The Mobile Gaming Market in India: Aiming for the Middle

Joseph: You can see that almost half of the Indian gaming market is a single genre—a sub-genre, actually—Battle 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.

Roman: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of ROI101. I’m Roman from Tenjin, and today I’m joined by Joseph Kim from Gamemakers. Hi Joseph! Yeah, thanks for doing this with us. Joseph, maybe for those who don’t know who you are, can you do a quick intro?

Joseph: Sure, yeah. So currently I am working in mobile gaming. I started a mobile gaming studio based out of India about five years ago, and we had been working on a mobile extraction shooter. Basically—I know the topic is going to be India today—but 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 hard launching a dating simulation game for India in January, as well as soft launching our mobile shooter game for the global market in January as well.

Roman: Exactly. And this is why we invited Joseph—because he has so many insights on India. We’ll talk about a lot of micro stuff. He prepared some slides, so without further ado, I’ll just ask Joseph to share the screen and we’ll just start a discussion based on it.

Joseph: Okay sure, yeah. I didn’t really prepare—it’s basically… the slides I’m going to share are really… It’s essentially some data that I pulled from a really great report on the Indian gaming market that was essentially published by Bitkraft and RedSeer that 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 metrics there. But it’s all very positive in terms of the overall growth of the Indian gaming market and what I believe to be a pretty significant opportunity there.

Roman: I think you made them pretty and you pulled out the most important stuff for us because the report was huge.

Joseph: Yeah, it’s a really good report for sure.

Roman: Yeah. But can you go one slide back? I want to ask you about the biggest opportunity in 2026. Why do you think the Indian gaming market is the biggest?

Joseph: Well, I think it’s the biggest opportunity because of two things. From a market perspective, it is the fastest growing market in the world from my perspective. And so we can see some of the data associated with that claim in this presentation. But what we are seeing is massive and dramatic growth in terms of the local Indian economy as well as the mobile apps landscape.

But also, I think that there seems to be an opportunity from a demand perspective. As we’ll kind of show in the presentation—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 think it speaks to the potential where if somebody were to develop a game or application for India, the potential revenue opportunity there is very significant.

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 mobile ecosystem in the world, and we also have a demand gap where there are proof points that applications or games can make significant revenue in India if you can come up with the right product.

Roman: Gotcha. Yeah, I’ve seen that even on the indie scale. From time to time I’ll see some games that will like—I even see in the title that it’ll be something like “Indian Cab Driver”—so I can see that the product was made specifically for India.

Joseph: Right, yeah. So 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 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 suggesting here—I believe it represents the biggest opportunity in 2026 when we see so many other market spaces that are extremely challenged right now.

Roman: Right, I agree. Like advertising games in the US now is ultra competitive.

Joseph: All right, so should we get into it? What do you want?

Roman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Joseph: Okay, so yeah, I can kind of speak to this slide here. Again, from this Bitkraft/RedSeer presentation. But what we see here is that when you look at the real GDP growth, India represents one of the fastest developing economies and advanced economies in terms of a major country that has very high GDP growth. When you look at the number of internet users in India, what we’re seeing is pretty massive growth there as well.

So I can just keep going, but we really have bonkers numbers when it comes to the growth. And, what we’re seeing is—in terms of digital gaming revenue, because I’m more in the gaming market, but 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% CAGR since 2023 over the last couple of years, and it’s expected to grow to $4.4 billion by 2030.

I think this is the chart that is especially shocking: we are seeing that in just a five-year span, the ARPPU 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— surprisingly—has a lot of dramatic growth that is not that well understood by people outside of India.

What we see here is what you would expect: a lot of this is driven by increase in discretionary spend. So as gamers or just consumers in India have more money to spend, a lot of that money is going to flow into digital and mobile applications. And what we’re seeing is that discretionary spend growth.

In addition to that, 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—we could talk about the specifics of the Indian market more generally—but in India it is very much a mobile-first economy and a country where there are a lot of people. Well, the vast majority of the Indian market has mobile phones. Very few—I think the penetration of the PC market in India is significantly lower, something like 10 to 15% penetration, relative to phones which is the vast majority. I think 80%+ of the market has access to mobile phones. This is certainly a mobile-first country that also spends a ton of time on their smartphones per day and is one of the top countries in the world in that aspect.

And here you can see that one of the things that’s happening is that historically it’s been more of an ad-based economy, but what we’re also seeing is a projection where we’re going to see a significant shift in terms of the monetization mix from IAA to IAP in the future. We’ve already seen a bit of an increase of that mix over the last couple of years.

Here I think this is speaking to what I was talking about earlier with respect to the demand gap. You can see that almost half of the Indian gaming market is a single genre—a sub-genre actually—Battle 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—Battlegrounds Mobile India—which is essentially just an Indian version of PUBG, and Garena Free Fire and Garena Free Fire Max.

And so I think this is, to me, the most surprising aspect of the Indian gaming market, where you’re seeing 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 Battle Royale has, they will spend.

We’ve seen that also—and we can talk about other aspects of the Indian mobile ecosystem—but RMG games, or real money games, were making significant amounts of money from India until the recent ban took place. And I think that the ban on RMG to some degree has been viewed negatively, but you can also take the opposite side of that and consider that what that does with the RMG ban is it frees up a lot of discretionary spend by Indian consumers to spend in other application areas. And so 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.

Roman: Gotcha. And for BGMI, I’d like to clarify: was this game developed specifically for India? Was it like taking into account the culture…

Joseph: Yeah. So essentially what had happened is that PUBG was released in India and it was… there were, a few years ago, over a hundred Chinese apps that were kind of banned from India. And, because PUBG—so PUBG is a little bit of a unique case where the IP is owned by Krafton, but the game was developed by Tencent. Because of the—and it’s kind of not 100% clear why it was banned—but the clear part is it is associated with the relationship with China. So as part of that, PUBG was banned.

And in response, Krafton 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 it continues to be one of the top games in India.

Roman: Gotcha. Well, I’m wondering if I’m like developing games globally—I’m not targeting only India—is there still a market for me?

Joseph: Yeah, I don’t think… I think that as far as I know, India has not really banned any games outside of Chinese applications, right? Chinese games and applications for mobile. So if you are not a Chinese game company, then I think you’re safe.

Roman: Gotcha. And let’s make—I know this is the last slide, right? So maybe we can go a couple slides back to the ARPU slide. The ARPU slide, yeah yeah yeah, exactly. So it grew nine times. Is it, if I combine it to one of the next slides, is it probably based on IAA—in-app advertising—or…?

Joseph: Yeah, well I think there’s a few things at work here, right? So first of all, there’s probably a greater shift to IAP. 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 to ten years—well actually especially in the last five years—and post-COVID, there was a shift. I think two things have happened since COVID. There was a shift of a lot of production from out of China into India that created a lot of jobs and increased production within India itself.

Also, another effect of COVID was that a lot of jobs, especially software engineering jobs, became more remote, right? And so what happened—you can look at the numbers, there’s a really interesting chart that shows the number of software engineering jobs in the US just since COVID is on a freefall. So does that mean software engineering jobs went away? No. What actually happened is that a lot of those jobs went to India. And so 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 to ten years is that there’s a lot of local industries—and I’m just speaking to this anecdotally from some of the venture capital friends that I have in India—but certain industries in India, whether it’s agriculture and e-commerce and things 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 ARPU.

Roman: Gotcha, makes a lot of sense. And from your perspective, you’re developing two products. If I understood correctly, gaming and non-gaming—how does your approach change?

Joseph: Both gaming, yeah. We are currently focused only on gaming products, but I think you will see us expand into non-gaming applications next year (2026). So that will happen. But for now, 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 in India is: one, you’ve got a local talent base in India. So you’ve got a lot of talent in India 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, we were banking on leveraging local game development talent for the global audience. But 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.

Roman: Gotcha. What was the most challenging in this shift when you had to kind of change your focus? Specifically, I’m talking about the dating simulator for the Indian market.

Joseph: Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t say there’s anything specifically challenging about that. I think for us we viewed it more as a significant opportunity that we should at least spend a little bit of resources 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 we saw was this huge opportunity in terms of the local market, so we decided to just basically take a shot or two. And we’ll probably continue to evaluate the market and opportunistically try to see if there are specific opportunities that we can go after for the local market as well.

Roman: Gotcha. So you saw all those micro stats, the growth in India, you saw everything, and you were like, “Okay, why not make this bet?” Right?

Joseph: Right.

Roman: Gotcha, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, thanks a lot Joseph. We’ll ask our audience to leave the questions in the comments. And is this live?

Joseph: No, it’s not live, but afterwards we ask the guest to reply to the questions.

Roman: Yeah, so please leave us the comments. Joseph will try to answer. We’ll also leave the link to the report in the comments. Anything else, Joseph? For example, how can people find you?

Joseph: How can people find me? Well, I’m on—probably the best way is LinkedIn, probably. So you can look me up on LinkedIn. I’m not very active in social media these days, but yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way. Also, I do have the Gamemakers newsletter and podcast, although I haven’t been quite active just because I’ve been getting my butt kicked in development. But if you go to gamemakers.com, I think that would be a good place to see some of my thoughts and philosophy, whether it’s related to the Indian market itself, especially with respect to gaming, or game development as well.

Roman: Super, we’ll leave all the links in the description of this video. Thanks a lot, Joseph. Give us a like if you liked this video, and until next time!