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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Mobile Gaming Gaining In India

Kedar Sohoni
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Kedar Sohoni
Necessity might always have been the mother of invention, but development has often been driven by demand. In this case, the demand has come from two quarters: the mobile phone user wants to do, not just more, but everything, from his handset; and every industry wants different forms of marketing that will give them captive audiences.

This has led to the increasingly sophisticated mobile handsets, on which you can also call and text people – but those are no longer the USP of mobile phone. With the advent of 3G and wireless technologies, mobile phones have become as portable, small scale, entertainment systems. You can watch videos, watch movies, browse the Web, listen to music – and you can play a great range of games.

Mobile gaming has evolved into a multimillion dollar industry with stakes held by every OEM, network operator, VAS developer and application provider in the telecom industry. With handsets getting more and more intricate and advanced, with BlackBerry and iPhone and high-end Nokia phones in the market, mobile gaming has become one of the biggest baits dangled in front of the consumer to make him opt for one handset or network over the other. Now, mobile gaming stands next only to caller tunes and SMS, in terms of revenue generation. In fact, a recent study revealed that the mobile users are spending 7.5 per cent of their active time on mobile games. Further, it states that night is the most active gaming time on mobiles, while there is only one minute difference between gaming time on weekdays and weekends.

The Indian Mobile gaming market is growing in excess of 200% for the past two years and is expected to reach $450 Million in 2012. The penetration of mobile devices is much higher than that of PC and consoles, even if many of those handsets are fairly low-end. But even the lowest end handset has at least one game, and even people normally resistant to technology will master this as easily as calling or texting. With the consumer getting more demanding in terms of the features they expect from their mobile phones, games can only get more sophisticated, helping the industry exceed its share in the India gaming market.

The mobile industry has data on games downloaded from various portals but it also needs metrics to measure actual game usage on mobile phones. Recent data based on actual usage on a monthly basis shows that users spend close to 10 minutes on any given day playing games on their mobile phones. Though the most popular game categories are of the established genre –Card (comprises of 20% of the game time) followed by 15% for Puzzle & 13% for Sports, there is a spike in popularity for mobile games inspired by Hollywood, Bollywood movies and Cricket.


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