Why India's games spending is expected to reach $9.2bn in five years
India's gaming revenues rose 23% in the last fiscal year to $3.8 billion – and are expected to nearly triple in the next five years.
That's according to a new report by India-based venture capital firm Lumikai, created in collaboration with Google and Deloitte. Some of the report's consumer data was based on a survey of 2,269 India smartphone users.
According to this year's 'State of India Interactive Media and Gaming Research' report, mobile games accounted for 30% of the nation's $12.5 billion new media market in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. New media also encompasses video content, animation and VFX, audio streaming and social media.
In fact, games revenues were nearly level with the $3.9 billion from video content, the largest new media segment.
And games are projected to reach $9.2 billion in revenue by the end of the 2029 fiscal year.
Lumikai's founding general partner Salone Sehgal tells GamesIndustry.biz the Indian games market has been plagued by misconceptions over the years – for example, that players only engage with real-money games – but the data demonstrates the industry is much broader.
"The [typical] narratives of 'Indians don't play games' and/or pay for games – they have been debunked completely," she says. "So if we take that off the table, if you're looking for the next billion gamers, they're going to come from the Indian market."
According to the report, India stands as the world's second biggest mobile games market with 15.2 billion downloads in the year ending March 31, 2024.
Meanwhile, the total number of players rose by 4% to 591 million in the past year.
Sehgal tells us that, while most markets saw a spike in gaming revenues during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdowns helped boost mobile games and draw both revenue and players away from their real-money counterparts in a way that hadn't happened before.
"Post-COVID is when gaming and mobile gaming largely became a prevalent phenomenon," she explains. "Real money gaming
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