August - 2015 - issue > CEO View point
The Booming Gaming Industry of India
By Saurabh Aggarwal, Founder & CEO, Octro Inc.
Till a few years back, the most popular forms of entertainment available to the youth in India were the traditional forms like movies, music, television and sports. Gaming as a culture was a concept, alien to India. The potential market for gaming has emerged over time and its growing popularity can be attributed to the new digital generation. In a country with burgeoning youth and middle class, more than 50 percent of the youngsters who fall in the age group of 18 to 35 constitute the target audience for gaming.
When gaming started in India, it was primarily an outsourcing hub for foreign gaming companies providing game development services. The console and PC-based games resulted in a very small percentage of the gaming population. Power issues, low smartphone base and Internet penetration were some of the reasons that further attributed to a small gaming market in India.
The industry which had just about 25 companies at the time when I started out has grown to more than 250 game developers today. I have been at the helm of affairs of Octro Inc since 2006, having built one of the most complex mobile communication backend, a technology we used to create real time multi player social games that can scale up to millions of concurrent players.
Frankly, what prompted me to step into the gaming industry was the fact that out of the 100 top grossing apps on Google Play store, 60 percent of the apps were games. This was an indicator of the revenue generating ability of the apps.
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