Indian gaming space is democratising, says report

Access to gaming in India is democratising, with gamers coming from cities beyond metro and tier 1 and playing mainstream gaming segments, according to the latest comprehensive report on the gaming space in India, developed by Redseer, in collaboration with Lumikai, India’s first gaming fund.

The report says that with increasing smartphone, internet penetration and world’s lowest data tariff, gamers from across India are maturing in the way they play different genres, casual, mid core and paid games.

India’s gaming ecosystem is transforming at a fast pace as gaming is gaining popularity as a medium of recreation. Today, India’s gaming market is at, a once in a generation, inflection point exceeding previous estimates on sophistications, scale, growth, and propensity to pay. Market is maturing both from a demand and supply perspective.

According to the report, propensity to pay is growing with paid gamers in India to become 235 million by 2025.

Today this number stands at 80 million paid gamers. Most of this growth in paid gamers comes from casual, Midcore, eSports segments and in the form of in-app purchases, tipping, etc. While real-money games are the largest source of revenue for the market, IAPs will grow faster for the next five years at 30-40% with the rise of paying users in casual & hyper-casual gaming.

An average gamer spends $16-a-year on gaming, and it takes one week to start paying to play games.

India emerged as one of the fastest growing gaming markets in the world, with growth in new paying users, now at 50%. Currently, 20% of gamers pay for games.

The report also says that with new paying users getting onboard, India’s gaming market is set to become $7 billion in FY2026; more than 3X of the current market.

While real-money gaming (RMG) will continue to dominate the market, in-app purchases (IAP), virtual gifting, etc to become mainstream spend categories among paid gamers, and the revenue from IAP is expected to outgrow overall India’s gaming market growth rate.

With the rise of online gaming, more so post-Covid, newer games and genres have appeared in the business. Driven by a healthy diversity of monetization mechanics, India first content and increasing propensity to pay, the gaming market matures and evolves to the next level, making it an exciting space to watch.