Indian mobile gamers prefer ads over in-app purchases: InMobi

A majority of Indian gamers (74%) prefer to watch advertisements instead of making in-app purchases to move to the next level in a mobile game, according to an InMobi report.  

While the Indian market contributes to download numbers, there is a lower propensity of pay in the country, the technology company, which specialises in mobile advertising and marketing, said in the report published on Thursday.  

The report, titled ‘Everyone’s gaming among us – mobile gaming through the pandemic and beyond’, offers insights from app usage patterns and trends. It analysed 1.7 trillion advertisement requests between January 2020 and January 2021 on the InMobi marketing cloud and audience intelligence platform.  

The report also included data from a survey of 1,000 smartphone users across India, using InMobi Pulse. 

It states that Indians interact 2.6 times more with video ads in gaming apps, compared to ads in other apps.  

“Video advertisements in gaming apps are among the most popular and deliver 31% higher completion rates for publishers (over the MOAT benchmark) on the InMobi Advertising Platform,” the company said in a statement. 

“Mobile gamers are receptive to advertising, with three in four consumers preferring to see an ad, and 60% of them being able to recall the ads they see. Gaming is the biggest opportunity for brands to maximise impact with video and other engaging formats in 2021,” Vasuta Agarwal, managing director for Asia Pacific at InMobi, said.  

The report showed that 43% of mobile gamers are women, of which 28% are over 45 years old and 12% are in the age group of 25-44.  

In India, 45% of the respondents started playing mobile games on their smartphones during the Covid-19 national lockdown, it said. During the period, the time spent on gaming apps also surged through the day, with a peak of surge at 11.30 am, with 6.6X increase in gameplay. 

According to a separate report on the gaming market in India, published earlier this month by PraxInsights, online gaming in the country is expected to be worth $2.2 billion by 2022. A major chunk of it is expected to be driven by real money games.  

This week also saw the public market debut of the first gaming company in India, Nazara Technologies.