A game to win

FREEZE FRAME

The fastest growing segment of the entertainment industry worldwide is not movies, television or music but gaming "� as in video games played on consoles like Playstation and X-Box, handheld devices like Gameboy, arcade games, web-based games and now mobile phone games.

The global gaming business is estimated to be a $ 30 billion industry. In the US alone in 2003 games earned $ 13 billion. In contrast, movies collected $10 billion at the box office. Most experts believe that what we are seeing is just the beginning of a new interactive revolution.

This is not surprising. From pre-historic times humans have played games. So from wooden toys to the first arcade games like pinball was a natural progression.

It was obvious that as soon as the first computers made their appearance they would have some basic games designed for them. It is generally believed that American physicist William Higginbotham invented the precursor to videogames in 1958 and this survives even today in the form of Pong and Tennis for Two.

Magnavox developed the first Home TV game in the early seventies. The big breakthrough, however, came when Atari was launched a few years later.

In the eighties the Apple Mac and Commodore Amiga and Nintendo moved the revolution ahead. The spread of the internet led to the deployment of the most popular gaming device, the Sony Playstation, in 1995 and more recently Microsoft's X-Box in 2001.The latest spurt is coming from mobile games, with widespread use of 3G phone technologies.

Interestingly, the huge rise in game players is despite a heavy demographic bias "� 80 per cent of all gamers are males aged 15 to 25. So a large section of the population which has access to computers and other devices or for that matter broadband connectivity at home are still not playing video games.

Many game developers are now emotionalising their games and linking them to movies and TV shows to engage girls and older people. As broadband connectivity grows, as faster access becomes easy and convergence becomes a reality, ubiquitous gaming is bound to get a further boost. The dividing lines among movies, television and computer games will disappear in a few years.

Yet a gaming guru whom I met recently made an intriguing observation. He likened game play to reading comics. In spite of the fact that comics have thrived for over 70 years most adults hardly read them.

Similarly, gaming will continue to predominantly be an obsession of the young. If the Japanese experience of Pokeman is any indication of the impact a game can have on a whole generation, even a youth market is large enough to fuel gaming's fantastic growth.

We have moved from the early days of the clumsy computer games like Pong with low resolution fuzzy characters to the multi-player games like Doom, Quake and Everquest which have a fair amount of cinematics in them.

It was the launch of the Unreal engine which triggered photo realism and multi-layering in games. Today almost all major films like "Lord of the Rings," "Matrix," and "Star Wars" have games which are increasingly being developed in tandem with the movie. These games have budgets of over $30 million.

Many film makers and all studios are now looking at game development as an integral part of property development. The first truly interactive games involving a return path to TVs and/or the internet are just being introduced and in a couple of years will be sine qua non.

Companies like Microsoft, Sony, Intel, Time-Warner and Nintendo and all major telcos and content companies are spending billions of dollars to grab a piece of this exciting action.

Games are becoming culturally pervasive, stealing time and money from other entertainment options like movies, television and amusement parks.

On an average, an American will spend 75 hours this year playing videogames, more than double the amount of time spent in 1997 and eclipsing that of DVD or tape rentals today, according to market research firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

Of the other forms of entertainment, only internet usage is expected to grow faster than video games -- a fact that video game makers are already using to their advantage. Online gaming is already the big driver of broadband in homes in the developed world. It should be so in India too now that broadband is round the corner.

In fact, with the launch of Reliance Web worlds in several cities many children are experiencing the compelling delight of online games. Some experts believe that gaming is on track to rival the movie, music, or television industries by the end of this decade on a global basis.

India which has seen only the very rudimentary work being done in gaming can play a major role here. Companies like Dhruva Interactive, Indiagames and Paradox have achieved success in this.

With our rich experience in films and television content and the necessary skills in computer programming, there is no reason India should not become the nerve centre for interactive gaming.

Our exploding mobile market and over 50 million cable passed homes present a unique opportunity for Indians to leapfrog in another digital activity.

Not only do we have a big untapped domestic market but huge export potential. After all, games are about storytelling and algorithms. And Indians are past masters at both.

Amit Khanna is chairman of Reliance Entertainment. The views expressed here are his own