how we’re redefining
gaming in India

Shift

India added 200M new gamers in the last 8 years, and today 50M+ "new-age" gamers treat gaming as identity, status, and social belonging. They play across mobile, PC, and console, and watch hours of gaming content daily.

This is the first Indian generation introduced to gaming through content and for the FIRST TIME EVER, are able to start gaming INSTANTLY because of mobile phones.

Once in, a large share of these new-age gamers didn’t stay casual - they upgraded devices and treated gaming as primary entertainment.

Anomaly

While gaming flourished, the gear around gaming didn’t keep up.
In mature gaming markets, players typically spend ~20% of their primary device cost on peripherals over the device’s lifetime, a pattern that stabilises into a 5:1 device-to-peripheral ratio.

For example, if Sam Altman buys a ₹1,00,000 device and uses it for five years, he’ll usually spend around ₹20,000 on peripherals in the same period.

But the last five years in India played out differently:

• gaming device sales (mobiles, laptops, PCs) grew ~5×
• average device prices rose ~50%
• yet gear spend stayed roughly the same

Pushing the ratio from 5:1 to ~8:1, a deviation not seen in established markets.

Signalling something simple: gamers upgraded their devices and expectations, but the peripheral market didn’t give them products worth upgrading to.

Demand moved. Supply didn’t.

Problems

• Today's new-age gamer faces a tough choice- pay a premium for reliable foreign brands, or roll the dice on a locally available product and hope they hit the jackpot.
• Foreign brands deliver immersion and performance but at price points most young Indian gamers can’t justify. They were built for Western markets, not Indian realities.
• Indian products are accessible, but are largely white-labelled “me-too” hardware with very little control over the user experience, leading to an inconsistent, unpredictable and an unreliable product experience.

Across the category, three fundamental problems remain unaddressed:

• Immersion is missing in accessible gear
• Accessibility is missing in immersive gear
• Consistent product experience is missing across all locally available options

No one solves all three.

Opportunity

India’s largest gaming generation has the desire and the spending power but but products haven’t kept up.

The first brand that delivers meaningful improvements, reliable performance, and identity-driven design becomes the default choice for India’s new-age gamers.

India doesn’t need more products, it needs gear that gamers trust, feel proud to own, and instantly connect with.

armor is the brand that unlocks this market.

armor builds upgrade-worthy gaming gear that’s immersive, reliable, and identity-driven, designed around how India’s new-age gamers actually play

1. Immersion that matters
   Gear that feels better to play with, tuned, comfortable, sensory, and built to elevate gameplay.
2. Accessibility Without Compromise
   Localised manufacturing, low CAC and full control over design and quality lets us deliver high-performance hardware at price points that make sense for Indian gamers.
3. 25M+ Captive Audience
   Zero-cost direct line to millions for selling, trend spotting, and launching products with built-in trust and virality

Today feels like the perfect climate to start this journey & win -

• Gaming has exploded
  50M+ new-age gamers now treat gaming as identity, status, and community — not a hobby.
  This TG did not exist a decade ago
• Manufacturing ecosystem has matured
  Local manufacturing capacity has expanded almost 6× in five years, enabling faster iteration, tighter QA, and more reliable hardware built in India.
  This ecosystem did not exist five years ago
• Hardware talent is the strongest it’s ever been
  Companies like Ather, Atomberg, and Ultrahuman have created a generation of engineers, designers and operators who know how to build world-class hardware.
  This talent pool did not exist a decade ago
• Willingness to pay has jumped significantly
  Gen Z gamers have 3.2× higher discretionary spend than millennials at the same age. They buy for identity, expression, and aesthetics - not just utility.
  This buying behavior did not exist five years ago.
• Trust is now decentralized
  Today creators drive discovery, aspiration and purchase intent more than any legacy brands or institutions.
  This shift has happened only in the last decade.

TL;DR

Gaming + Talent + Manufacturing + Willingness to Pay + Trust = $$$

• Non-Existent Competition
  Since most brands have done a terrible job of targeting this user, the perceived market cap is not big enough to draw attention
  And most experienced operators are all 30-35+, they can’t build for a TG they don’t understand

humble beginnings humbling beginnings

The first product we were going to launch were actually supposed to be wireless earbuds. Wireless Earbuds that also doubles up as a fidget spinner since people loved fidgeting with their earbuds case;

We worked on the engineering & design for months only to realize that the manufacturer we had given to make our mold had pawned our project off to someone cheaper & shared our designs with some other brands.
We found out about this in March’24, we had 2 choices, restart the process and spend another “n” months or launch a simpler product that we had already worked on. We decided to drop the earbuds and make wired headphones our first launch. (We still hope to modify the old earbuds design a bit and actually launch them in the future)

We love gaming.

One of our co-founders literally turned playing games into a career (lol).

This category is home for us and that’s exactly why its current state bothers us.

Everything feels predictable, generic, and copy-paste.
We miss waiting for product drops, obsessing over gear, and chasing that feeling of “holy sh*t, I need this.”

No anticipation. No innovation. No brand you’re proud to back. We want to bring that excitement back. We want to build products that we would get excited about. Products gamers can't wait to try. Products that bring energy, innovation , and identity back to gaming electronics.

We’re starting by becoming the go-to gaming hardware brand for India’s new-age gamers, but the ambition is larger: To build a global gaming hardware brand that becomes synonymous with the category (not sure how we get the copyright for Armor across geographies, but that’s a problem for another day.

Upcoming boss fights