How Digital Gaming In India Is Growing Up Into A Billion-Dollar Market

The Indian digital gaming industry is growing rapidly, with behemoths like Paytm, Tencent, Youzu and Nazara investing in it. The industry is already worth over $890 million and with the demand for games on an upward curve, India now has more than 250 game development companies, up from a mere 25 in 2010, with at least two startups coming up every month.

Estimates suggest that India’s mobile games market will be worth $1.1 billion by 2020, and number of users projected to become 628 million by then. The rise in the popularity of gaming is partly due to the increased accessibility that the public has to them; at the tap of a screen, one can download games onto a smart device. Many game developers such as Moon Frog, 99Games, PlaySimple and Mech Mocha are capitalizing on the growth in smartphone usage to build their businesses.

Big players in the market:

With a larger appetite for gaming in India, there’s more money moving through the industry, with increased overseas investment and partnership, mostly from China. Alibaba-backed digital payments startup Paytm and Hong Kong’s AGTech Holdings launched a gaming platform Gamepind; Tencent, which has stakes in legendary games like League of Legends, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, is planning to invest in gaming in India this year, and Chinese gaming company Youzu launched local casual strategy games last year. Vietnam-based StomStudio also partnered with mobile game publisher Gamesbond to create mobile games in India.

Enthusiasm for esports:

Meanwhile, gamification has brought a new a trend upon which some firms have been quick to capitalize. Nazara Technologies, a mobile game publishing company, has seen growth that mirrors an increasing enthusiasm for competitive online gaming, or esports. It recently acquired a 55% stake in gaming solutions company Nodwin Gaming and plans to invest $20 million to develop esports over the next five years.

“Indian esports market is picking up steam, with an estimated four million enthusiasts,” says Manish Agarwal, CEO of Nazara. “We want to develop the ecosystem to enable competitive online and offline gaming, create local leagues and boost esports as spectator sports in India.”

With Electronic Sports League (ESL) as one of Nazara’s investors, the approach, Agarwal says, is to include localized content creation around global events such as ESL One, ESL Pro League, Intel Extreme Masters and The International, and bring in sponsors. “This will give a massive boost to the creation of best esports players in India.”

Last year, eGamers Arena, an esports startup that also runs Indian League Gaming, partnered with World Cyber Arena to host qualifiers in India for a championship held in China. Even Nvidia, an American gaming technology company, organized five GamerConnect symposiums across India.

In January, U Cypher, promoted as the first multi-gaming platform on TV for esports, organized U Cypher Championship, in partnership with MTV, where teams competed for a prize pool of around $80,000.

Media companies are taking note, with thousands turning out to watch gamers play live and millions more watching on the internet, esports could soon become a staple of the TV sports channels.

AI in gaming:

Virtual-reality gaming is also a fast-evolving vertical in the country. Digital advertising is forcing companies to look at gaming in a big way, embedding commercials through games. What makes all of this even more exciting is the introduction of artificial intelligence into gaming. Tech startup Absentia has developed Norah.ai, an AI-powered tool for quick creation and incorporation of all game elements. “Our engine is trained over 40 million data points, it generates variety at each step thereby adding countless number of possibilities to the terrains, 3D models and game play environments among others,” says Shubham Mishra, co-founder of Absentia. “At the click of a button, a fleet of 100 different variants are generated, empowering the developers with more options.” This means that games developers don’t need to have particularly powerful hardware — they will be able to create assets for games, ranging from story, to animations, and even models quickly, and affordably. And, it’s all adding up to a fast-growing business.

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Source: IBEF

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