NASSCOM Animation & Gaming India 2007: Session Wise Coverage
The Mobile Gaming panel discussion at NASSCOM Animation & Gaming India 2007 unanimously agreed that the Quality of Indian Mobile Games has improved over the past year. And it is not the case that Indian developers were not able to come out with good quality in the past, it is more to do with the focus of the ecosystem now shifting from quantity to quality.
Chaired by Indiagames CEO Vishal Gondal, the panel comprised of Airtel Marketing Manager for VAS Anshuman Kalia, JumpGames CEO Salil Bhargava, Reliance Communications Head for VAS Krishna Durbha and Nokia head for Games and Internet experience Keith Liu.
The panel shared that amongst Mobile Gaming Milestones achieved in 2006 were, the focus of the ecosystem moving from quantity to quality, the pricing models for mobile games evolving to be more consumer friendly and the marketing and promotion of game content stepping up (relatively).
Talking about 2006, Reliance Communication‘s Krishna Durbha shared, “There was a phase where earlier we were throwing games at the consumer to get feedback and to know the market better, now we have an better understanding of what the cosumers want in terms of the quality and kind of game as well as in terms of the pricing models and how to promote the game better”
“This year the big milestone is going to be community based gaming, and multiplayer is going to be the milestone of the future” he added.
“I think EA buying Jamdat was a milestone too” quipped Gondal “Also the fact that now finally things like revenue share are being openly discussed at forums is a great thing too”
“A big milestone has been the pricing moving toward more realistic levels which will help make gaming a mass market phenomena” added Salil Bhargava “And if you take note there has been a shake out and consolidation in the industry. Henceforth, I think it is only the serious developers commited to the business who are going to rule the fray”
Giving an International perspective and hinting at a trend that would sooner or later come to India, Nokia‘s Keith Liu shared, “Globally, the big milestone or coming of age has been in the emergence of mobile games as complimentary to the PC /Console game where players can continue playing their PC game on the mobile seamlessly. Gaming anytime, anywhere is a great thing”
The panel mentioned about how the mobile games market had grown in volumes, though the price points of the games were coming down. “The market has grown. now it is well over 2 million Unique Users a month, the price points though are going down as the new subscribers being added every month are users new to telecom & VAS. The growth in the future too is going to be volumetric for a while now” shared Vishal Gondal.
“The impending growth stares at one, in the statistics. Currently only approximately 2% of the 120 Million Mobile users are consuming gaming. The % is definitely set to grow” he added.
When it comes to Voice, SMS, CRBT, Indian consumers have a voracious appetite, these services are in sync with the prevalent culture. But surely gaming can get at least to 6-7% of consumers, which means the potential of 7x growth. What was curtailing it?
“Awareness” the panel replied in unision. There is a good amount of money that operators spend in marketing and promotion as well as direct to consumer campaigns in order to make the consumer aware of the Value Added Services, but given the breadth and depth of the market, for such information to percolate takes a long time.
The developer view point was that along with educating the consumer about the VAS services, the discovery process of consumers finding it inviting, easy and intutive to navigate and discover the value added applications and games on their own would go a long way in tapping that potential 7x growth.
Making a case for quality and variety, Airtel‘s Anshuman Kalia spoke about how generic games and re skinned games were proliferating in the market. “I think we have to conciously come with better quality, newer and better games rather than just re skinning titles and coming up with tweaked up versions of generic formats”
“Also I think while rating games, the metric is based on most highly downloaded games, this metric should now evolve and be based on market sampling where the games that are most played and popular amongst consumers should be rated” he added.
The panel also discussed how the quality of the device was responsible for enhancing the gameplay. Also discussed were things like sideloading which affected user experience as well as revenue loss for the entire ecosystem.
NASSCOM‘s Rajiv Vaishnav and Shruti Verma
Explaining Sideloading, the Indian developers shared, “When a consumer downloads a game from the operator‘s server to his device, it is downloading. When he then uses technology like blue tooth and transfers the game to his friend, that‘s sideloading, akin to piracy”
Nokia‘s Keith Liu pointed out that, a lot of R&D was on at the device Mfgs end where issues like sideloading could be addressed. “We are working on a nex gen technology that will require consumer devices to have certain code in order to run the game and even though the game could be transferred via bluetooth, the code that it would need to run would not be able to transfer, hence blocking the piracy”
Concluding the session, the panel shared that 2007 would be a year to watch out for and that the quality, the numder of users, the discovery proess, the marketing and promotion and the technology were all set to improve.