2026

“With an 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,” according to the 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 RedSeer, a management consultant company developed in collaboration with Lumikai, India’s first gaming fund.

“With an 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,” according to the report. 

The report mentioned that the propensity to pay is growing with paid gamers in India to become 235 million by 2025, amid the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. 

Presently, 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. 

The report outlined that while real-money games are the largest source of revenue for the market, IAPs will grow faster for the next 5 years at 30 to 40 per cent with the rise of paying users in casual and 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 per cent. Currently, 20 per cent of gamers pay for games,” the report stated. 

With new paying users getting onboard, India’s gaming market is set to become $7 Bn in the fiscal year 2026, 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,” report mentioned. 

With the rise of online gaming, more so post-COV, 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.