India Mobile Gaming 2026 Report: Market Size, Trends

6 Jan 202622 min video

Transcript

You can see that almost half of the Indian gaming market is a single genre, a subg genre actually, battle roy royale. And so that's like 47% of the market. But I think the even more shocking thing is that the vast majority of this 47% is essentially two games.
Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of ROI1. I'm Roman from Tangjen and today I'm joined by Joseph Kim from Gamemakers. Hi Joseph. Um yeah, thanks for doing this with us Joseph. Uh maybe for those who don't know who you are, can you do a quick intro?
Sure. Yeah, so uh currently I am working in mobile gaming. So started a mobile gaming studio based out of India about five years ago and we had been working on a mobile extraction shooter. Uh

basically I I know the topic is going to be India today but uh essentially we have a studio that is based out of India building for the global market but then we also have started to explore the local Indian gaming market as well. We'll be launching we'll be hard launching a dating simulation game for India in January as well as soft launching our mobile shooter game finally uh for the global market in January as well.
Exactly. And uh this is why we invited Joseph because he has so many insights on India. We'll talk about lot of micro stuff. He prepared some slides. Without the without further ado, I'll just ask Joseph to share the screen and we'll just start a discussion based on
Okay. Sure. Yeah. And I didn't really prepare uh it's it's basically so the slides I'm going to share are really um it's essentially some data that I

pulled from a really great report on the Indian gaming market that was uh essentially published by Bitcraft and Red Seir that I I would highly recommend folks to check out. But yeah, I did pull some of the graphs from that report if we want to talk about some of the the metrics there. But it's it's all very positive in terms of like the overall growth of the Indian gaming market and what I believe to be a pretty significant opportunity there.
I think you made them pretty and you put out like the most important stuff for us because the report was huge.
Yeah, it's a really good report for sure.
Yeah. But can can you go one slide back? I want to ask you about the biggest opportunity in 2020 thinks why do you think Indian uh gaming market is the biggest
well I I think it's the biggest opportunity because two things so I I from a market perspective it is the

fastest growing market in the world from my perspectives and so what we can see some of the data associated with that with that claim name uh in this presentation but what we are seeing is massive and dramatic growth in terms of the local Indian uh economy as well as the mobile app apps landscape but also I think that there is there seems to be an opportunity from a demand perspective where as we'll kind of show um in in the presentation that there are well actually I don't have the specific data but kind of word on the street is that there are two games in India that are generating hundreds of millions of dollars. And so I I think it speaks to the potential where if somebody were to develop a game or application for India that the that the potential revenue opportunity there

is very significant. And so while India has historically and traditionally been viewed as a market where it's hard to monetize which has been the case, I think that there are data points that suggest that it's very possible to make significant revenue out of India if you make the right product. So what we have is we have an ecosystem that is the fastest growing uh mobile ecosystem in the world and we also have a demand gap where um there are proof points that applications or games can make significant revenue in India if if you can come up with the right product.
Gotcha. Yeah. I've seen that even on the like indie scale. Uh from time to time I'll see some games that will like I see even in the title that be like something like Indian cap driver. So I can see that the product was made specifically for Indian

right. Yeah. And so like historically I think that India has been viewed as a market for downloads and for kind of cheap experimentation but I think increasingly we're going to see that u because of some of the macro factors and because of some of the changes and the fast growth of the Indian market that it's going to be a much more vibrant and viable market and to the point that I'm saying uh suggesting here I believe represents the biggest opportunity in 2026 when we see so many other market spaces that are extremely challenged.
Right. Right. Agree. Um like advertising game in the US now is like ultra competitive. Um
all right. So should we should we get into it or what what what do you want?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So yeah, I can kind of speak to this slide here. Um, again from this Viccraftraft Brezier presentation, but what we see here is that when you look

at the real GDP growth, India is represents one of the fastest the fastest developing economy and advanced economy in terms of um a major country that that has um very high GDP growth. And when we when you look at the number of internet users in India, what we're seeing is pretty massive growth there as well. And so, um, I can just keep going, but like we really have like bonkers numbers when it comes to to the growth. And what we're seeing is we're seeing, um, a digital gaming revenue because, you know, I'm I'm more in the gaming market, but I I think this speaks to the overall application market in India as well. But just in terms of the digital gaming revenue, we're seeing that there's been significant growth at a 31% kagger since 2023 over the last couple of years. and it's expected to grow to 4.4 uh billion by 2030. And I think this is the chart that is um especially shocking

where we were seeing that in just a 5year span the poo poo growth from 2020 to 2025 has been 9x starting at $3 in 2020 to $27 in 2025. And so I think what we're seeing is a market that actually and surprisingly is a lot of dramatic growth that is not that well understood by people outside of India. And um what we see here is like um what you would expect that uh a lot of this is driven by increase in discretionary spend. And so as gamers or just you know consumers in India have more money to spend a lot of that money is going to flow into digital and mobile applications and um what we're seeing is that we are seeing that that discretionary spend growth.

Um in addition to that um what we also see is that India is a country that spends a lot of time on their phones and so one of the things you know we we could talk about the specifics of the Indian market uh more generally but in India it's it is very much a mobile first economy and country where there are a lot of people uh in well the vast majority of of the Indian uh market has mobile phones um very few I I think the penetration of like the PC um the PC market in India is significantly lower something like 10 to 15% penetration relative to like phones which is the vast majority I think like 80% plus of the market has access to mobile phones and so this is certainly a mobile first country that also spends a ton of time on their smartphones per day and one of the top countries in the world for in that aspect.

And here you can see that like um one of the things that's happening is that um historically it's been more of an I like an ad adbased uh economy. But what we're also seeing is a projection where we're going to see significant um shift in terms of like the monetization mix from IAA to IAP in the future. And we've already seen a bit of an increase over that of that mix over the last couple of years. And um here I think this is this is like speaking to what I was talking about earlier with respect to the gap what what I believe is a gap in demand. You can see that almost half of the Indian gaming market is a single genre a subg genre actually battle roy royale and so that's like 47% of the market but I think the even more shocking thing is that the vast majority of this 47% is

essentially two games the first is BGMI uh battlegrounds mobile India which is essentially just an Indian version of PUBG and green of free fire green and Garina Fruit Fire Max. And so um I think this is to me the most surprising aspect of the Indian gaming market where you're seeing like two games represent a huge portion of the Indian gaming market which to me indicates that if you give Indian consumers or players a product that resonates with them in a way that like battle royale has they will spend. And we've seen that also and you know we can talk about other aspects of the the Indian um mobile ecosystem but you know RMG games or real money games were making significant amounts of money from India until the the recent ban took place and I think that the ban on RMG to

some degree has been viewed negatively. that you can also take the the opposite side of that and consider that what that does um with the RMG ban is it frees up a lot of discretionary spend by Indian consumers to spend in other application areas. And so, um, I think what we are going to see is the freeing up of discretionary spend and the opportunity for a new app or game developer to create a product that sucks up a lot of that spend.
Gotcha. And for BJMI, I'd like to clarify, was this game uh developed specifically for India? Was it like took into account like the cultural and
Yeah. So essentially what had happened is that PUBG was released in India and

it was um there there were like a few years ago over a hundred Chinese apps were kind of banned from India and because PUBG so PUBG is a little bit um of a unique case where the IP is owned by Craftton but the game was developed by 10 cent and because of the um and it's it's kind of not 100% clear why it was banned but the the clear part is it is associated with the relationship with with China and so as part of that PUBG was banned and in response Crafteron led a new development of essentially the same game PUBG but a more India localized version of that game and kind of free of Chinese influence. And so BGMI was reintroduced into the

market and um and you know it's it's continues to be one one of the top games in India.
Gotcha. Well, I'm wondering if I'm like developing games like globally, I'm not targeting only India. Um is there is still like market for me? Uh
yeah, I don't I I think that as far as I know, India has not really banned any games that you know outside of Chinese applications, right? Chinese games and applications for for mobile. So if you are not a Chinese game company, then I think you're safe. This is clear. Gotcha. And uh let's make I know this is the last slide, right? So maybe we can go a couple slides back to the RPU slide.
The RPU slide.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
So it grow nine times. uh is it if I combine it to the one of the next slides, it's probably based on IA in app advertising or uh
Yeah. Well, I think I think there's a few things at work here, right? So, uh first of all, um there's probably a greater shift to um AP. Sure. I think that's part of it. I think the other part is that there is a rise in discretionary income. But essentially what's happened is that what we have seen with India is a dramatic rise in the middle class. And so over the past call it five ten years well actually especially in the last five years and postcoid there was a shift I I think two things happened um since co there was a shift of a lot of production from out of China into India that created um a lot of jobs and

increased um you know increased production within India itself. Uh also another effect of COVID was that a lot of jobs especially software engineering jobs became more remote right and so what happened like you can you can look at the numbers like you should there's there's a really interesting chart that shows that the number of software engineering jobs in the US just since COVID is on a freef fall. So does that mean software engineering jobs went away? No. I what what actually happened is that a lot of um a lot of those jobs went to India and so like a lot of Indian developers were able to secure jobs with higher salaries displacing US software engineering jobs because of the remote nature of work. And on top of that, what has happened over the last five ten years is that there's a lot of local industries and I'm I'm just

speaking to this anecdotally from some of the uh venture capital friends that I have in India but certain industries in India whether it's agriculture and ecom and things of that of of that nature. A lot of those industries have been booming which has also again led to this effect where the Indian middle class has been growing substantially. That growth leads to the ability for Indian consumers to be able to spend much more dramatically than in the past and leads to this dramatic growth that you're seeing here in our Gotcha. Makes a lot of sense. And uh from your perspective, you're developing like two products like if I understood correctly, gaming and non-gaming.
Yeah.
How does your approach changes?
Both gaming. Yeah, we're so we are we are currently focused only on gaming products but I think you will see us expand into non-gaming applications next year. So that will happen but for for

now our our two main products will be a dating simulation game for India and that mobile extraction shooter game for the global market. And both of those games correspond to what I would describe as the two opportunity spheres with respect to India, right? And so the way that you can think about the opportunity India is one, you've got a local talent base uh in in India. So you've got a lot of talent in India that can be uh that can work on products for the global market. So that's one opportunity sphere. And the second is the local market itself where you're seeing this dramatic growth. Now when I started Leela games five years ago, you know, we were banking on leveraging local game development talent for the global audience. But um what we did not expect was the dramatic growth in the local market. And so this new dating

simulation game is a response to what we're seeing as this massive and unprecedented growth over the last five years. Gotcha. What was the most challenging in this shift when you had to kind of change your focus specifically? I'm talking about dating simul simulator for Indian market.
Yeah. I mean I wouldn't say there's anything specifically challenging about that. I I think for us we viewed it more as a significant opportunity that we should at least spend a little bit of resource to try and go after. Right? So currently the vast majority of our company is still oriented around the mobile extraction shooter game and that has a lot of challenges associated with it which depending on your interest I can go into or not. But what what we saw was like this huge opportunity in terms of the local market. So, we decided to just, you know, just just basically

um take a shot or two and we we'll probably continue to like evaluate the market and and you know, kind of like opportunistically try to see if there are specific opportunities that we can go after for the local market as well.
Gotcha. So you saw all those like micro stats you often in India you saw everything and like okay why not to make this bad
right right
gotcha makes a lot of sense um yeah thanks a lot Joseph we'll ask our audience to leave uh the questions in the comments and
is this live
no [laughter] it's not live but afterwards we ask the guest to reply to uh to the questions. Um yeah so please uh leave us the comments. Uh Joseph will

try to answer we'll also leave the link to the report in the comments. Uh anything else Joseph? Uh for example how can people find you?
How can people find me? Well, I'm on uh probably the best way is is LinkedIn probably. So, you can look me up on LinkedIn. Um I'm not very active in social media these days, but uh um yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way. Also, I do have the GameMakers uh newsletter and podcast, although I I haven't been quite active just because I've been getting my my butt kicked in development. But if you go to gamemakers.com, I think that would be a good place to um kind of uh see some of my thoughts and philosophy whether it's related to the Indian uh Indian g the Indian market itself especially with respect to gaming or game development as well.