The majority of Indians pay for content online, gaming dominates the premium wallet share: Lumikai

The majority of Indians now pay to access online content, with gaming dominating the wallet share pie at a payment amount of over ₹1,000, a survey has found, said a top official at gaming and interactive content-focused venture capital firm Lumikai.

Lumikai Founder and Managing Partner Salone Sehgal told PTI that the survey covered around 3,000 mobile phone users across the country between September 2024 and September 2025.

The report shows that 80 percent of these consumer bases use UPI for payments, and at least 40 percent have three or four active subscriptions.

She said the trend shows that India’s digital audience is young, data-hungry and very willing to pay.

“We took a deep dive into where people spend that time and what the attention share is and how that is distributed. Of course, social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are a very dominant part of that, but I think what was more interesting was that gaming’s attention share is about 49 percent,” Sehgal said.

She said more than 46 percent of India’s interactive media consumers are women and more than two-thirds are from non-metro regions, and about 80 percent use more than 1 GB of mobile data.

According to Lumikai’s recently released annual report ‘Swipe Before Type’, the gaming landscape is being redefined by women (45 percent of gamers) and non-metro users (60 percent) and the diversity of devices is increasing.

Asked about the possibility of data overlap between children using their mother’s phone to access the internet and the Lumikai survey findings, Sehgal said all consumers surveyed in the survey were over 18 years old.

According to the report, games have a 70 percent share of the wallet for ticket sizes above ₹1,000, indicating that the propensity to pay among gamers is significantly higher than other forms of entertainment.

The report shows that 50 percent of consumers surveyed paid for mid-core games, 20 percent for casual games, 15 percent for real money games (which are now banned), and 5 percent for hyper-casual games.

The report shows that users spend 10 hours a week on social platforms, driven by the desire to interact with friends, influencers and like-minded communities, with 33 percent regularly using astrology apps.

Published on November 17, 2025