Sometimes success comes from whence least expected. Sometimes the people create their own success stories for the nation, uninvited and unappreciated, slipping under the radar of those trained and paid to watch for such things.
The commanding space that India now occupies in the global business of gaming — as consumer and as creator — is an exemplar of this phenomenon.
Until five years ago, annual studies of India’s media and entertainment industry hardly mentioned gaming as they looked at the usual suspects — cinema, TV, print media, books, electronic media, advertising, etc.
Then came the mobile phone explosion. When the number of handsets in use, crossed the magic number of a billion, some five years ago, it created in the hands of its Indian users an agni astra, a potent combo of empowerment and entertainment. A handy device for basic communication and gradually for financial transactions, that also served as a cool ‘time-pass’ tool.
Those casual games have evolved at amazing speed, from those early TickTackToe and Prince of Persia knock-offs to a raft of visually stunning, aurally striking games that span multiple cultures and traditions: Teen Patti coexists happily alongside Angry Birds; Pokemon with Balle Baaz.
Mobile games are not the only category of personal and professional games. The other gaming platforms are PC (laptop and desktop), consoles (like Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s Playstation and Nintendo’s Switch) and cloud-based Internet gaming. PC-Based Gaming Holds Its Own
Hardcore professional competitive gamers mostly use their own laptops or desktops — which has led to high prized hardware product sub-categories from leading makers — Asus with its RoG or Republic of Gamers brand, Dell with Alienware or HP with Omen end up costing much more than the same company’s professional platforms.
The HP India Gaming Landscape Report 2021-22 revealed that 89 per cent respondents in a poll believe that a PC offers a better gaming experience than a smartphone and that four in 10 mobile gamers would migrate to a PC for gaming, for a better experience.
This might seem like a self-serving finding, but the fact remains that among India’s Gen Z (18-24) and millennials (25-40), professional gaming is widely seen as a viable career option — and in this niche, a hand phone is not an appropriate platform.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision earlier this year has brought popular console games like Warcraft and Call of Duty to its lineup, and this will help it to bolster and expand the market for Playstation. With the Activision buy, Microsoft also acquired one of those all-time favourite mobile games — Candy Crush.
This is a huge plus because the fact remains that mobile games constitute 95 per cent of the total market for games. And within this mobile gaming world, India is the world’s largest market: In 2021 Indian players installed 4.8 billion games on their phones — every fifth game downloaded was in this country, reported the India Mobile Market Spotlight 2021.
Their most downloaded game was LudoKing, a free-to-play title developed by Indian studio Gametion Technologies. The game of ludo is actually based on the ancient Indian game of Pachisi (Hindi for ‘25’) also known as Chaupad — famously, the game between Pandavas and Kauravas in the Mahabharata.
Interestingly, this is something of an exception because only some 7.6 per cent of the mobile games Indians play, are Made in India.
Read More at https://swarajyamag.com/business/why-india-leads-the-globe-in-gaming-and-how-lay-users-made-it-happen
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