Cashing in on a new addiction: mobile games

Creating an engaging game is difficult. But more difficult is to get consumer to download the app & engage with it. In this re­gard, the gaming firms in India have done the impossible in short period

“Tax demand on e-gaming cos may top Rs 1.5 trn,” said a news report (Business Stan­dard, September 27, 2023). Another warned, “Gamers watch board moves with GST roll of dice” (Business Stan­dard, October 2, 2023).

When did Indians get hook­ed to electronic or e-games?

Game consoles became a must-have item in households in the Western world more than 20 years ago. The first version of Sony PlayStation launched in 1994 sold 100 million units. I should admit I, too, got hold of a PS2 PlayStation unit some 15 years ago. I topped it with Guitar Hero a year later. But I may have been the rare Indian consumer to have invested in e-gaming consoles. I did not have a teenager at home to play the games with and soon lost interest. In a related note, the product category never took off in India; maybe high prices (console + games), inadequate promotion and patchy distribution may have contributed to the dismal performance of this category.

We Indians tend to jump across technologies. We never did adopt electronic typewriters or even word processors. We jumped ahead to the PC era and started typing on Word, just as I am doing now.

In a similar vein, I used to wonder whether Indians will ever get addicted to online games. A few things happened to facilitate this. First was the launch of Reliance Jio that made mobile internet highly affordable, even free for a few months. Then came the low-cost smartphones; you did not need a Rs 25,000 smart phone to watch videos or download games. Finally came the Covid lockdown. A report (Frontline, May 8, 2023) says that Indian mobile game downloads jumped from 1.8 billion in Q1 2020 to 2.7 billion in Q2 2020. The number of online gamers crossed 433 million in FY21, says the same report, and it will cross 650 million by FY25.

Not all gamers are playing for money. There are the casual gamers; you can see them in bus stops and trains. These are big revenue spinners for gaming companies; they pay to play a better version of the game. All mobile games have a freemium game where they entice consumers with a free version only to make them move to a higher level. With the universal availability of UPI-based payment interfaces, you may not even have to break your game to buy tokens and move to a higher level.

Then there is RMG, or real mo­ney games. A re­port said that an average player spends Rs 400 per month to play the games for ar­o­und 45 min­u­tes a day, shelling out Rs 10 to Rs 15. Who are these players and when do they play?

The larger gaming companies will probably know the details to the last digit. Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile Gaming 2022 report said that 43 per cent of Indian gamers are women (the number is 40 per cent for South East Asia); while mobile gaming is largely the hobby of the young, 31 per cent of Indian (and 40 per cent of South East Asian) gamers are over 45 years old. Yet another report in WARC June 2022 said that in the UK, 79 per cent of adults aged 18-34 play games at least once a week, but that drops to 28 per cent for those aged 55 years and older. Similarly, the young tend to play games throughout the day while the older cohorts tend to play during the traditional prime-time hours.

With mobile gaming be­coming such an important part of daily activity, advertising will not be far behind. The oldest form of advertising in e-gaming was the virtual billboards offered by football and racing games. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002 was littered with displays and product pla­cements. This form of in-game advertising is becoming popular in India as well. In add­ition, brands are playing a role in the freemium conversions: “watch this ad and you can con­tinue to play for another 15 minutes”. The more adventurous brands are trying their hand at creating their own mo­bile games, or gamification as it is referred to. Coca-Cola had a game, Sprite CPL, in time for their Indian Premier League campaign and reported to have achieved 2.3 million sessions.

The challenge facing bran­ds today is deciding where to put their money and how to get the best ROMI (return on marketing investment). Creating an engaging game is difficult. But more difficult is to get a consumer to download the app and engage with it. In this re­gard, the gaming companies in India have done the impossible in a relatively short period. They have created a new form of entertainment, largely harm­less, by their aggressive promotion. Yes, real money games need stronger supervision. But other types of games, especially those that can imp­art skills, need a different treatment. It is a slippery slope to identify the good from the bad and ugly. Maybe a new game is needed to help us navigate which game to let our kids play.

Ambi Parameswaran is a best selling author, independent brand coach and founder brand-building.com a brand advisory. He can be reached at ambimgp@brand-building.com