For years, brands treated gaming as an activation play: a sponsorship logo on an esports jersey, a gaming creator fronting a campaign or a one-off collaboration built around a tournament. But as India's gaming and esports economy scales, the pitch is changing. The question is no longer whether Indians are spending enough time gaming. It is whether gaming can become a media channel that brands buy with the same regularity as OTT, CTV and social.
According to PwC's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2026-30, India's gaming and esports economy is projected to reach $4.1 billion by 2030, with gaming revenues estimated at $1.5 billion and esports at $2.6 billion. With that growth comes a bigger advertising opportunity—and a more fundamental question about where gaming sits inside the media plan.
The first argument gaming can make is a simple one: attention.
“Gaming is emerging as a serious media channel, given that we are in the attention economy and there is an intense competition for eyeballs,” says Sanjay Trehan, Digital Strategy Advisor. He points to research showing high completion rates for certain gaming ad formats, particularly when compared with the skippable or scrollable environments of OTT and social. The audience is also not confined to gaming. “Gamers are voracious consumers who straddle streaming, social and virtual applications,” Trehan says, making them attractive to advertisers looking to reach the same consumers across multiple digital touchpoints.
But having attention is not the same as being easy to buy.
That, according to Prafulla Kumar Jha, Founder & CEO, JEEVMEDIA, is where gaming still has work to do. OTT and CTV became mainstream media buys partly because they developed a familiar advertising infrastructure: standard inventory, defined impressions and reach-and-frequency metrics that planners could put into a media plan with relative ease. “India already has one of the largest gaming populations in the world and the attention there is real and daily. What is missing is the plumbing,” Jha says.
Gaming, he argues, still lacks consistency across platforms. Different publishers offer different formats and define engagement differently, making gaming harder to compare with more established digital channels.
As a result, it often ends up in what Jha calls the ‘innovation box’ of a media plan—something brands experiment with, but are likely to cut first when budgets tighten. There is another complication: gaming is not one advertising category. Creator-led gaming content competes for influencer and content budgets. Esports sponsorship behaves more like sports marketing. And advertising inside the game itself remains relatively early in India. The last category, however, is not starting from zero. Rewarded video already attracts significant spending through the app-install ecosystem. “The channel is already earning crores. It is simply not taking brand crores,” Jha says.
That distinction could become increasingly important as brands move from simply appearing around gaming to becoming part of the gaming experience.
From billboard to experience
The formats already being tested show how different gaming can be from a conventional screen environment.
In Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), for instance, brands including Royal Enfield and Mahindra have appeared as interactive, driveable elements rather than static advertisements. BGMI has also used regional entertainment and film fandom to build campaigns that have collectively crossed 120 million views. Globally, brands have pushed the idea further. Monster Energy has been integrated into the survival experience of Death Stranding, while Mentos has appeared as a usable item in Fortnite. Mercedes-Benz has also brought branded vehicles into the game.
These examples matter because they illustrate the fundamental difference between advertising on gaming and advertising within gaming. “A badly placed gaming ad is still a bad ad,” says Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO of Frodoh, an ad-tech agency. “The advantage comes when the format takes advantage of the environment rather than simply treating the game as another screen.” For brands, that distinction could determine whether gaming remains an interesting activation or becomes a repeatable media investment.
“Mainstream advertisers don't need to be convinced that gaming is big. They need to be convinced that they can put meaningful money behind it, repeat the investment and explain the outcome to their CFO six months later,” Thakkar says. That is a more difficult proposition than simply proving that gaming has a large audience.
The repeatability problem
For much of the mainstream advertising market, gaming remains a one-off experiment rather than an always-on channel. Karthik Shankar P S, independent digital marketing leader, sees the issue partly as one of audience overlap. The person watching a live esports match is likely to also consume OTT content, watch CTV and spend time on social platforms. “The person watching a live esports match on a weekend is also watching content on OTT, is also reachable on CTV, is also active on social media,” he says. In other words, gaming isn't necessarily offering brands an entirely new consumer. It is offering another environment in which to reach an existing digital consumer — potentially with a different level of engagement.
Yet, Karthik says that distinction has not fully translated into media budgets. “For most mainstream brands, gaming is still an activation budget, not a media budget.” Tech brands are a natural exception because of their proximity to gaming. New-age D2C brands are moving in as well, while larger mainstream categories continue to assess the medium more cautiously.
Jha sees the same pattern from the investment side. Gaming can be approved as a one-off experiential idea, generate attention and even become an award-worthy campaign, without necessarily becoming part of the next quarter's media plan. The categories most likely to return, he says, are those where the brand's buyer and the gamer naturally overlap — including snacks, beverages, energy drinks, telecom and quick commerce. For a bank or a large FMCG advertiser, the internal case for sustained gaming investment remains harder to make. That is where interactivity could become an important differentiator. “In-game video ads and logo placements build recall, but in-game purchases, branded content packs and contests convert interest into behaviour,” Karthik says.
His larger point is that brands need to stop measuring gaming only by visibility. “The brands that will win here are the ones who stop treating gaming like a billboard and start treating it like an experience platform,” he says.
The measurement gap
If attention is gaming's biggest selling point, measurement is its biggest unresolved question. For gaming to compete directly with established media channels, planners need to know what exactly they are buying and how it compares with other channels.
Trehan argues that the industry needs to move beyond click-through rates and look at measures such as attention, first-party data and brand-lift outcomes. Thakkar makes a similar case for standardisation. Gaming needs consistent definitions of an impression, a view, reach and frequency if media planners are going to compare it meaningfully with other digital environments. He points to the IAB's work around gaming measurement as a step towards creating that common language.
Targeting also remains unfinished business.
“‘Gamers’ is not an audience segment. It's an umbrella,” Thakkar says. A 19-year-old playing a casual mobile game for ten minutes and a 30-year-old spending two hours most evenings in a multiplayer title may both technically be gamers, but they represent very different audiences, behaviours and advertising opportunities. That means the next phase of gaming advertising may not simply be about proving that people are there. It will be about giving brands enough information to understand who is there, what they are doing, and what the brand achieved by reaching them.
Jha expects in-game display and rewarded video to become more normalised and plannable over the next two to three years. Branded worlds and deeper integrations, however, are likely to remain more bespoke for longer because they involve building an experience rather than simply buying inventory. That could leave gaming occupying an unusual position in the media landscape for some time: part media channel, part entertainment platform and part experiential playground. The opportunity is already visible. The audience is already there. Brands are already experimenting with increasingly sophisticated formats.
What remains is turning those experiments into something media planners can buy, measure and repeat. As Karthik puts it: “The medium is ready. The question is whether the brands are.”
