India's Casual Gaming Revolution: How Local Studios Are Going Global Without the App Store

India has 591 million gamers, making it the world’s second-largest mobile gaming market by downloads. For years, that scale told one story: India consumes games. What it is now beginning to show is a second — more economically significant — one: India builds them, and increasingly, exports them. 

The casual gaming segment sits at the centre of this shift. India's gaming industry was valued at USD 3.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 9.1 billion by 2029, according to the India Gaming Report 2025, jointly released by WinZO Games and the Interactive Entertainment and Innovation Council (IEIC) at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March 2025. India's projected gaming revenue CAGR of 14.6% is nearly double the global average of approximately 8%.

The most instructive way to understand how Indian casual gaming is going global is to look at two platforms solving the same problem from opposite directions.

Gamezop, founded in New Delhi in 2015 by brothers Yashash and Gaurav Agarwal, took the B2B route. Rather than building a destination players visit, Gamezop embeds HTML5-based casual games directly into platforms users already use — news apps, fintech portals, telecom services, entertainment platforms. Its network spans over 9,000 apps and websites across 100+ countries, with partners including Samsung Internet, Tata Play, Paytm, and Amazon. For partner platforms, the result is a 15 to 40 percent increase in time spent. For Gamezop, it is a B2B monetisation model built entirely on advertising revenue; no in-app purchases or downloads. 

"India is not just becoming a billion-player market," said Yashash Agarwal, CEO and Co-founder of Gamezop. “Web gaming is seeing explosive traction (… ) no downloads, no wait time, just instant play,”

Where Gamezop embeds games inside the platforms Indians already use, Poki — a browser gaming platform founded in Holland — built the destination itself. Operating on the same underlying technology (HTML5, no download, instant play), Poki serves over 100 million players monthly across more than 100 countries, making it the largest open-web gaming platform. Platforms like Poki demonstrate how browser-based HTML5 games can scale globally without relying on app-store distribution or install-driven discovery.

The contrast is not competition — they operate at different layers of the same market. It shows how instant-play HTML5 games can scale through entirely different distribution philosophies: one embeds, one attracts. 

Nazara Technologies, India's only listed gaming company, has posted consistent revenue growth through its diversified portfolio spanning esports (NODWIN Gaming), edutainment (Kiddopia), and casual titles across geographies. "Indian companies are rewriting the rules, growing from local leaders to global powerhouses," said Nitish Mittersain, CEO and Joint MD at Nazara Technologies.

India now counts over 1,900 gaming companies, employing over 130,000 people, according to the India Gaming Report 2025. Indian studios have moved from outsourced development to creating original IP for global distribution.

"India is not just becoming a billion-player market, it's emerging as a powerhouse for innovation in mobile gaming," said Anurag Choudhary, Founder and CEO of Felicity Games. “We're seeing global-quality titles being built and scaled from here." 

For Indian studios building casual games, the traditional distribution channels carry a structural tax. Apple's App Store and Google Play both take a 30 percent commission on every transaction. This is not just a cost — it effectively raises the barrier to global distribution, especially when combined with the need for paid user acquisition to drive installs. Discovery algorithms on both platforms systematically favour publishers with large user acquisition budgets — a significant disadvantage for studios of ten people operating out of Bengaluru or Hyderabad.

The open web offers an alternative. For smaller studios, the appeal is practical. A small team can build and distribute a browser game globally without navigating app-store approvals, localisation pipelines, or paid acquisition — compressing both time-to-market and upfront cost.  HTML5 games run instantly in a browser, with no download or install  — can be distributed through web platforms without app store intermediaries, without commission, and without UA budgets. According to an estimate, 15,000 games launched in 2025 used HTML5, 2.7 times more than the prior year, according to data cited in Bloomberg's November 2025 report. However, the trade-off is discovery. Unlike app stores, which algorithmically surface content, open-web distribution shifts the burden of audience aggregation to platforms like Gamezop and Poki — making distribution power, not just game quality, the key determinant of scale. 

This is the economic logic behind both Gamezop's 9,000-partner B2B network and Poki's 100-million-player consumer platform. Both are, at their core, distribution infrastructure for browser-based HTML5 games — a format that bypasses app-store dependency entirely. 

USD 2.8 billion has been invested in India's gaming sector. With regulatory clarity, the India Gaming Report 2025 estimates that USD 26 billion in investor value could be unlocked — potentially reaching USD 63 billion by 2029.

For a country that built a USD 200 billion IT services industry by mastering other people's technology before building its own, the parallel is not subtle. The casual gaming sector — low capital intensity, high scalability, universally appealing product, distribution channels that bypass app store economics — may be where India writes its first significant chapter as a gaming IP exporter rather than a gaming market.

The question now is which Indian studios the world will be playing next.