Indian gaming still in nascent stages

Candy Crush, the popular game on Facebook, has been played by over 30 million people in India, Temple Run has a following of another 12 million. There are over 200 million mobile gaming users in India who play various kinds of games at least 4-5 times in a day.

According to the recent FICCI-KPMG report on the Indian Media and Entertainment Industry, the size of the gaming industry last year was Rs 2,350 crore and is likely to be a Rs 4,580-crore market by 2019 on the back of mobile gaming.

With interactive advertising being the newest fad, gaming for sure is a platform that all advertisers would want to be on. In fact, advertising is the only way Indian gaming companies can monetise the games they create, as the concept of paid games is still nascent.

Though advertisers are indeed excited about gaming, they are still playing a wait and watch game. "Brands are willing to spend Rs 10 crore on a TV commercial but they are still hesitating to invest Rs 2-Rs 2.5 crore on a good game," says Manish Agarwal, CEO, Reliance Entertainment Digital, the gaming arm of the Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group.

A game like Temple Run or Subway Surfers costs anywhere upwards of $1 million (approximately Rs 6 crore) to be created, and Indian game creators feel that with advertisers still quite reluctant in backing games, it would be impossible to monetise such high-end games. Companies such as Reliance Entertainment Digital work with Hollywood studios and create games for their films. It has created three games around the Hollywood franchise, Real Steel, which is a $65-million franchise.

But what stops companies such as Reliance from creating games for Bollywood films? After all, Shah Rukh Khan's Ra.One game, based on his film Ra.One, got over 200 million downloads. Agarwal says that while Hollywood IP games are made right from the time when the script is in the concept stage, in India film-makers think about the game only two-three months prior to the release, making it impossible to come up with a good quality game.

So, the Indian gaming industry, with over 250 gaming companies, many of them such as Octro Inc and Monofrog Labs also attracting private equity money, is indeed promising. However, there is still some time for the industry to explode.