
Industry expertise
Gaming & Esports market research in India
Player, monetisation and audience research for gaming companies.
Quick answer
Market Research India is a specialist gaming & esports research consultancy in India. We interview players, streamers, parents in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia and English, with field teams in 50 cities and 4 methods matched to how this sector actually buys.
Proposal in 24 hours
Scoped, itemised and fixed-fee.
50 cities, 14 languages
Our own supervised field teams.
Senior-led, NDA-first
A research director on every project.
2,400+
Projects delivered
50
Cities with field teams
30
Industries covered
14
Indian languages
01
The decisions we help you make
India's gaming audience is enormous, young and almost entirely mobile, and it spends in small amounts for social reasons. The household context — a shared phone, a watching parent — shapes monetisation more than any paywall design does.
What makes players pay in-game?
Who is the Indian mobile gamer?
How big is the esports audience?
What converts a free player into a first-time payer, and what stops the second payment?
Which titles can support a real-money or esports extension, and where does the regulatory risk sit?
Tell us which of these you are actually facing and the design follows — sample, method and analysis plan are all downstream of the decision.
02
Who we talk to, and how we reach them
Who you talk to decides what the study can conclude. We treat each audience as a separate recruitment problem rather than as quotas in one sample.
Players
Screened on titles played, hours per week, device and spend in the last 90 days, with payers and non-payers quota'd separately rather than left to fall out of the sample.
Streamers
Recruited across follower bands and languages through creator networks, screened on streaming frequency and the share of income earned from gaming content.
Parents
Sampled among households with gaming children, screened on awareness of play time and spend, and interviewed separately from the child so neither moderates the other.
Interviews run in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia and English, with every questionnaire translated and back-translated before fieldwork. Moderators and interviewers are briefed on the gaming & esports category itself, not handed a script — which is the difference between a respondent answering politely and a respondent explaining themselves.
03
Methods that fit this sector
These four come up repeatedly in briefs from this sector. Each page explains the method in full and what it delivers.
Quantitative
Online Surveys
The audience is native to the channel and responds best to short, in-context mobile surveys.
ViewQualitative
Focus Group Discussions
Online groups by title and cohort, where players argue about value in their own language.
ViewQuantitative
Product & Concept Testing
Build, feature and monetisation testing with real play sessions before a live-ops change ships.
ViewQuantitative
Usage & Attitude Studies
Play occasion, device and social-context mapping across cohorts that look nothing like each other.
View
04
What a typical study looks like
Indicative, not fixed — but close enough to budget against before you have written a brief.
Indicative scope — gaming & esports study
- Typical sample
- n=1,500 players across 4 cohorts and 5 languages, 6 online groups and 25 streamer and parent interviews
- Who we interview
- Players, Streamers, Parents — each recruited against a separate screener rather than drawn from one general sample.
- Core methods
- Online Surveys, Focus Group Discussions, Product & Concept Testing, Usage & Attitude Studies
- Fieldwork window
- 3–4 weeks
- Standard deliverables
- Real-time dashboards, Cross-tabs, Executive summary, Video highlights
- Signature output
- A conversion-to-first-payment model with the social triggers identified by cohort
- Lead time
- 6–7 weeks from sign-off to debrief
05
Compliance, ethics and data quality
Research in this sector carries obligations that a generic fieldwork house will not have thought about. These are the ones we build into the protocol before the first interview is scheduled.
Minors protected throughout
Under-18 participation requires verifiable parental consent, sessions are time-boxed, and no child is questioned about spending without a parent informed.
No spend encouragement
Research never prompts or rewards in-game purchases, and incentives are paid outside the game economy.
Real-money gaming handled carefully
Where RMG is in scope we respect state-level restrictions, screen out self-declared problem gamers and signpost support resources.
Verification you can audit
Every player and parent we count is screened against a written definition, de-duplicated, GPS- and timestamp-logged in the field, and re-contacted on a 10% back-check with 10% of audio audited by a supervisor who did not run the interview.
What we will not do on a gaming & esports study
How we work
Our research process
- 01
Discovery
We turn your business question into clear research objectives.
- 02
Design
Sampling, method, questionnaire and discussion guides, translated into local languages.
- 03
Fieldwork
Supervised field teams with GPS, audio and back-check quality control.
- 04
Analysis
Statistical and thematic analysis by senior researchers.
- 05
Insight
Board-ready reports, dashboards and workshops with clear recommendations.
Where the sector concentrates
The Indian cities that matter most for gaming & esports
Gaming & esports is concentrated rather than spread: one city carries most of the sector's weight, so we start there and add the metros that supply the rest of the demand. Each page covers gaming & esports research in that city specifically.
Tier 1 · Karnataka
Bangalore
India's startup and technology capital, home to global capability centres and digital-first consumers.
ViewTier 1 · Maharashtra
Mumbai
India's financial capital and headquarters city for most FMCG, BFSI and media companies.
ViewTier 1 · Delhi
Delhi NCR
The national capital region, a vast and diverse consumer market and India's policy hub.
ViewTier 1 · Tamil Nadu
Chennai
The 'Detroit of India', a manufacturing and healthcare powerhouse on the east coast.
ViewTier 1 · Telangana
Hyderabad
A life-sciences and technology hub, often called the pharma capital of India.
ViewTier 1 · West Bengal
Kolkata
The commercial gateway to East and Northeast India with a strong trading heritage.
ViewTier 1 · Maharashtra
Pune
An automotive and IT cluster with one of India's largest student populations.
ViewTier 1 · Gujarat
Ahmedabad
Gujarat's commercial capital, known for textiles, chemicals and entrepreneurial businesses.
View
Before you brief us
Frequently asked questions
What does a gaming & esports research project cost in India?
Cost follows the sample, the seniority of the audience and the number of cities. Reaching players costs a fraction of what it costs to reach parents, so the audience mix moves the number far more than the headline interview count. Send a brief and you get a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.
Which cities should a gaming & esports study cover?
Start where the sector concentrates — Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad — then add markets that match your distribution rather than the national map. Most clients run four to eight cities so results can be compared side by side.
How do you make sure respondents are genuinely streamers?
Each audience has its own written screener and its own frame. Respondents are de-duplicated against past projects, fieldwork is GPS- and timestamp-logged, 10% are re-contacted on a back-check and 10% of audio is audited by a supervisor who did not conduct the interview.
How long does a gaming & esports study take?
Fieldwork of the scope described above runs 3–4 weeks, and the whole project is typically 6–7 weeks from sign-off to debrief. Fieldwork usually begins five to seven working days after sign-off, once screeners and translations are approved.
Which methods suit gaming & esports research best?
For this sector we most often use online surveys, focus group discussions, product & concept testing, usage & attitude studies. The right combination depends on whether you need to size something, explain it or test it — a brief that names the decision gets a sharper design than one that names a method.
What safeguards apply to gaming & esports fieldwork?
Under-18 participation requires verifiable parental consent, sessions are time-boxed, and no child is questioned about spending without a parent informed. Alongside that, all personal data is collected on informed consent, held in India, pseudonymised before analysis and deleted on an agreed schedule, in line with the DPDP Act, 2023 and the ESOMAR code.
Sector at a glance
- Hub cities
- 1
- Audiences covered
- 3
- Fieldwork window
- 3–4 weeks
- Lead time
- 6–7 weeks
- Proposal
- Within 24 hours
Keep exploring
Gaming & Esports research, city by city and method by method
Fifty cities, twenty methods and the sectors that sit closest to gaming & esports. Each page is written for that specific combination of market and approach.
Tier 1 metros
8Full-scale quantitative fieldwork, viewing-facility groups and senior gaming & esports interviews in the eight largest markets.
Tier 2 growth markets
42Forty-two cities where gaming & esports demand is forming fastest, each covered by a supervised local field team.
By research method
20Every one of our twenty methods, written for the gaming & esports audience rather than in general.
- Consumer Researchquantitative
- B2B Market Researchstrategy
- Focus Group Discussionsqualitative
- In-Depth Interviewsqualitative
- Quantitative Surveysquantitative
- CATI Telephone Surveysquantitative
- Online Surveysquantitative
- Mystery Shoppingspecialist
Show 12 more
- Market Feasibility Studiesstrategy
- Competitor Analysisstrategy
- Brand Health Trackingquantitative
- Customer Satisfaction & NPSquantitative
- Product & Concept Testingquantitative
- Pricing Researchstrategy
- Market Sizing & Forecastingstrategy
- Ethnographic Researchqualitative
- Healthcare Market Researchspecialist
- Retail Audit & Distributionspecialist
- Usage & Attitude Studiesquantitative
- Advertising & Media Researchquantitative
Sectors that sit next to this one
4These most often appear in the same programme as a gaming & esports study, either as an adjacent market or a shared audience.
All other industries
25The rest of the thirty sectors we hold dedicated field and analysis experience in.
- FMCG
- Healthcare
- Pharmaceuticals
- Banking & Financial Services
- Insurance
- Automotive
- Electric Vehicles
- Real Estate
Show 17 more
- Retail
- E-commerce & Quick Commerce
- Energy & Renewables
- Agriculture & Agritech
- Manufacturing & Industrial
- Hospitality & Tourism
- Food & Beverage
- Consumer Durables & Electronics
- Fashion & Apparel
- Logistics & Supply Chain
- Chemicals & Specialty Materials
- Construction & Infrastructure
- Beauty & Personal Care
- Fintech
- Aviation & Airports
- Medical Devices
- Government & Social Sector
Next step
Make your next gaming & esports decision with evidence.