Has the Mobile Gaming Frenzy Caught India Yet? This Entrepreneur Says Yes "30 million smartphones are sold every quarter and the data costs have reduced drastically"
By Nidhi Singh
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The growth of Indian mobile gaming market is clearly fuelled by the increasing mobile penetration and subsequent mobile internet usage.
The gaming market is predicted to establish its presence on various platforms like mobile, console and PCs among others.
Game developers will now get more opportunities to innovate and create best content. The games now are advanced and not merely inspired from bollywood flicks, cricket and football.
Rajan Navani, Vice-chairman, Managing Director and CEO of JetSynthesys, explained to Entrepreneur India several reasons behind the booming of the sector in India.
India Poised for Stellar Growth
According to a joint report by Google India and KPMG, the country's online gaming market will grow to $1 billion by 2021 from the current $360 million, registering a 20 per cent growth.
With a 117 per cent spike in searches for online games, the gaming base in India is expected to cover almost 310 million people from the current 120 million by 2021, the study added.
Again, according to App Annie-NASSCOM report, globally, games have been the key driver of mobile app growth.
"India presents a ripe opportunity for local and foreign mobile game publishers and investors, as it is poised for stellar growth in the coming years. This growth will be catalyzed by the rising trend of purchasing powerful smartphones and the universal implementation of direct carrier billing," Navani explained.
300 Million New Gamers to Enter Field Soon
The industry consists of three core pillars — Mobile, PC and Console. Elaborating the role of mobile gaming apps in the ecosystem, Navani affirmed that this is the most exciting segment right now.
"Imagine the potential of this industry, given the fact that there are 30 million smartphones sold every quarter, more than a billion people have applied for mobile data subscriptions and the data costs have reduced rapidly. We expect that there will be more than 300 million gamers in the next couple of years," he said.
PC Gaming at Nascent Stage
He said PC Gaming is still at its nascent stage with about 3 million gamers. Jetsynthesys is deeply engaged with them through the E-sports tournaments that the company conducts, he added.
High Prices of Consoles, Low Popularity
Navani opined that the console gaming was still very niche in India and the popularity was low due to the high cost of consoles. However, he claimed that there was definitely immense potential even in this segment, once the pricing would be brought down to favour Indian pockets.
The core strengths of India's gaming industry are art, analytics and technology. Navani shared few gaming trends that will influence gaming apps' performance in 2017. "Very soon we will see trends like VR, AR, HTML5 games, online e-sports, smaller game sizes, single-hand gameplay, shorter game cycles but no longer game sessions," he concluded.
