eNews
Indian gaming revenue set to hit Rs 250 billion by 2019
MUMBAI: With the growing technology, not only the number of users in India is growing steadily but the mobile gaming users increased too.
The latest report by mobile gaming trends and gaming habits the Seattle based enterprise SaaS for mobile marketing company has stated that Indian gaming revenue is set to double in the next three years and hit Rs 250 billion by 2019, owing its growth to the increase of smartphone penetration and higher in-app spending in the market. Combined with industry estimates this proves that mobile games in India are growing at an average rate of 56 per cent.
The report titled, ‘India & Mobile Gaming: Poised for Massive Growth’ comprises insights and data collected from over 3,500 Indian smartphone owners and over 220 million mobile app installs in India mapped from January-September 2016.
As per the Tune report, Indian mobile gamers are more likely to buy virtual goods. In fact, 34 per cent of Indians respondents admitted to spending money in mobile games every month. Interestingly, a tiny fraction of players are the highest contributors to game revenue, just as it is seen in other markets globally. Specific to India, 2.5 per cent of Indian gamers provide over half of game revenue, and 5 per cent account for almost 80 per cent of all game monetisation in the country.
Regional Head of Sales India Ashwiny Thapliyal said, “India is already the world’s second-biggest market for smartphones. With 221 million smartphone owners and as many as 800 million Indian citizens joining the smartphone revolution over the next decade, India will emerge as the country with biggest global opportunity for growth. India is a mobile-first country and its people are mobile-centric buyers. This is one of the many reasons why we furthered our existing commitment towards the Indian market by opening TUNE’s first corporate office in India located at Delhi/NCR in November 2016. Our India office will also serve as our strategic hub for business in Southeast Asia.”
Another key finding revealed that women are serious mobile gamers in India, with 87 per cent playing a game at least one hour per week. This number matches the North American data, where women make up 55 per cent of all mobile gamers. Of the women surveyed, 63% said that they prefer playing single player games and 18 per cent prefer playing against another player.
Interestingly, women prefer single-player games to an even greater extent than men.
Tune’s mobile economist John Koetsier added, “As per our research, the number of app installs in India doubled last year and in fact, Indians downloaded more than 3X as many commerce-oriented apps per capita as the next highest country, Brazil. Although relatively nascent, Indian mobile gaming industry is catching-up fast and our research highlights the immense potential it holds for gamers, game developers, mobile publishers and advertisers.”
Indian Gamers and their Gaming Habits:
84% of Indian smartphone owners have games on their phones.
37% of gamers have three or more games on their phones.
47% of Indians in top urban cities like Delhi and Mumbai tend to install one to two games on their phone.
Indians are very eager to try new apps: a majority install new apps every week. 90% of Indian smartphone owners download games regularly and are very willing to try new apps, especially new games.
Those with cheaper smartphones change to new games more frequently possibly due to low storage/device memory.
Google Play is the undisputed leader in India, taking 94% share of all game installs.
The cheaper the phone one possesses, the more likely is an Indian consumer to get new apps straight from a friend or from the web.
Almost 7% of people get new apps from their friends.
Gaming Behaviour Trends: Almost 9 in 10 Indian smartphone owners play games weekly.
86% of people play at least one game regularly and almost a third play more than three games regularly.
Indians who own expensive smartphones worth Rs 30,000 and up are less likely to play games.
57% of Indian mobile gamers prefer single-player games.
Only three of the top 10 downloaded games are team or multi-player games.
Indians are loyal gamers, with significantly higher user retention compared to global averages.
Almost a third of Indian gamers are exceptionally loyal to the games they love, at times playing them for months at stretch.
Just over one in 10 Indians play the same game regularly for over a year.
50% of Indians give a game just a few days and switch to a new one, if it’s not interesting, fun, or engaging enough they switch to a new one.
Gender Matters: Women play just as many games as men, but men play for longer.
92% men play at least one hour per week as against 87% women who play at least one hour per week.
57% of men play more than two hours each week, compared to 48% of women.
Interestingly, 54% men prefer single-player games. Team games get the least attention from both Men (14%) and Women (11%). Young men i.e. teens under 17 play less than men aged 20 or above.
Mobile Game Monetisation and in-app Purchases:
Top games tend to be team or multiplayer games; 8 out of the top 10 grossing games in India are multiplayer or team games
Similar to world average, 2.5% of Indian gamers provide over half of game revenue, and 5% account for almost 80% of all game monetisation in the country.
Young gamers are the least likely to pay; 71% of Indian smartphone owners (under the age of 21) buy nothing in games every month.
2% of gamers spend over Rs 200 each month, and almost one in 10 spend over Rs 50 every month.
32% of gamers use digital wallet to cover their mobile game purchases, while 25% use a debit card as opposed to a credit card- widely use payment mode internationally.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
