India's Gaming Boom is Just Getting Started

For a long time, India was known as the "back office" of global gaming. Studios provided animation services, quality assurance, and outsourced production for overseas companies. That work built real skill. Some of the best art and animation talent in the industry today came out of those years, but it also meant India rarely got credit for the games themselves, because the ideas usually belonged to someone else. That is rapidly changing.

A Market Too Big to Ignore

India has 550 million gamers today and 175 million of them already pay to play, whether that's an in-app purchase, a subscription, or something else. And they may be the youngest gaming audience in the world. According to report by BITKRAFT Ventures and Redseer Strategy Consultants. India's median age is 29 and more than half of Indian gamers are under 30.

This is a generation that grew up with a smartphone in hand and some of the cheapest mobile data anywhere. 96% of gamers play on mobile, PC and console are catching up, helped along by programs like Sony's India Hero Project, which now supports 78 studios, and Krafton's incubator, which has around 15 studios building original games.

Even so, the average Indian paying player still spends far less than counterparts elsewhere. Annual revenue per paying user in India is $27, compared with over $500 in Japan, though that figure has grown as much as ninefold since 2020. 

That advice cuts both ways. Global studios sometimes bring in pricing that makes no sense for local players. Indian studios, meanwhile, sometimes lean too heavily on ad revenue rather than building direct purchase tools and player trust that turn casual players into paying ones. Krafton's mobile title BGMI, which is India's highest-grossing game, saw its paying user base grow 27% year over year in 2025. That's not a market waiting to happen. That's a market already spending money on the right games right now. 

From Service Work to Original IP

5 out of 10 of the top mobile games by downloads are made by Indian publishers, but that also means the other 5 are still made outside the country, the gap this new generation of studios is working to close.

Source: Top 10 games by number of downloads in India in FY24-25 2. Top 10 India headquartered games by revenue in FY24-25 3. Based on revenue in last 30 days; Sources: Tracxn, Sensor Tower, Redseer Research & Analysis. The Gaming and Interactive Media Opportunity in India | © 2025 BITKRAFT Ventures Management, LLC | www.bitkraft.vc.

The shift toward original intellectual property is the biggest story in Indian gaming right now, and it didn't happen overnight. Nazara became India's first publicly listed gaming company. Around 2019, two of India's larger studios were acquired by international players, including a Swedish company. Since then, more global studios have set up shop in India, not just for outsourced work, but to build their own games with their own profit and loss on the line.

Companies like Zynga, Ubisoft, Keywords Studios, Rockstar Games, and Electronic Arts all have significant operations here now. Some of them do service work. A growing number are building original titles from India for a global audience. Rockstar's India office is one of its largest anywhere in the world.

We're also seeing homegrown success stories. Raji, an indie action game, became a genuine hit a few years back. More recently, an indie title called We Are So Group picked up more than 350,000 wishlists on Steam before launch, a strong signal in a market that historically hasn't had many PC breakout hits. 

Mobile games like Ludo King continue to perform well internationally, especially in parts of Europe and the Americas. If I had to name one gap that's holding back the next wave of original IP, it's not art or animation. India already has plenty of that talent. What we need more of are game designers, the people who shape the systems, levels, and narrative that make a game feel like a game, rather than just look like one.

Why Global Partners Are Paying Attention

Here is what makes India different from other fast-growing markets in the region: Part of it is scale; part of it is a young population with some of the most affordable mobile data in the world; and part of it is infrastructure that most people outside India don't know exists, particularly around digital payments.

That kind of direct connection between developer and player is something our industry body cares about deeply, because it's what allows a small studio in a non-metro Indian city to build something that reaches players anywhere.

Original IP: India's Next Big Move

We're preparing to launch a 6-week creator residency program that brings international and Indian developers together to build something new, side by side. We're also expanding our work with more than 30 colleges around the country, running game jams, and starting our first faculty development cohort so more teachers can train the next generation of designers, not just artists.

The Indian government has been a genuine partner here, supporting the industry through what's officially grouped as the animation, visual effects, gaming, and comics sector. That support includes incubation policies, subsidized co-working spaces, and grants that help studios raise their first round of capital, whether they're Indian-founded or international teams setting up locally.

Our industry's long-term goal is straightforward, even if it's ambitious: By 2035, we want to see 5,000 original IP studios in India, with 100 generating at least $10 million in annual revenue and another 100 reaching $100 million. Together, that would put India at roughly 5% of the global games market. Every program we run, from talent development to policy work to community building, is designed to move us toward that number.

If you're a studio or a publisher wondering whether now is the right time to pay attention to India, my honest advice is simple. See it for yourself. Numbers on a slide only tell part of the story: the energy in a room full of Indian developers, at a game jam or at our own India Game Developer Conference this October, tells the rest.

India's game industry has moved from doing the work behind other people's games to building its own, backed by a young, connected, and increasingly willing-to-pay player base of 550 million people.

Moral of the story: The opportunity in India isn't on its way; it's already here, and studios that show up now will help write what happens next.

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Interviews, copywriting, editing, and article publication prepared by Kirill Tokarev, Lisa Sirlin-Hall, Viktoria Steshina, and David Jagneaux.