When Parliament banned real-money gaming last year, it forced a large part of India’s gaming industry to search for a new direction. Browser-based gaming, which sidesteps app stores, real-money mechanics, and user acquisition costs entirely, has been building a significant Indian audience in the interim.
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, passed in August 2025, brought an abrupt end to the real money games segment that had for years anchored India’s gaming economy. Fantasy sports platforms paused operations, early-stage startups shut down, and job losses were reported across the ecosystem. The sector, valued at roughly $5.9 billion in 2025 according to market research firm IMARC Group, was forced into a structural reset, with studios pivoting toward social gaming, esports, and original intellectual property.
Against that backdrop, browser-based gaming has been expanding steadily on the back of affordable smartphones and cheap mobile data. Players open a browser and start playing immediately, with none of the installation friction, app store gatekeeping, or real-money mechanics that define the rest of the market. India is among its largest markets.
Poki, a Dutch browser game platform, is already deeply embedded in the Indian market. According to Semrush, it is the second most visited gaming website in India with over 17 million visits, sitting behind Discord and ahead of Steam, Supercell, Epic Games, and every other games platform in the country. The numbers that explain the scale of that audience are well-established: India had an estimated 517 million gamers in 2025, according to the FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2025, making it one of the world’s largest player bases. At the same time, the country contributes just 1.1 per cent of global play revenue despite accounting for roughly 20 per cent of its users, according to industry data compiled by DemandSage. Volume, rather than spending, is the defining characteristic of the Indian gaming audience. Browser gaming, funded entirely through advertising rather than in-app purchases or entry fees, fits that structure directly.
The accessibility case is equally straightforward. Web games like Poki’s run in any mobile browser, requiring no installation and no storage space on an entry-level handset. The platform reports that mobile devices accounted for 48 per cent of its global traffic by the end of 2025, up from 42 per cent at the start of the year, with mobile on course to overtake desktop usage in 2026. According to Mordor Intelligence’s India Gaming Market Report, mobile accounted for 79 per cent of India’s gaming revenue in 2025, with Android devices priced under $300 remaining the dominant hardware across the country.
Poki’s model for developers differs from typical app store dynamics in one important respect. The platform curates rather than aggregates, accepting games through a selective process and offering studios free access to a playtesting tool before any publishing agreement is signed. The tool provides screen recordings of actual players alongside session-length data and drop-off points. One developer cited by Poki improved average session time from three minutes and 49 seconds to seven minutes and five seconds in four days through iterative changes informed by the data.
India’s gaming industry is moving through 2026 with its business models under revision and its regulatory environment still settling. Studios are being pushed toward original IP, sustainable monetisation, and global distribution reach. Browser gaming addresses all three, and India is already one of its largest audiences.
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