The Indian gaming market is expected to touch $50 million (mobile gaming not included) by 2005, throwing open a huge opportunity for vendors to tap into this emerging industry.
A main growth driver for the industry is the emergence of new gaming platforms like online gaming (broadband) and mobile (wireless) gaming. The increase in PC penetration is also one of the main drivers behind a swell in the Indian gaming population.
According to Nasscom, apart from the games that are computer and console based, a relatively new segment is the massively multi-player on-line games (MMOG), which has been a highly successful business model in Asia. MMOG enables hundreds or thousands of players to simultaneously interact in a game via the Internet.
Online gaming is now said to be slowly eating into the PC-based gaming market, mainly dominated by Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2), Nintendo, and Microsoft X-box.
Online gaming/MMOG
According to industry sources, Indian players could become a dominant force in the global online gaming market in future, due to the high volume of online game development taking place in the country.Online games include the more casual genres of games, such as card games or board games. In online gaming, the developer creates a concept and develops a game, and then licenses it to an Internet portal site. The portal site then markets it to the consumer.
Activity in Indian MMOG market started in mid- 2004, with the release of the beta version of 'Ragnarok', developed by a Korean company. The title has been launched in India by a Philippines based company, which has been licensed to sell this product.
According to industry observers in India, MMOG games are the prime revenue driver for certain large Chinese Internet portals such as Sohoo (name changed to Sohu), and Sina, and have contributed significantly for their commercial success.
Industry observers also believe that MMOG games sub-segment represents the hottest growth potential in the Indian gaming market. A key reason is that it sidesteps the problem of piracy, which has stifled the growth of the computer games market in India. Sources estimate that around 90 percent of the computer games titles in use in India are illegal versions.
Wireless/mobile gaming
The Indian market has a rapidly expanding base of potential players in accordance with the rising number of mobile users in the country.
The market size of wireless/mobile games in India has been estimated at US$3 million in 2004. The estimation is based on the total number of downloads of games during the period, as downloads currently account for 90 percent of the means through which games are accessed on mobiles.
It is estimated that, on average, there are 200,000 downloads of games via GPRS network of the cellular mobile players - Orange, Airtel, Idea, and BPL. The market size estimation assumes an average charge of Rs 50 per download.
At present, the cellular mobile phones platform account for almost the entire wireless/mobile games market in India. The two large mobile telecom players in the CDMA space - Reliance Infocomm and Tata Indicom - do not charge for game downloads as yet. The reason could be that these players are recent entrants in the competitive mobile telephony market in India, and are in the phase of establishing their services vis-à-vis the GSM players.
Indian vendors that have been active for the last two to three years include Paradox Studios, Indiagames Ltd. and Mobile2Win.
Computer games
In general, Indian players have a low presence in computer games development market due to the disadvantage of being late entrants. Some of the players include Milestone Interactive Software and Gayatri.
As far as outsourcing is concerned in this segment, overseas game publishers or developers are not outsourcing the development work for an entire game to Indian players. At present, the level of outsourcing would be only around 10-15 per cent of a game. Typically, the nature of work outsourced from India is cut scene animation for game cinematics, single level design, or a specific sequence of a game.
Console based gaming
Video console based gaming is at an advanced level, and Indian companies are taking a cautious approach in addressing this market, as they look to establish themselves in the computer games market. However, Milestone Interactive Software is the only vendor that has developed a game for the console market.
At a global level, the three main players in the interactive video gaming market are Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft with Sony's PlayStation hogging 50 percent of the global console game market; Nintendo is ranked second and Microsoft a relatively recent entrant with its X-box.
