India Plays The World’s Games; Gamebee Studio Wants The World To Play India’s

India has 555 million gamers, and its games market, excluding real-money gaming, grew 17% to $1.5 billion in 2025, according to venture firm Lumikai’s latest annual report, as reported by Outlook Respawn. Yet all ten of India’s top-grossing games come from global franchises such as Free Fire, Candy Crush Saga and Roblox. India is one of the world’s great audiences for games. It is not yet one of its great exporters.

Gamebee Studio shows what the other side of that ledger can look like. Founded in Mumbai in 2019 and built without outside funding, the studio made a deliberate choice from the start: to build for global platforms and global players, not for the Indian market alone. Today its portfolio of more than 70 games spans Smart TV, mobile and PC, distributed through Amazon Appstore, Google Play and Apple’s App Store. It reports more than 40 million lifetime downloads across all platforms, and was named Best Indie Game Studio of the Year at the AnimationXpress GEM Awards 2025 (Gaming, Esports, and Metaverse).

“We never set out to build for one country,” says founder and chief executive Amit Dubey. “We built for a screen and a player, wherever that player happened to be. The global storefronts were open to us from day one. The real question was whether we would be patient enough to learn what those players wanted.”

Global By Design, Bootstrapped By Choice

Choosing the world over the home market was a strategic bet, and bootstrapping made it a disciplined one. With no venture capital behind it, every Gamebee release had to find its players in markets that owed the studio nothing.

The catalogue shows who those players are. Sports titles such as Baseball Super League, built around a sport with a modest following in India, and World Sports Games & Athletics were built specifically for players in the United States and Europe. As a portfolio-first publisher of its own games, Gamebee treats every release as both a product and a lesson in what global players respond to.

“Bootstrapping is a discipline, not a constraint,” Dubey says. “When nobody is funding your mistakes, you learn quickly what the global player actually wants. Seventy titles later, that is seventy lessons the market taught us.”

Built From Scratch

Dubey came to games without a conventional startup pedigree. The early-career struggles that preceded Gamebee taught him how games are made, how products find their audience and how to keep building when the odds are against you. That experience shaped how he and co-founders Bosco D’Mello (technology), Daniel Yunus (product and game quality) and Amit Chalke (operations) built the company from scratch.

“Everything I learned in the hard years went into Gamebee,” Dubey says. “Nobody handed us a market. We earned one, game by game.” The studio has since acquired Hyderabad-based Destiny Interactive and reports a team of more than 50 people.

A Clearer Playing Field At Home

India has also redrawn the rules for its own industry. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, passed by Parliament in August 2025, came into force on 1 May 2026 with its accompanying Rules. It bans all online money games, gives formal recognition to e-sports and online social games, and is overseen by a new regulator, the Online Gaming Authority of India.

Lumikai estimates the real-money segment the law brought to an end was worth $2.3 billion. For studios that never relied on money games, the test is now simpler: build games people choose to play because they enjoy them. “When the easy money leaves, what remains is the craft,” Dubey says.

The Step Up To Premium

Next is Gamebee’s first full PC game for Steam, planned for mid-2027. It is a crowded stage: more than 19,000 games launched on Steam in 2025, and almost half had fewer than 10 user reviews by mid-December, according to SteamDB data reported by PC Gamer.

“On mobile, a player gives you thirty seconds. On Steam, they give you their evening and their money up front,” says Yunus. “We are building for that bar now, not the month before launch.”

For Dubey, Steam is the same strategy that has guided Gamebee from the start. “Our whole company is built on looking one platform to the left,” he says. “For an Indian studio today, the platform to the left is the global player.”

“Success used to mean winning the Indian charts,” he adds. “The next generation will be judged by players in Ohio, Berlin and São Paulo who have no idea where the game was made. That is the right test.”

Gamebee chose that test in 2019. More than 70 games later, it intends to be counted among the studios that turn India from an audience for the world’s games into an exporter of its own.

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