India Has 1,900 Game Studios. Most Are Chasing the Hardest Platform

The country's developer boom is pointed almost entirely at mobile app stores, where margins are thin and discovery is brutal. A parallel distribution channel that fits India's gaming behaviour is going largely unexplored.

India is home to approximately 1,888 gaming companies employing more than 130,000 people, according to the India Gaming Report 2025, jointly developed by WinZO Games and the Interactive Entertainment and Innovation Council and launched at GDC San Francisco in March 2025. The country's gaming industry was valued at $3.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $9.1 billion by 2029, growing at 19.6% annually. The studio count is real, the talent pipeline is growing, and the ambition to build for global audiences is no longer rhetorical.

What is also real is the structural problem most of those studios are walking into. Apple's App Store and Google Play both take a 30% commission on every transaction. Getting discovered on either platform without a paid user acquisition budget requires considerable luck. Mobile audiences also expect long sessions, complex live-ops systems and deep monetisation loops, a production scale that most indie studios in India cannot yet sustain.

The platform assumptions are worth examining

The dominant mental model in Indian game development treats mobile as the default and the destination. The India Gaming Report 2025 puts the country's mobile gamer base at 532 million and its total gamer base at 591 million. A studio building for Indian players is, in most cases, building for a phone.

But mobile and browser are not competing platforms. They share the same hardware. Browser-based games run directly in a phone's web browser, require no download or installation and load in seconds. The meaningful distinction is between games that require an app store and games that do not. A significant portion of India's 591 million gamers already play in exactly the short, frequent sessions that browser gaming is built around.

The revenue model fits India's ad-first reality

The FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2025 projected in-app purchases growing at 20% annually, but the current average revenue per paying user in non-RMG games sits at approximately $3, well below comparable markets. Advertising revenue grew 10% in 2024, with casual and hyper-casual titles offering the most accessible entry point for brand spend.

Browser gaming platforms operate on an advertising-first model built around rewarded video, where a player opts in to watch a short ad in exchange for something useful inside the game. Romy Halfweeg, Business Development Manager at Poki, described it on Episode 1 of the Next Big Games Gaming Podcast as a format that works for everyone: players choose to watch and developers earn from every completed view. Games that reach a meaningful audience can generate income that can sustain them on a 50/50 revenue-share basis. For a developer without in-app purchase infrastructure, that is a simpler starting point.

Where the gap sits

More than 15,000 HTML5 games were launched globally in 2025, 2.7 times more than the previous year, with web gaming revenue projected to nearly triple by 2028. India's studio count means the country has the capacity to contribute meaningfully. What is missing is not technical capability but familiarity with a different kind of player.

Web players arrive without having made a download decision. Mobile retention mechanics, timers and onboarding sequences that assume a committed player rarely translate. A studio designing for that behaviour builds very differently from one optimising for Day 7 retention.

The India Gaming Report 2025 puts India's share of the global gaming population at 17 to 20%. That share has not translated into a proportionate presence in web gaming. The studios exist. The audience exists. The infrastructure exists. Whether Indian developers connect those three points is a question of awareness as much as anything else.