Salone Sehgal On India's Video Game Revolution With The One Percent Project

Gaming has long been a training ground for the qualities that build great tech companies, from agency and collaboration to strategic thinking, and many prominent tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Stuart Butterfield, grew up as gamers.

On The One Percent Project, host Pritish Sanyal sits down with Salone Sehgal, Founder and Managing Partner of Lumikai, to trace the history and cultural impact of gaming, the rise of the Indian woman gamer and the unit economics that drive the industry.

Salone explains how gaming grew from a pastime for young men into a universal form of entertainment, and why India's path has been different, with gamers who tend to be social and a player base that is almost 40% women, a far more balanced mix than the West started with. She walks through how Jio's 93% cut in data prices, the spread of digital payments and the pandemic reshaped access, then breaks down the industry's three main revenue streams of in-app purchases, advertising and subscriptions such as battle passes, alongside real money gaming in India. The conversation closes on the metaverse, where virtual worlds, digital currencies and asset ownership already live inside games, while a truly interoperable, persistent version remains years away.

Curious how a pastime became one of India's biggest industries? This one connects the dots.

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