On a Steam forum thread an Indian gamer was trying to explain to a bunch of Americans why ?5,999 for DOOM: The Dark Ages was outrageous. The Americans couldn’t wrap their heads around it. “That’s like sixty-seven bucks, what’s the problem?” The problem, which took about forty replies for anyone to grasp, is that sixty-seven bucks in India doesn’t feel like sixty-seven bucks. It feels closer to paying $350 for a single game.
The World Bank’s purchasing power parity tables back this up: you need something like ?21-22 to buy what one US dollar buys domestically. But nobody in that thread was citing the World Bank. They were just talking past each other. It captures the central tension in global gaming right now. The industry is more international than it’s ever been, but pricing still largely works as if everyone lives in San Francisco.
How India Actually Games
India clocked 8.45 billion mobile game installs last fiscal year, per Sensor Tower. That’s billion with a b, and it makes the country the biggest mobile gaming market on the planet by download volume. But only a tiny fraction of that audience has ever bought a console game at full price, and the reasons are pretty straightforward: the hardware is expensive, the games are expensive, and for most of the country’s 659 million smartphone owners, the phone already does the job.
The real backbone of Indian gaming isn’t the PlayStation or even the gaming PC. It’s a ?7,000 Android phone, a ?200-a-month data plan, and UPI. If you’re not familiar with UPI, it’s India’s unified payments interface, and it has done more for gaming monetization in South Asia than any marketing campaign ever could. Two taps, no credit card, no sign-up friction. According to data India’s Chief Economic Advisor cited last year, Indians are now spending over ?10,000 crore monthly on online games through UPI alone. That’s roughly $1.2 billion a month, and it only counts UPI transactions — cards and bank transfers are extra.
What’s wild is how small the individual amounts are. For example, the minimum bet in the popular JetX game on the odds96 online platform is as low as ?8. Eight rupees! That’s about nine cents. Publishers figured out that if you make the first purchase feel like nothing — cheaper than a packet of chips — people cross the psychological barrier from “I never spend on games” to “okay, maybe sometimes.” And once that barrier breaks, spending tends to grow. The average UPI gaming transaction went from ?208 in April to ?287 by July 2025, right around when Epic, Ubisoft, and Steam all added UPI support.
The Battle Pass (And Whether It’s Actually Fair)
The BGMI Royale Pass costs 360 UC, which works out to about ?300-350 depending on how you buy the currency. Call it four dollars. For that, you get fifty levels of rewards, and if you grind to level 43, you earn the UC back. Meaning the pass is effectively free for anyone willing to put in the hours. I’ve seen people argue this is exploitative because it hooks players into daily engagement loops, and honestly, I get that critique. But compare it to the American model of paying $70 upfront for a game you might abandon after ten hours, and the value math looks very different from an Indian gamer’s chair.
Outlook Respawn ran a piece last year calling UPI “the single biggest hero” of India’s in-app purchase boom, and I think that framing is right. The old story about Indian gamers was that they’d play forever but never pay. A 2023 figure had only about 3% of players spending anything. By 2025, Lumikai’s research was reporting 75% of Indian gamers making in-app purchases. That’s not incremental change. Something broke open.
The pattern repeats across Southeast Asia, though the specifics vary by country. In the Philippines, over a quarter of microtransactions still go through carrier billing because so many people don’t have bank accounts. Indonesia saw 870 million mobile game downloads in just Q1 2025, per Sensor Tower, mostly on budget Android handsets that cost less than $150. Free-to-play with cheap cosmetics isn’t some inferior version of gaming in these markets. It is gaming. Mobile Legends, Free Fire, BGMI — these are the shared cultural touchstones for a generation of players who might never own a console.
The Pricing Problem That Won’t Go Away
Here’s where things get complicated, and where I think the optimistic narrative needs a caveat. The microtransaction model works well when it’s battle passes and cosmetic skins. It works less well when it’s gacha mechanics and loot boxes engineered to exploit compulsive behavior. And the uncomfortable truth is that these predatory designs don’t hit lighter in lower-income markets. A kid in Jakarta burning through his data budget on randomized pulls is getting a worse deal than a kid in Dallas doing the same thing, because the relative cost is so much higher.
But I’d argue the bigger structural problem is actually happening at the premium end. Sony hiked the Indian price of Horizon Zero Dawn from ?1,098 at launch to ?3,299 after the fact. Horizon Forbidden West launched at ?3,999. Microsoft priced Halo: The Master Chief Collection at ?849 initially, then jacked it to ?3,349. These aren’t PPP-adjusted prices. They’re moves toward global price harmonization, and they’re happening right when India’s PC and console audience is starting to grow. It’s like raising the drawbridge just as people are arriving at the castle.
Steam still offers suggested regional pricing, and indie developers mostly follow those recommendations. But AAA publishers are increasingly ignoring them, apparently deciding that India should be treated as a premium market. Outlook Respawn’s analysis called it a missed opportunity, and I agree. India’s gaming market pulled in around $5-6 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $16-17 billion within a decade. Two-thirds of its gamers now live in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Cloud gaming through services like Jio’s Blacknut partnership is starting to bring console-quality titles to phones. The growth is real, but it’s fragile, and price signals matter.
Where This Goes
The American $70 box game isn’t dying. But it’s also not the template for what comes next globally. The future, at least in the markets where most of the world’s new gamers actually live, looks more like the ?80 impulse buy, scaled across hundreds of millions of people. A kid in Patna spending ?29 on his first skin, a college student in Hyderabad picking up a Royale Pass, a working professional in Jakarta buying a season bundle on her commute.
None of these transactions look impressive in isolation. Together, they’re building something enormous. The gaming industry just has to decide whether it wants to meet these players at their price, or keep pretending everyone can pay American rates. I know which bet I’d take.