Gaming mart boosts Indian players, draws global majors

Bengaluru: India has all the right elements to make it a huge thriving market for the gaming industry – A young demography, a growing middle class and a smartphone user base that is growing exponentially every year. Yet, the gaming industry in India is not more than $250 million including gaming services, products and sales of consoles. Compare this with China which has built a thriving $7.5 billion gaming industry over the last 12 years and you would naturally wonder why India is not yet there. While global biggies expand their India footprint, several successful, independent game developers and gaming service providers have mushroomed around the country. Some of the successful ones are, Delhi-based, Lakshya Digital which has a formidable reputation in delivering gaming art and technical outsourced services; Mumbai-based, Yellow Monkey Studios which is an official Nintendo DS developer and also develops for Apple and Android handsets; and Pune-based Rolocule, which has bagged international mobile gaming awards beating much bigger players with some of its games like ‘Touch Squash,’ ‘Super Badminton,’ and ‘Flick Tennis’ and has to its credit over 1.5 million downloads in over 100 countries around the globe. “The fourth biggest activity on smartphones in India today behind email, Facebook and search, is gaming” points out Rajesh. “With the installed base of smartphones almost doubling every year, there’s a lot of competition in the gaming industry today. The country has some 175 gaming companies, of which close to 70 per cent are independent developers which started off as 2-5 member teams and are now 10-25 people strong. These independent developers are largely inspired by the runaway success of games such as ‘Angry Birds,’ developed by a small 20-people company called Roveo and ‘Temple Run’ which was developed by a husband and wife team from Imangi Studios, both of which went on to make millions of dollars in revenue” he said. Then there are startups like Mumbai based, Prisma Animation Studio, a division of Prisma Global Ltd, has developed 51, 2D and 3D interactive casino games for customers in the US. “There are 22 million people around the world who play online casino games, many of whom play for high stakes. Typically when they start losing in one game, they move onto another game and try and win there. We are now in the process of targeting these people with online versions of our interactive casino games” said Shreeram Iyer, CEO, Prisma Global, who is confident of netting Rs 120 crore in revenue from the online casino games by December 2014. Bengaluru based Eoxys Systems started with developing mobile games for Nokia phones a few years ago and has since then developed mobile games for Android phones, BlackBerry and Windows phones. The team has released over 40 games spanning the genres of action games, adventure games, board games and sports games. “Our games crossed the 20 million download milestone in Nokia’s Ovi store over the last 2 years and in Android, crossed over a million downloads in the last 6 months. We are now looking to design and develop productivity games such as, managing personal finance through an engaging game, and a game to help new managers work efficiently with colleagues who have different attitudes and workstyles” said A Prabhakar, MD, Eoxys Systems India Pvt Ltd.