India Is One of Mobile Gaming's Last Growth Markets — and It Runs on Ads, Not IAP

Sensor Tower's 2026 State of Mobile report narrowed the list of markets with positive download growth to just two: India and Pakistan. Every other major market — the US, China, Brazil, Indonesia, the UK — saw mobile downloads flatten or decline as the industry pivots from acquisition to retention. For studios building outside the eight now-shrinking top markets, India isn't one option among many; for download volume, it is close to the only one left.

That growth doesn't show up evenly across the funnel. India logged 8.45 billion game downloads in the year to March 2025 — more than double Indonesia's 3.34 billion, and the largest install base of any country in Asia by a wide margin — while game revenue crossed just $400 million over the same period, ranking India eighth in Asia by revenue behind markets with a fraction of its downloads. Downloads themselves fell 8.7% year over year for a second straight year, even as India stayed the volume leader. Scale in India increasingly means reach, not spend.

Genre data explains part of the gap. By downloads, simulators (22%), arcade (19%), and puzzle games (16%) lead the market, but by revenue, shooters take half of everything spent, driven by titles like Free Fire and Battlegrounds Mobile India. Casual genres that dominate the top of the funnel in India are exactly the genres least likely to be paid for directly. The players are there; the willingness to spend on IAP, historically, has not been.

What is working is ads. Across growing markets — India, Indonesia, Brazil — advertising now delivers 55-70% of game revenue, compared with 77-90% coming from IAP in mature markets like the US, Japan, and South Korea. Globally, ad-monetized mobile games pulled in $12 billion across 2.4 trillion impressions in 2025, and puzzle games alone accounted for 53% of that ad revenue — more than every other genre combined. Block, match-pair, sort, and match-swap mechanics are the sub-genres actually converting that attention into ad dollars.

For a studio building casual and idle titles for India first, the read is straightforward: don't benchmark IAP conversion against US or Japan cohorts, and don't treat ads as a fallback monetization model — in this market they are the primary one. The titles clearing real revenue here, from Coin Master to Candy Crush Saga, pair simple, high-download mechanics with ad stacks tuned for volume rather than premium IAP funnels. With India and Pakistan carrying nearly all the industry's remaining download growth, that math is likely to matter more, not less, over the next few report cycles — and it's the logic behind why our own games lean on ads first in this market.