Financial Express
Rupsa Ray
Posted: May 08, 2008 at 2119 hrs IST
How about helping Bappi Lahiri in recovering gold jewellery, or playing Bipasha in challenging the worlds’ best to an adrenaline-pumping jet-ski ride across exotic circuits? Or, may be, accompanying Hanuman in his mission to rid the world of evil forces? Well, these are some of the popular ideas grabbing the attention of mobile gaming enthusiasts.
And it is not just mobiles that are attracting gamers. Slowly but surely Indians are begin wooed by exciting gaming options across platforms—be it online, consoles or just plain old PCs. Mobile devices, to being with, have a huge reach and opportunity in India. With 261 million cellular subscribers, and growing rapidly, the gaming industry has barely scratched the surface of this vast opportunity. Analysts say that the market share of mobile gaming could reach 68% by 2009. As for the gaming themes, cricket and Bollywood sell best in India. It is true of mobile gaming as well. A game on Indo-Pak series by Jump Games saw 2.5 million downloads. To keep up the sensation, Jump Games and Zapak.com have tied up with cricketer Ishant Sharma to create online and mobile games on him.
Besides, new trends are emerging—advergaming, for example. These are games on the mobile platform that revolve around brands. Experts say this would become a popular advertising medium, primarily because the cost for developing an advergame is pretty low, ranging from Rs 3-6 lakh. “Thums Up Everest Challenge, an advergame on Reliance network, saw more than 350,000 downloads a week,” says Salil Bhargava, CEO, Jump Games.
But there are challenges before the gaming industry that go beyond the constraints of partially developed mobile broadband. “The biggest challenge for the mobile gaming and VAS industries in India is the discovery factor. People want games and content, but do not know where to access them,” adds Bhargava.
Experts say Indian gaming industry is in a transition phase, moving from casual to serious gaming. Although Indian gamers are not ready to pay big bucks for serious games, casual and entertaining online games seem to have posted a healthy growth. With increasing PC penetration and the opportunity to play games at cyber cafes, this segment is showing much promise.
“Racing and sports steal the show when it comes to online gaming, and cricket is the most popular sports in India, followed by Fifa,” says Rohit Sharma, COO, Zapak Digital Entertainment. Zapak is also creating games for Kolkata Knight Riders on its website.
Interestingly, Zapak and Onlinereal games.com have different sets of games for women, who prefer activity—oriented gaming, puzzles and games on fashion. However, 30% gamers for Zapak’s online cricketing game are women; 10%-12% gamers are into racing and action.
“Online gaming is becoming popular as it is simple and easy to play. On our site, we have different genres of games catering to teenagers, women and 35 years. Also, there are games in different Indian languages to reach out to a wider user-base,” said Maruti Sanker, MD, 7Seas Technologies Ltd, which owns the portal onlinerealgames.
Analysts feel the growth for serious gaming is pretty slow in India. MMOGs (massively multi-player online games), which are for hardcore gamers, will take some time to gather pace in India. Zapak is coming up with its first MMOG called crazycard by June and with three more MMOGs this year.
“The reason for serious online gaming not taking off in India is the poor PC and broadband penetration. Unless that improves, not much can be expected in this segment. However, we hope that the situation will improve in the coming months,” says Surjyadeb Goswami, assistant manager, communications research, IDC India. “There is a lack of a robust business model for popularising and growing the online gaming market and vendors are confused as to what would work better— a subscription based model or a virtual sales model,” he added.
However, industry experts feel that there are a number of reasons for the growth of the Indian online gaming market. Piracy is one—as users are not satisfied with the quality of standalone (offline) pirated versions of games, they would be driven to online games.
Growing blogging and gaming communities are also expected to accelerate the growth of online gaming. While there is growing excitement around mobile and online gaming, industry observers say that consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation give the ultimate gaming experience.
However, they believe that consoles will remain a niche market here because of steep price tags. Industry estimates indicate that console gaming will account for only 20% of the market by 2009. “Unless taxes and duties on these go down, it’s not possible to cut prices steeply because developing a quality game requires multi-million dollar investments,” says Ashim Das Mathur, a spokesperson for Microsoft Entertainment Devices Division.
For the foreseeable future, meanwhile, it seems that PC gaming will continue to hold the attention of stakeholders. PC games development market in India is expected to witness a CAGR of 62.6% and go up to $35 million by 2009. Gaming development companies like Electronic Arts (EA) are trying to get casual gamers into hardcore gaming and non-gamers into gaming.
“Today, we have cut down the prices as much as is possible. We are offering different versions of games such as “Need for Speed” at different price tags. We are trying to reduce prices by 30% and taking a number of initiatives such as manufacturing the discs in India to do so,” says Ajay Khanna, general manager, EA. However, the market for pirated games in India is about $40 million, which is affecting the organised gaming market.
In the next 3-5 years, gaming is expected to become the biggest entertainment for the youth. Though console-based gaming is the biggest platform globally, analysts say India will follow China in going the digital way, with better broadband networks and a larger subscriber base. “The Indian gaming market is quite different from the rest of Asia,” says an industry official. “Gaming in India is not yet ingrained in the country’s culture like in some of the evolved markets of Korea and Japan, where role-playing and strategy-based games are more popular. In India, gamers prefer action, racing and sports, like their counterparts in the US and Europe.”
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