970x125
Indians’ spending on online games is not “particularly small”, Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran said on Thursday, days after the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for the first time released monthly data breaking up payments made to various categories of merchants via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). As per the data, UPI payments on digital games have averaged more than Rs 10,000 crore in the first four months of 2025-26.
970x125
“…[T]ake a look at how much Indians are spending on online gaming every month. And the number isn’t particularly small – it is Rs 10,000 crore per month. That’s Rs. 1.2 trillion (in a year),” Nageswaran said while speaking at a meeting with statistical advisers in various ministries and departments, organised by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). The government’s top economist went on to tell the advisers present that a separate workshop could be conducted to discuss the implications for consumption spending, GDP growth, savings, and disposable incomes, without elaborating further.
As per the NPCI data released earlier this week, UPI payments for digital games amounted to Rs 40,992 crore in April-July, which is almost equal to the amount spent via UPI in drug stores and pharmacies. These payments for online games made up 1.5 per cent of all person-to-merchant UPI payments worth Rs 27.77 lakh crore over the four-month period. In volume terms, they made up 3.4 per cent of all UPI transactions over April-July.
Official data on money spent by Indians on online games has so far not been available, with the NPCI’s latest publication only containing payments made via UPI. Even the statistics ministry’s updated household consumption expenditure surveys, the last of which was conducted in 2023-24, only asks how much households spent via online payments for consumables and services in the previous 30 days, without specifically asking about games.
As such, total spending on online games may be much higher than what the NPCI data suggests once other modes of payment, such as credit and debit cards, are considered.
Gaming concerns
What may concern policymakers is that the average transaction size via UPI for online games increased from Rs 208 in April to Rs 287 in July.
To be sure, this could also be due to global video game publishers such as Epic Games and Ubisoft adding UPI as a payment option in June. Later, in July, another major games platform, Steam, enabled payment via UPI. Prior to UPI, the options available to video game players included credit and debit cards and internet banking.
Story continues below this ad
Other online games, especially those played on mobile phones, have increasingly become popular in India in recent years. These games, such as fantasy cricket – where winnings are based on a points-based system decided by outcomes of real-life games – and card games like poker and rummy have also been at the centre of the game-of-skill-or-chance debate which led to the imposition of a 28 per cent Goods and Services Tax on them.
According to a PwC report from October 2024, India’s online gaming market is expected to rise to Rs 66,000 crore by 2028 from Rs 33,000 crore in 2023, with the real-money gaming market doing Rs 16,500 crore of revenue in 2023.
“With one of the cheapest internet mobile data prices in the world, Indian smartphone users, exceeding 650 million, have developed a robust culture of data consumption for the purposes of entertainment and playing games. In 2023, an average Indian citizen was consuming 24.1 GB of data per month – an increase of 24 per cent over 2022,” the PwC report said.
While online gaming is not banned in most states in India, many see some of these games – particularly those played on phones – as being similar to gambling, raising concerns about addiction as well as financial losses. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, for instance, issued 1,410 blocking directions related to online betting, gambling, gaming websites, including mobile applications, from 2022 and until February 2025.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
970x125
