As India's game market grows, opportunity awaits

Game developers who want to grow their business may want to look to new markets where they can sell their games, and India is a prime market where a game company can find new players.

Find out more here!

"For game developers, entering a new market is one of the simplest ways to acquire new users and gain new revenue," said Yulia Mikhailova, payments business development manager at Xsolla, speaking in a sponsored Q&A session with Game Developer (see video below for full interview).

Xsolla is a game commerce company and provider of a suite of tools that help game companies expand their businesses. Over the last few years, Mikhailova said Xsolla has seen game companies show increasing interest in selling their games locally in India, thanks to a few factors.

First there's the financial aspect. "India is a tremendous business opportunity [for games], representing almost $2 billion annually, with forecasts to reach $4 billion in revenue by 2025," she said. "Secondly, there is the potential audience, with over 400 million video game players spending approximately nine hours per week playing video games."

"Thirdly, the barriers for entering the Indian market for Western developers are not that high," Mikhailova said. "English is a commonly-spoken language, so to start selling games, Western developers don't really need to localize the game...gamers in India have gotten used to Westernized content."

Mikhailova said there are a few factors driving India's game market growth. For one, the country has a relatively young demographic with an average age of 28 who have jobs and a growing amount of disposable income to spend on entertainment like online games.

India also has the second-largest smartphone userbase in the world, outsized only by China, with Indian residents spending five hours per day using their phones. Indian players installed 4.8 billion games in the first half of 2021 across Android and iOS, compared to 2 billion each in the U.S. and Brazil, Mikhailova said.

"That makes India really the world's top market for mobile gaming," she said, with 85 percent of players using mobile phones as their platform of choice.

India's is also a global IT hub and that has laid the groundwork for new game companies, with the amount of studios exploding in recent years, though still behind more established game markets.

"Now is a good opportunity to tap into a new market when it's not that competitive," Mikhailova said.

For the full interview, watch the chat with Mikhailova above. You can learn more about selling your game in India here.