our gaming and entertainment segments,” he said.

Arya answered in the same register. He called NODWIN a new-age sports media group and said he wanted to use large-scale gaming events and publisher partnerships to push the company further.

The Arena Playbook He Brought From Bangalore

The useful part of the CV sat in the brand list, not the title. NODWIN’s own announcement said Arya had already worked with Comic Con India and with NVIDIA, Intel, LG, Lenovo, Dell, JBL and Amazon.

That book matches how Indian esports still gets paid. Chipmakers, PC brands and cloud firms buy presence at live rooms. A vice president who has sold those names into a festival is hired to repeat the trick on a larger roster.

THE BRANDS HE HAD ALREADY SOLD INTO LIVE GAMING

• Chip and PC: NVIDIA, Intel, LG, Lenovo and Dell sat in his earlier event work.
• Audio and cloud: JBL and Amazon were named in the same 2024 brief.
• The Comic Con rehearsal: In 2020 Arya said TEC had run The Esports Club Arena inside Comic Con India shows, drawing nearly 30,000 people at each stop.

He was not a stranger to the hall NODWIN had just bought. TEC had already parked a gaming arena inside Comic Con. NODWIN’s bet was that the same person could now sell the whole building, not one zone.

What the June 2024 IP Roster Required

The five properties in the appointment note do not share a buyer. A BGMI league sells publisher inventory and mobile-first brands. A Challengers circuit sells a Riot calendar. DreamHack sells a LAN weekend. Comic Con sells tickets, exhibitors and lifestyle names that may never sponsor a tournament.

THE JUNE 2024 SALES BOOK

One sales lead across that mix is a translation job. The person has to talk prize pools to a publisher on Monday and booth footprints to a studio or auto brand on Tuesday. That is why the hire sat next to Comic Con, not only next to BGMS.

Comic Con Grew From Eight Cities to Eleven

NODWIN acquired 100% ownership of Comic Con India in January 2024 at a ₹55 crore valuation. Nazara Technologies’ annual report shows NODWIN paid ₹27.45 crore in cash and issued equity worth ₹27.55 crore, including 172 NODWIN shares, to founders Jatin Varma and Karan Kalra. Nazara’s January 24, 2024 exchange filing put Comic Con India’s turnover at ₹16.26 crore for the year ended March 31, 2023. The festival started in 2011.

Arya joined five months after that filing. He did not become Comic Con’s chief executive. On April 15, 2025, NODWIN named Shefali Johnson CEO of Comic Con India as Varma stepped back from day-to-day running, with Kalra and event director Sonal Varma also moving off that core team. OS Studios later said Arya had “led Comic Con India” while vice president of partnerships, a commercial overlay on an IP that already had its own CEO.

COMIC CON UNDER NODWIN, THROUGH ARYA’S TENURE

1. January 24, 2024: Nazara files the ₹55 crore, 100% Comic Con India buy.
2. June 14, 2024: Arya becomes vice president of sales and partnerships.
3. April 15, 2025: Johnson is named Comic Con India CEO. NODWIN lists eight cities: Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Pune plus Hyderabad, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai.
4. October 31, 2025: DreamHack India, in its sixth year, sits inside Hyderabad Comic Con through November 2.
5. December 2025: Delhi Comic Con records over 52,000 footfalls and a 40,000 sq ft NODWIN Gaming Arena.
6. FY26: Nazara’s investor deck records a Comic Con expansion from 8 to 11 cities.
7. June 25, 2026: OS Studios names Arya India country manager.

Organisers later said the previous Comic Con India season drew more than 3.5 lakh attendees across those 11 cities. The city count and the ticket gate both moved while Arya was on the partnerships desk, even though Johnson held the CEO title.

Hall Space Became the Sales Floor

The product of the 2024 bet is easiest to see where the IPs share a building. In September 2025 NODWIN put DreamHack India back to Hyderabad Comic Con, with BGMI open lobbies, a fighting-game night, chess, BYOD and a retro zone under the same roof as cosplay and comic stalls.

Rathee described that blend as gaming meeting pop culture after six years of DreamHack in India. Johnson said the prior Hyderabad edition had drawn over 40,000 fans. Delhi’s December 2025 show then put Android, Lenovo Legion, PlayStation and a NODWIN arena on the same floor as Crunchyroll and Maruti Suzuki Arena.

That floor is the inventory Arya was hired to price. A brand that will not buy a BGMS patch can still buy a Comic Con booth. A brand that will not fly a cosplay stage can still buy a DreamHack BYOD wall. The 2024 appointment assumed one person could keep those menus in the same conversation.

Two Years Later, OS Studios Hired Him for the Same Gap

OS Studios, a Project Worldwide fan-experience agency, announced Arya as country manager for India on June 25, 2026, with hubs in Bengaluru, New Delhi and Mumbai and production support from sister agency George P. Johnson India. The agency’s own welcome post went up on Instagram the same week.

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John Higgins, CEO of OS Studios, said India is a market where you have to be inside the culture, and that Arya understood that. Rasheed Sait, chief growth officer for India and South Asia at Project Worldwide, said brands are spending heavily on Indian gaming while “true fan experience is too often an afterthought.”

A massive gap remains between brand intent and authentic community engagement in India. I’m thrilled to leverage Project Worldwide and GPJ India’s operational strength to build culture-defining experiences for brands and fans alike.

Ishaan Arya, Country Manager, India, OS Studios

That sentence is the 2024 NODWIN brief with a new letterhead. The hire copy still talks about live rooms, non-endemic brands and community. Trade posts around the OS Studios note treated him as a Comic Con operator being asked to close an experience gap, which is the job NODWIN posted when it took him from TEC.

The people who can sell a hall keep getting recycled because the gap does not close. Hardware and FMCG money will fund a BGMI season. It still struggles to look like a fan event unless someone who has run Comic Con or The Arena builds the room.

NODWIN Sports Arrived in Mid-September 2026

NODWIN did not freeze the thesis when Arya left. Nazara’s FY26 presentation put NODWIN revenue at ₹658 crore, 25% organic growth from ₹524 crore in FY25, with EBITDA turning to a ₹21 crore profit from a ₹14 crore loss. The same deck credited a live-and-content calendar, the Freaks 4U deconsolidation and Comic Con’s city rollout. NODWIN had already said in November 2025 that it would stop funding Freaks 4U, which then filed for insolvency in Germany.

FY26, AS NAZARA FILED IT

• Revenue: ₹658 crore, 25% organic versus FY25’s ₹524 crore.
• EBITDA: ₹21 crore profit after a ₹14 crore loss the year before.
• Comic Con: eight cities to 11 in that fiscal year.
• Other live: a sold-out NH7 Weekender return in Pune, repositioned as the Festival of India.

An August 2026 Nazara filing went further on the festival NODWIN bought in 2024. Comic Con Mumbai sold out. The IP is launching 14 events in India this FY, has registered Comic Con World for overseas editions, and signed a three-year Space Fest memorandum with the Maharashtra government. NODWIN also dropped minimum-guarantee ticket deals so Comic Con could sell tickets directly.

On September 16, 2026, NODWIN opened NODWIN Sports under vice president Gurbaksh Singh Virdi, a former Red Bull, PUMA and Adidas India commercial hand. The new desk is supposed to build mass-participation sports IPs across the Global South, using the same live, content and partnership muscle as BGMS, Comic Con, NH7 Weekender and Valorant Challengers South Asia.

The 2024 hire asked Arya to make esports IPs and a comic festival speak one commercial language. Comic Con got bigger on that watch. Then a global fan-experience shop hired him to sell the live gap he had just been paid to close. NODWIN, nine days before September 25, 2026, pointed the same machine at mainstream sport.