The gaming industry in India has seen a lot of growth over the past few years due to a multitude of reasons. While the growth has been massive in the past few years, the Indian gaming market dates back decades ago to when gaming parlours used to exist. Remember the days people used to go to cafes and play games on a per hour fee basis? Nostalgic, isn’t it?
Consoles came into existence in the early 2000s. While console gaming has never reached the heights expected of it in the subcontinent, there has always been its fair share of loyal user bases that have never faded away. And with certain popular titles only available on certain consoles, it only makes the case for consoles becoming increasingly popular more likely as well.
When did the revolution really begin?
Then came the 4G revolution in 2016. With big mobile operators, namely Jio, lowering the prices of mobile data to incredibly low and jaw-dropping prices, almost everyone across the face of the country had access to the internet. This was an age of growing smartphone technology at very reasonable prices in the Indian market as well. This furthered the accessibility to a point that phones were present in every hand in the nation.
The final breakthrough came in the form of Covid-19. While the pandemic was a bane in many aspects throughout the world, much less the country, it was quite a big boon for the gaming industry. With people getting to stay at home for extended periods of time and with not much to do, they turned to gaming as a form of entertainment in the face of boredom.
With robust distribution through app stores and a growing focus of Indian developers to provide high-quality content, casual gaming has matured significantly from the arcade days and is set to grow manifold in the years to come
Table Of Content
Stunted Growth Of Gaming In India And Reasons
Gaming in India has been quite slow compared to global levels, albeit has increased at a rapid pace in the last few years. This is because of multiple reasons such as piracy, accessibility and much more.
In all honesty, India has skipped an entire generation of gaming. While consoles and PC gaming were popular at some places, they never bloomed in the country like they did on a global scale. This in turn caused some ripples that would further slow down the growth of the gaming market in India like hesitancy of developers to put money into gaming in India when it was not popular or growing.
Today we can see that mobile gaming is incredibly popular in various parts of the country. But the same can not be said for PC or console gaming. Their growth has been very slow compared to mobile gaming. In fact if we compare them more than 90% of users who game in the country, game on their mobiles. The difference is quite staggering.
When compared with other countries, it is quite evident that most of the countries had this growing phase for PC and consoles. This inturn led to more games being developed, growth of the esports industry with more companies coming forward to invest in them with a huge audience to back it up. This has also led to an increasing number of streamers who have come forward seeing the rapidly increasing audience base.
When we ask ourselves, what could have stunted the growth of gaming in India, there are various factors that come into mind – the spending capability and the stigma for gaming to name a few. The accessibility for PCs and consoles is not the same as for mobiles which are considerably much cheaper and also available throughout the nation. The games available on PCs and consoles are not cheap as well, much less free. The games on mobiles follow a freemium model which makes monetization of gaming in the subcontinent quite hard and therefore makes many companies reluctant to invest in the gaming market in India
Piracy And Its Effect
Piracy has a huge impact in how the gaming market has turned out in the country. At the starting age of gaming in India, piracy paved a way for people to get access to titles that were not released in the country or were too expensive at that point of time.
Companies were also partly responsible for this situation. There is a huge disconnect between India and the gaming market due to the pricing of AAA titles. The global prices for many games have not been changed when they were released in India. For example, a AAA game like Red dead redemption 2 costs Rs.4000. 4 of these games would cost more than 15,000. People in India buy a mobile phone for that price. It’s therefore not that hard to see why people choose the latter option, especially when a large amount of the population in the country is not well off.
The accessibility of consoles as well as their games was practically like finding a needle in a haystack at the earlier stages. Players were so frustrated of having to look for console games that they stopped buying consoles altogether and chose an alternative like PC or mobile. The alternative to this was importing games. Needless to say people were ready to rather sell their devices than do that considering the cost of shipping.
The users were not the only people fed up with the situation. Even sellers were incredibly exhilarated by how hard games were to come by. The situation was deemed so impossible that sellers turned to the alternative of pirating CDs themselves. By buying one or two imported CDs they rather copied the data into multiple CDs and sold them as cheap products in a printed cover of the game.
This piracy increased to a point that people began selling 100 games in 1 chip or with the console itself. Back when Nintendo DS was a thing, people were selling chips that had 100 games in it for the price of 1 game. Imagine the craze now. Obviously, no one is gonna buy a single game for 1000s of rupees when you can get 100s for the same price. People did not care about the originality or the quality, the quantity and value for money matter in the nation.
With the growth of pirated sites throughout the world all sorts of media like movies, e-books along with games were now available on the Internet for free! You can even get PS3 and Xbox 360 games on some websites. With emulators becoming popular as well, congrats your PC just became the new playstation or Xbox. It seems like the sky’s the limit for piracy in the country.
But is piracy a totally negative thing for India?
This might be debatable. You might wonder that why we took so much time explaining Piracy for a gaming article. But piracy has changed the expectations and habits of people in india
Mobile Gaming In India
India’s gaming industry is on the rise, especially mobile gaming. Which has become the favourite thing to do for many Indians, including both the youth and the older generation. This has been due to rising popularity of mobile gaming, and an increasing catalogue of games for everyone. In this report we will see the factors that influenced this growing trend and look into how the gaming landscape has changed in India.
For a large population of the nation, mobile gaming is the true gaming. The growth of mobile gaming in India in the past 2 years (since covid hit) was so rapid and huge that it makes other countries look like little kids in front of it.
What could be the reasons for mobile gaming being so popular? First off, as explained previously, mobiles are incredibly cheap in the nation with them being compared to the cost of AAA games. They are also incredibly accessible with them being available in every nook and corner of the country. The ease of accessibility to the internet over the past few years has also played a huge part in the growth of mobile gaming. Leave all this, do you know what’s the best part of all? Mobile games are free!!! Unlike PC or console games you do not have to pay 1000s of rupees to play a game. All you need is a phone with play store, or iStore if you’re an apple user – but then you’d have money to purchase a PC or console game anyways, to play games.
Impact Of Covid 19
The impact of Covid on the gaming industry is quite evident. Statistics have shown that the time spent by users on gaming increased 45 percent during Covid times from 2.5 hours before the Covid times to 3.6 hours during the 2nd wave of the Covid era, which is quite significant to be honest. During this time, India was far ahead of its competitors and was one of the fastest growing gaming markets in the world with it being the best growing market for mobile gaming across the globe.
The stats have very much been in favour of rise of the industry during this period
The growth of UPI apps that have almost become the new “normal” way of payment with comfort to pay online and the increasing maturity of gamers.
Role Of Esports
Esports have been slowly growing in the Indian subcontinent for the past few years. With games such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or more popularly known as PUBG and Garena Free Fire becoming increasingly popular, people of all age groups have turned to gaming. With an increase in the audience base comes the increase in people willing to invest in which further increases the Esports opportunity in the country.
While it may look like a new scenario, Esports is not particularly new to the Indian subcontinent. Technically, during the early stages of the growth of gaming there used to be small competitions at places such as colleges and malls. While they did not have huge prize pools they definitely did a lot to further the growth of Esports in the nation. You can even say that these are the places from where Esports really grew from.
Nowadays with the big games like DOTA 2, LOL, CSGO, Valorant becoming more and more popular in the country, the Esports scene is also expected to grow in the coming years. These titles have also had an increase by 50% in the user base from India in the Covid era – which further strengthens their argument for becoming popular Esports titles in the nation.
Esports will also seem as a lucrative option for the youth of the country, with some of the big games offering plenty of money. For example – The International of DOTA has a prize pool of 40 million US dollars, which is a crazy amount of money for a video game if you ask us.
Conclusion
India has had a huge boost in gaming as an activity, but these were exclusive to mobile gaming and real money gaming. The major contributors being Covid 19 and the availability of cheap smartphones and affordable internet services. PC gaming and console gaming also grew during this time, but they did not see as much success as mobile gaming. If we compare games like PUBGM to valorant, it is evident that valorant has incorporated some of the features of PUBGM that made it into a success – a freemium model and focus on tournaments.
There is still a huge untapped market potential for PC and console gaming in India, as the spending capacity of people has increased manifold and people become more aware about gaming, through social media. The biggest hurdle that companies have to face is to find better ways to monetize the gaming audience in India. Many companies have tried- some succeeded some failed, and some like Nintendo have not even entered the market. What is certain is that, India is a very unique market to enter and companies have huge chances of becoming successful as well. The times have changed and the perception for gaming is surely changing as we see youtubers and streamers and esports players become fairly successful and make a career out of gaming. In the future we might be seeing a fairly good gaming environment in India and many names become big on the international esports scene.
