Video games are games played on a screen, on a phone, a PC or a games console. Together they are the world's largest entertainment business by revenue, larger than films and music. In India, hundreds of millions of people play them, and almost all of them play on phones: cricket games, word puzzles and battle games.
Here is a typical year for one player. A college student in Guwahati plays a word puzzle game on her phone on the bus. The game was free to download. It is a free-to-play mobile game, which earns from ads between levels and from purchases inside the game. Like most games, it was built on a game engine: ready-made software that draws the graphics, runs the physics and plays the sound. While she plays, game analytics records where she gets stuck, so that the studio can make that level easier.
In a battle game, she wants a new character. She has no credit card. So she pays ₹159 by UPI on a game top-up website, and the game credits appear in her account within seconds. These credits are a virtual currency, bought with real money and spent only inside the game. She also joins a play-to-earn rewards network. Once it has checked that she is a real person, it gives her points for playing new games and for small online tasks.
On a user-generated games platform, she uses the platform's tools to make a small obstacle course, and her friends play it. Later, she buys a big PC game at a fixed price. To make it run more smoothly on her laptop, she uses game booster software, which tunes the computer to show more frames each second.
None of these games is ever finished. Each one runs for years as a live service game. The studio adds new levels, events and items every week or month, and runs servers for millions of players at once.
Who pays for all this? Most players never pay at all. In a free-to-play game, most of the money comes from a small share of players who spend a lot. Indian players spend far less on average than players in America or Europe. So many Indian studios make games for players around the world.
India builds games for the world in other ways too. Large global studios run engineering, live-service and testing centres in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Delhi. Indian studios in Bengaluru make word games played by millions abroad. More and more of the art, text and testing in games is now produced with AI-generated content.