How Mobile Games Actually Make Money | Anurag Choudhary (Felicity)

Most people assume a gaming company gets built by a gamer. Anurag Choudhary does not play video games, and he has built one of the only mobile game publishing operations in India that funds titles locally and scales them to players in the United States.

A decade inside Indian consumer internet gave Choudhary an unusual education, first scaling Swiggy's restaurant network from 5,000 partners to over 100,000, then watching his own short video startup Wakao collapse into what he calls empty DAU before he returned a million dollars to his investors. Felicity, the Bengaluru publisher he founded in 2023, now runs north of $3 million ARR by financing games from India's 30,000 independent developers and monetising them in Tier 1 Western markets, where a single player is worth 20 to 30 cents a day.

Speaking with host Akshay Datt, he argues that casual gaming is not a creative business but a user acquisition arbitrage, that organic app installs are effectively dead after Apple's IDFA change, and that being underfunded makes founders greedy in ways that permanently cap their scale. With Indian capital and talent rotating hard into entertainment gaming, the timing is sharp.

👉Why Anurag Choudhary chose gaming despite not being a gamer, and how Rovio's 51 failures before Angry Birds shaped his decision to build a portfolio instead of a single app.

👉How Felicity's three step funnel works in practice, from a $5,000 prototype tested on 400 US installs, to a $15,000 soft launch for monetisation, to a $40,000 to $50,000 outright buyout of the game.

👉What the real retention bar looks like inside a casual gaming business, including why Felicity demands 30 percent Day 1 retention and expects Day 7 to hold at 40 to 50 percent of that.

👉Why organic installs died after Apple's IDFA change, how US cost per install went from 50 cents to more than $2, and what that broke for every solo developer shipping an app today.

👉How an Arrows puzzle game reached a $1 million ARR run rate in three weeks, why two thirds of its daily revenue came from Korea and Japan rather than the US, and what geo specific creatives had to do with it.

👉Understand why Choudhary says your core IP is not your game but your infrastructure, why India cannot support a $100 million casual gaming business on domestic users alone, and why he is happy to wait 180 days to break even.

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