India's games industry is waiting for its Black Myth: Wukong moment, its developers tell us how it can happen

China’s video game industry has had some huge, global hits in the past few years with games like Black Myth: Wukong and Genshin Impact. But we have yet to see equivalent success from games made in India – which has a similarly-sized population of around 1.4 billion people, along with the fifth largest economy on the planet. In fact, it’s rare to see an Indian game become a big hit outside the country’s own borders.

“Eighteen percent of the world lives here, how can we not be represented in one of the primary entertainment mediums?” asks Shalin Shodhan, director of the Gujarat-based indie studio Masala Games. “That’s a mind-boggling thing, if you really think about it. We have so many stories to tell. There’s so much interesting stuff, both in ancient and modern India, that could be showcased.”

Narinder Kapur, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, notes that India-based developers have seen some domestic success, particularly on mobile. Smartphones are the dominant gaming devices in India, with around 94 percent of Indian gamers playing primarily on mobile, according to Niko Partners’ 2024 survey. “One of the most popular games in India is called Ludo King, and it’s basically Ludo in app form,” says Kapur, but other hits also include the battle royale shooter Underworld Gang Wars from Mayhem Studios in Bengaluru, and the recently released Indus: Battle Royale from SuperGaming, which has put its own spin on the Fortnite formula with an Indo-Futurism aesthetic.

Niko Partners also reports that there are now around 508 million gamers in India, who spent an estimated $943 million in 2024. The venture-capital firm Lumikai puts the figure even higher, at $3.8 billion. Yet India’s games industry still remains comparatively tiny. China, with its similarly-sized population and similarly mobile-dominated market, saw predicted gaming revenues of around $49.8 billion in 2024, according to Niko Partners.

Multiple reasons have been put forward to explain why India’s games industry lags behind in terms of scale. Kapur notes it could be partly down to years of antagonistic attitudes towards gaming in the country. “For a long time, video games were looked upon as a waste of time and a waste of money, especially back when incomes weren’t as high as they are now,” he says, adding that parents would question the wisdom of using expensive computers for playing rather than education. “Even after India’s software services industry exploded, the video games industry didn’t take off in parallel, because a lot of people who had the requisite talent to go out and develop games would go out into the larger software services industry.”