India's gaming numbers are hard to ignore: roughly 517 million gamers , or nearly one in five of the global player base. This is a market that grew 43.9% in a single year to reach $2.79 billion in 2024, with PwC projecting revenue climbing to $3.96 billion by 2029.
And yet India generates just 1.1% of global gaming revenue.
That gap, between an audience of historic scale and the money flowing through it, is the defining tension of the Indian gaming market. It is also the opportunity the rest of the world is beginning to move on.
The infrastructure excuse is gone
For much of the past decade, slow and expensive connectivity explained everything. That explanation no longer holds. Reliance Jio crossed 200 million 5G subscribers in Q1 FY26 . TRAI logged over 518,000 live 5G radio sites by December 2025, covering 99.9% of districts . Average smartphone prices have fallen to around $274, with 88% of handsets shipped in Q1 2025 carrying 5G radios.
The connectivity and device gap that kept large parts of the Indian gaming audience on the margins of the market is closing at a pace that few industries have seen in a comparable timeframe.
The monetisation model is already settled
India's gaming audience has demonstrated a clear preference over time. They play for free, supported by advertising, and they are comfortable doing so.
Ad-supported formats accounted for 46% of India's gaming revenue in 2025, according to Mordor Intelligence . Rewarded video, where a player opts in to watch a short ad in exchange for an in-game benefit, is the dominant unit, with completion rates above 90%. This is not a transitional behaviour waiting to be replaced by paid models. It reflects the structure of the market.
The advertising industry is beginning to treat it accordingly. In-game advertising in India is projected to cross $1.2 billion by 2030, according to PwC's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2025–29: India Perspective, which tracks in-app and in-game advertising revenue growing from $584 million in 2024. The broader programmatic advertising market is forecast to grow from $4.9 billion in 2025 to $17.6 billion by 2033, according to Pheonix Research . Industry analysts are calling 2026 the year in-game advertising moves from experiment to serious media line item.
Where the gap remains
The difficulty for advertisers is access. Mobile app gaming, which accounts for 79% of India's gaming market according to Mordor Intelligence, sits inside ecosystems where programmatic buying is fragmented and standard measurement tools do not apply consistently. Gaming inventory remains harder to buy at scale than most other digital formats, which is why many brands still treat it as a secondary channel.
Browser-based gaming presents a different proposition. It requires no download, runs on any connected device, and plugs into the same programmatic infrastructure advertisers use elsewhere. The global web gaming market is on course to exceed $3 billion by 2032, according to Verified Market Research , which valued the H5/browser gaming market at $1.03 billion in 2024, and the category already reaches audiences at a scale comparable to major console platforms. One game platform alone, Poki , serves 100 million monthly active players at its peak.
India is already among the top five markets by player volume on that platform, without significant local marketing investment. The audience is there. The question is whether the advertising infrastructure around it develops at the same pace.
Disclaimer: This article is generated and published by ET Spotlight team. You can get in touch with them on etspotlight@timesinternet.in
