Games People Play: Online gaming has seen a big boom in India during lockdowns

Locked inside houses and bored, people in India turned to online gaming with a vengeance, giving a fillip to the growth of the sector that is still in its nascent stages in India. The number of mobile game downloads in the country touched a significant 2.9 billion in the July-September period last year from under 2 billion in Q1CY20. From about 250 million gamers at the end of FY18, the number of Indian gamers grew to nearly 400 million by mid-CY20, establishing the country as the “second-largest base of online gamers in the world after China”, according to a recent report published by KPMG.

Analysts believe the trend is here to stay; though the pace of growth in consumption did fade to a certain extent after cities opened up post the first lockdown, most of the key business metrics like monthly active users (MAUs) still operated at a higher average as compared to the pre-Covid period. In fact, the restrictions imposed to tame the surging second wave may have only aided consumption.