Startup Deep Dive : SuperGaming – how a 200-million-install studio still earns under Rs 45 crore a year

In September 2025, SuperGaming announced that its first mobile shooter, MaskGun, had crossed 100 million players worldwide — a number most Indian studios never touch. In the same window, the Pune company’s audited-scale financials told a quieter story: revenue actually fell, from ₹43.4 crore in the year to March 2024 to ₹42.8 crore in the year to March 2025, a decline of 1.4%, as per figures reported by Inc42 from the company’s regulatory filings. A studio with more than 200 million installs across its games earns less in a year than a mid-sized restaurant chain, and earned slightly less last year than the year before.

That gap — between vast reach and modest, flat revenue — is the whole story of SuperGaming, and of the “next billion players” bet that Indian game studios have been making for a decade. This is a company that has shipped a genuine global hit, a made-in-India battle royale, and its own multiplayer technology stack, stayed profitable through it all, and still has to prove that scale in India converts into money at the pace its $100 million valuation implies.

Quick facts

What they do

SuperGaming is a Pune-based studio that builds free-to-play multiplayer games for mobile — and, increasingly, PC and console — monetised through in-app purchases and advertising rather than an upfront price. Its portfolio spans a first-person shooter (MaskGun), a social-deduction party game (Silly Royale), a tower-defence title (Tower Conquest) and its flagship live bet, Indus Battle Royale, an “Indo-futuristic” battle royale launched worldwide on 16 October 2024. Underneath the games sits SuperPlatform, the company’s own real-time multiplayer and live-operations engine, which powers its titles and is pitched as technology infrastructure other developers can build on. The stated mission, repeated across its funding announcements, is to make games for “the next billion players” — meaning primarily India and other emerging markets where smartphone gaming is growing but paying users are still comparatively few.

The origin

The founding insight was not that India needed more games, but that India had never built a globally competitive one of its own. Roby John, the studio’s CEO, came to that view the long way round. A BTech from the College of Engineering, Pune, he spent roughly five years running TaptoLearn, a Y Combinator-backed educational-games company, before founding a studio called June Gaming — which later merged into SuperGaming. That merger, in 2017, brought together John and a founding group that included Navneet Waraich, Sanket Nadhani and Sreejit Jayanthan, with sources differing on a fifth name. The team’s bet was specific: that the same free-to-play, real-time multiplayer formats winning globally — shooters, battle royales, social party games — could be built out of India, for a mass Indian audience first, using technology the studio owned rather than licensed. MaskGun, the multiplayer shooter that would eventually anchor the company, had in fact been in development from the mid-2010s, before the SuperGaming name existed, which is why the studio could point to a working, scaling product almost from day one.

The struggle years

SuperGaming’s difficulty was never a lack of players; it was turning a country of downloaders into a business, and doing it in a market that kept moving under its feet. Three pressures defined the hard years. First, monetisation: India’s mobile-gaming audience is enormous but famously reluctant to pay, and the studio’s own early economics leaned heavily on advertising in a market where, as Inc42 reported in 2022, close to 85% of games from Indian publishers carried ads, against 73% globally — a sign of how thin in-app-purchase revenue was. Second, dependence on a single ageing hit: MaskGun, first built in the mid-2010s, remained the studio’s proven earner years later, which meant every new title was effectively an attempt to escape reliance on one game. Third, the sheer cost and risk of the big swing. Indus, the battle royale meant to prove an Indian studio could compete with global titles, was first talked about for a 2022 launch but did not reach a worldwide release until 16 October 2024 — a multi-year build during which the studio had to keep its older games monetising to fund the new one. The reward for surviving all this was real but modest: the company stayed profitable, but on revenue that by FY25 had stopped growing.

The turning point

If there is a single turning point, it is the stretch between MaskGun becoming a bona fide global hit and Indus arriving as the studio’s make-or-break bet. On one side of that line, in September 2025, SuperGaming said MaskGun had crossed 100 million players worldwide across Android and iOS, with some 40 million in-game playing hours logged, and that installs across its whole portfolio had passed 200 million (company statements reported by Business Standard, PocketGamer and CXOToday). Those numbers gave the studio the credibility — and the investor confidence — to raise on the promise of what came next. On the other side sits Indus: launched globally in October 2024 and reported at more than 9 million downloads by September 2025, an India-first battle royale with India-inspired characters such as Morni, Sirtaj and Pokhran and mechanics like a “Grudge” system that lets players hunt whoever eliminated them. The turning point, in other words, is a hand-off that is still in progress: a decade-old shooter has delivered the reach and the profits, and the company is now spending that credibility trying to make a newer, home-grown title carry the business forward.

The money behind it

SuperGaming’s funding history is short, unusually strategic in its backers, and modest in absolute size for a studio with its reach.

• Series A, August 2021: reported at $5.5 million by Entrackr and at $5 million by Inc42, at a valuation Inc42 put at around $21 million. It was led by Skycatcher, with AET Fund and BACE Capital among the backers.
• Series B, August 2025 — $15 million (about ₹144 crore): co-led by Skycatcher and Steadview Capital, at a reported valuation of over $100 million (about ₹960 crore). The round is notable less for its size than for its strategic roster.
• Named Series B backers: a16z’s Speedrun (the games accelerator run by Andreessen Horowitz), Bandai Namco’s 021 Fund, Korean publisher Neowiz, Japan’s GFR Fund and IVC Japan, Brazil’s Loud.GG, Polygon Ventures, and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal as an individual investor (Entrackr, Inc42).
• Total raised: about $21.8 million across five rounds to date, per Inc42’s tracker.

What each backer changes is more revealing than the cheque sizes. Skycatcher and Steadview provide the growth capital and continuity, having backed the company across rounds. The strategic games investors — Bandai Namco, Neowiz, GFR, IVC Japan, Loud.GG — buy SuperGaming distribution, publishing know-how and access to the Japanese, Korean and Latin American markets it wants to expand Indus into. And the presence of Polygon Ventures and Sandeep Nailwal signals a Web3 gaming ambition sitting alongside the mainstream free-to-play business. The company said the Series B would fund taking Indus into new geographies, including Latin America, and scaling its game-development and technology capabilities through hiring and new intellectual property.

How it makes money

SuperGaming runs the standard free-to-play playbook, but with an ambition to sell the infrastructure underneath it as well. The mechanics, as described by the company and industry reporting:

• Money in — in-app purchases: games are free to download; revenue comes from players buying in-game currency, cosmetic and functional items, battle passes and event content inside titles such as MaskGun and Indus.
• Money in — advertising: ad revenue remains a significant component in the Indian free-to-play market, where in-app-purchase spend per user is still low; Inc42 reported in 2022 that roughly 85% of Indian-published games carried ads.
• Money in — technology (SuperPlatform): the studio’s proprietary real-time multiplayer and live-ops engine powers its own games and is positioned as a platform other developers can use — a potential business-to-business revenue line beyond consumer games.
• Costs out: the heaviest costs are engineering and content teams to build and live-operate multiplayer titles over years, plus user-acquisition spend to keep installs flowing in a market where organic reach is cheap but paying conversion is hard.
• The part people get wrong: 200 million installs is a reach metric, not a revenue metric. The number that matters is how many of those players spend, and how much — and on that, Indian free-to-play economics remain thin, which is why ₹42.8 crore of revenue sits under a nine-figure install base.

The numbers

Only two fiscal years of SuperGaming’s financials are available in public trackers at the level of detail below; earlier years are not disclosed in the sources reviewed. All figures are as reported by Inc42 from the company’s regulatory filings, in ₹ crore.

The headline is that revenue went sideways-to-down — a 1.4% dip from ₹43.4 crore to ₹42.8 crore — even as the studio’s player and install counts kept climbing. Profitability is real but small: ₹3.4 crore of profit after tax in FY25 on a 7.9% net margin, per Inc42. Against a reported valuation of over $100 million (about ₹960 crore), FY25 revenue of ₹42.8 crore implies a revenue multiple in the region of 22 times — a number that only makes sense if investors are paying for Indus’s future monetisation and the platform story, not the trailing financials.

Where the money comes from

SuperGaming does not publish a per-game or per-geography revenue split, so the breakdown below is directional, drawn from what the company and press have disclosed about its titles rather than from a segment table.

• The engine is the old game, not the new one: MaskGun, in market since the mid-2010s and now past 100 million players (company-stated, September 2025), is the mature, monetising title; Indus, launched October 2024 and at 9 million-plus downloads by September 2025, is the growth bet whose monetisation is still being built.
• Silly Royale showed the reach, not the revenue: the Among Us-style social game reached roughly 17-18 million users within about nine months of launch (Inc42, 2022), demonstrating SuperGaming can manufacture virality — but virality in India converts to modest spend.
• Geography is split by title: MaskGun’s base is global across Android and iOS, while Indus is India-first with planned expansion into Latin America and other emerging markets, per the Series B announcement.
• The surprise: for a studio whose public identity is built around Indus — the made-in-India battle royale — the business is still carried by a nearly decade-old shooter, and total revenue has not grown despite every new launch and milestone.

The risks

• The monetisation gap: the central risk is visible in the numbers — 200 million-plus installs and 100 million-plus MaskGun players, yet FY25 revenue of ₹42.8 crore that fell year on year. If Indus does not convert its reach into paying users at a materially higher rate, the studio’s revenue could stay flat while its valuation assumes steep growth.
• Single-title dependence and an unproven flagship: the mature earner (MaskGun) is aging, and the title the company is built around (Indus) has not yet demonstrated it can carry the business. A stumble in Indus’s live-ops or retention would hit the growth thesis directly.
• A hostile regulatory backdrop for Indian gaming: the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, passed on 22 August 2025, banned all online real-money games in India, an industry the government’s own reasoning valued in the billions. SuperGaming’s free-to-play titles are not real-money games — the Act explicitly seeks to legitimise e-sports and social games — so it is relatively insulated. But the law has chilled investor sentiment across Indian gaming and signalled that the sector’s regulatory ground can shift fast.
• Platform and channel dependence: revenue depends on the Google Play and Apple App Store distribution and billing rails, and on third-party ad networks whose rates the studio does not control — a structural exposure for any free-to-play mobile business.

The takeaway

SuperGaming is the clearest test yet of a proposition India’s game industry keeps making: that reach in a huge, low-paying market is worth building toward, because the paying users will come. The studio has done the hard part twice — a genuine global hit in MaskGun, and a technically credible home-grown battle royale in Indus — and has stayed profitable while doing it, which most of its peers cannot claim. What it has not yet done is turn any of that into revenue that compounds. The transferable lesson is uncomfortable and specific: in consumer software, a hundred million players is not a business until a measurable slice of them pays, and reaching that slice is a separate, harder problem than reaching the players in the first place. SuperGaming has raised money and goodwill on the promise that it can close that gap. The next two years of Indus’s monetisation will show whether the “next billion players” were ever the point, or whether the point was always the far smaller number of them willing to spend.

Frequently asked questions

What does SuperGaming do?

SuperGaming is a Pune-based game studio, founded in 2017, that builds free-to-play multiplayer games — including the shooter MaskGun, the social game Silly Royale and the battle royale Indus — and operates its own real-time multiplayer engine, SuperPlatform. It earns money through in-app purchases and advertising.

How much money has SuperGaming raised, and at what valuation?

The company has raised about $21.8 million across five rounds, per Inc42. Its August 2025 Series B was $15 million (about ₹144 crore), co-led by Skycatcher and Steadview Capital, at a reported valuation of over $100 million (about ₹960 crore), with backers including a16z’s Speedrun and Bandai Namco’s 021 Fund.

Is SuperGaming profitable?

Yes. Per Inc42’s reading of its regulatory filings, SuperGaming reported a profit after tax of ₹3.4 crore in FY25 (year to March 2025) on revenue of ₹42.8 crore, and about ₹3.9 crore of profit on ₹43.4 crore of revenue in FY24. Revenue slipped 1.4% between the two years.

What is Indus Battle Royale?

Indus is SuperGaming’s “Indo-futuristic” battle royale, launched worldwide on 16 October 2024 for Android and iOS, with India-inspired characters and a “Grudge” feature that lets players track opponents who eliminated them. It had crossed 9 million downloads by September 2025, per company statements.

Does India’s 2025 online gaming ban affect SuperGaming?

Not directly. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 bans real-money games, whereas SuperGaming makes free-to-play games that the Act instead seeks to legitimise as e-sports and social games. The main effect is indirect — a more cautious investor climate for Indian gaming overall.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr — “SuperGaming raises $15 Mn led by Skycatcher and Steadview” (August 2025)
• Inc42 — “SuperGaming Mops Up $15 Mn At $100 Mn Valuation” (August 2025)
• Inc42 — SuperGaming company profile and financial highlights, FY24 and FY25 figures (2025-2026)
• Inc42 — “With Local Content, Real-Time Multiplayer Games, SuperGaming Plans To Carve A Niche In $7 Bn Indian Gaming Market” (2022)
• Business Standard — “SuperGaming’s MaskGun crosses 100 mn downloads, raises $15 mn funding” (September 2025)
• PocketGamer.biz — “SuperGaming’s MaskGun surpasses 100m players across Android and iOS” (September 2025)
• CXOToday / MediaBrief — “SuperGaming’s MaskGun Crosses 100 Million Players Worldwide” (September 2025)
• Inc42 — “SuperGaming’s Battle Royale Game Indus To Kick Off From October 16” (October 2024)
• Business Standard — “India-based SuperGaming to launch Indus Battle Royale on October 16” (October 2024)
• Wikipedia — “Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025”; Lexology and Law.asia analyses (2025)
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate (18 September 2026)

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