Online Gaming in India: 488 Million Users, One Monetization Gap

While legacy industries debate digital transformation, India’s online gaming sector is already leagues ahead. With 488 million active gamers in 2024, India now hosts the largest online gaming audience in the world.

Yet, here’s the kicker: fewer than 10% of these gamers spend money on games. That means more than 440 million individuals are highly engaged but not monetized; they’re forming habits, communities, and digital behaviors that exist outside the traditional revenue model.

The untapped potential here is massive. The real opportunity for businesses isn’t just in monetizing games, but in understanding the psychology of these users: why do they play, how do they discover games, and why mobile gamers don't convert to buyers? In short, understanding why they play but don’t pay, and how to change that.

At Xcel Global Panel, we recently conducted a proprietary research study for a leading online gaming platform to explore this very gap. The objective was to understand how Indian users discover and engage with games, and why conversion from awareness to revenue remains so limited. While the full study is confidential, one insight stood out clearly: awareness in India is highly fragmented, social-first, and behaviorally complex. India’s gaming boom is about much more than game installs or revenue. It’s about digital habit formation, peer influence, and social proof, and platforms that understand this behavior are the ones positioned to strike digital gold.

Even more crucially, we found that awareness doesn't automatically lead to intent. Many users know about a game, may even try it once, and then never return. By mapping these behavioral patterns and friction points, we were able to help our client reframe parts of their user acquisition and retention strategy, ensuring their marketing efforts were better aligned with actual user discovery journeys and social signals.

India’s Gaming Boom: Scale, Speed, and Serious Numbers

According to the FICCI-EY Media & Entertainment Report 2025, India’s gaming market was valued at ₹35,000 crore (~US$3.7 billion) in 2024. And it’s just getting started. The industry is projected to grow at a 16–20% CAGR, reaching ₹80,000 crore (~US$9.1 billion) by 2029.

In just one year, India added 33 million new gamers, pushing the total user base to 488 million. That number is expected to cross 517 million in 2025, meaning nearly 40% of the country’s population will be gaming online.

What’s fueling the money flow? Real Money Gaming (RMG), including fantasy sports and skill-based games, which contributed 86% of total game spending (~US$3.2 billion) in 2024.

India now accounts for 15–20% of the global gamer base, making it a high-stakes playground for platforms, brands, and investors. But with all this scale, the next challenge is conversion, how to increase game revenue in India, how do you turn passive players into active paid users?

Demographics, Discovery, and Digital Influence

In India, game discovery is inherently social. According to Deloitte’s 2024 Gaming Survey, 67% of gamers find new games through Instagram and YouTube, not paid ads or app store rankings. These aren’t just passive impressions, they’re recommendations, reactions, and reviews from people users trust. That’s why a ₹1 crore campaign may be less effective than a creator with the right cultural pull, a nod to the growing power of influencer marketing for mobile games.

Gaming in India is a community-driven, visually-led, socially validated experience. If a user doesn’t see someone they trust playing a game, they’re unlikely to try it, no matter how much budget was spent on marketing.

Gamers here don’t follow ads, they follow each other. Discovery happens in WhatsApp groups, on YouTube reels, via friend referrals and influencer shoutouts, driving social virality.

This also means discovery is deeply cultural. A game that works in Delhi might not resonate in Lucknow or Coimbatore. Demographic patterns further reinforce the need for regional targeting for mobile game growth. According to EY’s Digital Entertainment Report, urban millennials tend to prefer competitive, high-involvement formats like mobile esports or gaming strategy, while Gen Z in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are flocking toward casual, puzzle-based, or fantasy sports platforms. These differences are foundational to how games should be marketed, designed, and monetized using behavioral segmentation for gaming users.

To address this, leading platforms are localizing content, partnering with regional influencers, and running vernacular campaigns. Because in India, mass reach without relevance is wasted spend. McKinsey’s Digital India Report notes that top players now allocate up to 25% of their marketing budgets to awareness-building, particularly in regional and vernacular markets. If your game isn’t seen in the language, tone, and cultural moment your audience lives in, you’re invisible.

Monetization: The Funnel Everyone’s Ignoring

Once awareness is in place, the natural next question is: how do you get users to spend? According to KPMG’s Consumer Behavior Study, the path to monetization follows a non-linear four-stage conversion funnel:

Awareness → Trial → Engagement → Monetization

But most brands focus only on the start and end, overlooking the behavioral drift that happens in between.

The opportunity lies in designing strategies that keep users engaged after their first interaction. Because trial doesn’t equal game retention, and engagement doesn’t guarantee payment. According to Sensor Tower, the average paying Indian gamer spends ₹2,400 per year, but this spend is skewed toward a small, deeply engaged segment. Platforms that actively invest in awareness-building, especially through influencers and interactive ads, see up to 40% higher revenue per paying user.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gaming Insights show that users with higher awareness also deliver better ad monetization. They engage with advergaming and in-app ads three times more frequently and generate 65% higher click-through rates. It’s simple: better-informed users are more profitable users. Monetization doesn’t begin with the payment screen, it starts with awareness and grows through trust, gamer personas, and micro-targeted strategies like player profiling.

Infrastructure, Bharat Markets & The Tech Catalyst

India’s gaming evolution is driven not just by demand, but by the infrastructure that made it possible. The Jio 4G revolution brought affordable internet to millions, and now, the 5G rollout, expected to reach 350 million users by 2028 according to Ericsson, is unlocking possibilities in AR, VR, and cloud-based gaming.

Rural and semi-urban growth is outpacing expectations. Counterpoint Research reported a 45% surge in smartphone usage in rural India in 2024, with gaming consistently ranking among the top money-making games for Android users. Cities like Lucknow, Indore, and Coimbatore, highlighted in RedSeer’s Gaming Economy Report, are emerging as next-gen gaming hubs, not just in usage, but in monetization potential.

What does this mean for platforms and publishers? It’s time to shift from a metro-first mindset to a Bharat-first approach. Regional language support, cultural alignment, simplified UI/UX, and growth hacking with hyperlocal influencers are becoming core strategies, not experimental bets. In India, infrastructure democratized access; now it’s time for marketing to democratize engagement, from freemium users to premium ones, from downloads to in-app earnings, and from installs to gaming wallets.

Online Gaming Brands & Their Success Stories

Online gaming in India is exploding, powered by smart strategies and hyperlocal focus. Dream11, the fantasy sports juggernaut, added 55 million users in 2023 alone, hitting 220 million by March 2024, 72% from beyond the top 100 cities. Mobile Premier League (MPL) rides the regional wave with over 90 million users, 60% from Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns, thanks to vernacular outreach and influencer tie-ups. Meanwhile, Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) proved the power of IP revival, bouncing back post-PUBG ban to hit 100 million users by mid-2022, fueled by mobile esports leagues and desi content.

These platforms showcase a winning playbook: fuel national passions like cricket and gaming, tap into untapped geographies, and build communities. The result? Massive user bases, deep engagement, strong monetization, and unwavering player loyalty.

Tap into the Opportunity

At Xcel Global Panel, our work with gaming, fintech, and consumer tech platforms focuses on awareness intelligence. We help businesses:

• Identify high-conversion segments

• Pinpoint awareness gaps by geography and age

• Align content and campaigns with local digital behavior

Beyond gaming, adjacent sectors like food delivery, telecom, OTT, and financial services are all leveraging games as advertising and engagement ecosystems. Because gaming isn’t just entertainment, it’s a behavioral habit. And habits create revenue opportunities across industries, especially when guided by data-backed gaming strategy and cross-sector engagement.

Understanding how India discovers games, what drives them to engage, and what nudges them to spend; those who focus on these, along with other metrics, will live the story.

Whether you're a platform, an investor, or a brand exploring this space, your biggest advantage will be your understanding of awareness, not just as a media goal, but as a strategic growth lever; contact us so we can help you with it.