India had 488 million online gamers in 2024, according to the FICCI EY Report 2025, one of the largest gaming populations in the world. And yet, for most Indian brands, the strategy for reaching that audience has remained strikingly narrow, concentrated almost entirely on mobile app advertising and social media, with little meaningful engagement with what lies beyond. Web gaming is one of the channels sitting largely outside that conversation, despite evidence that suggests it deserves to be inside it.
What the Research Says About Gaming Attention
McKinsey research on gaming audiences found that 55 percent of mobile gamers report high levels of focus while playing, rising to 75 percent among PC and console players, a level of engagement the researchers compared to attending a live event. That stands in notable contrast to social media, where users are typically scrolling quickly across multiple content types, engaging with advertising only incidentally. The same McKinsey research found that 76 percent of PC and console players say they are open to in-game advertising. Separately, Dentsu research found that one in four gamers globally expects to spend less time on social media to make more time for gaming, and one in five expects to cut back on streaming television for the same reason. The attention is moving toward gaming; the advertising budgets, largely, have not.
Where India Fits in Web Gaming’s Growth
Within gaming, the web format has a specific advantage that is particularly relevant to the Indian market. Because web games run directly in a browser with nothing to download or install, they work reliably on lower-specification devices and load quickly on slower connections, removing barriers that restrict app-based gaming for a large portion of Indian users. poki.com, widely described as the world’s largest web gaming website, counts India among its top markets globally, alongside Brazil and Indonesia, reflecting precisely this dynamic. The site’s audience spans age groups evenly and is split roughly equally by gender, with mobile accounting for 48 percent of sessions and growing. These are not the niche demographics that gaming advertising tends to conjure; they are broad, accessible, and increasingly active.
An Ad Format Built Around Consent
The dominant advertising format in web gaming is rewarded video, which works differently from most digital advertising. Rather than inserting an ad into the user experience without consent, the format gives players an explicit choice: watch a short clip, typically seven to fifteen seconds, and receive something useful in the game in return. The player opts in, the advertiser reaches someone who has actively chosen to pay attention, and completion rates reflect that distinction. For brands whose campaigns depend on a message being received rather than merely served, it represents a meaningfully different proposition from the formats that currently dominate Indian digital media plans.
Dentsu estimates that gaming accounts for less than five percent of total digital advertising spend globally, a figure that does not reflect how much time consumers now spend there. For Indian brands, the gap represents not an argument for switching budgets away from social media, but for extending reach into an audience that is already large, already attentive, and, for now, largely uncontested.
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