A lot of people in India have started tapping the online games more often and a recent report by Google India and KPMG now claims that the online gaming industry will grow to $1 billion USD by 2021. Currently, the industry stands at $360 million USD which translates into a growth rate of 20 percent each year from now. The major reasons behind this growth are likely to be localisation, increased popularity of digital payments and more penetration of smartphones among the younger generation. The report suggests that the number of searches for online games by Indians has grown by 117% and it predicts that the current gamer base of 120 million in India will grow to 310 million by 2021.
Besides, about 70 percent of searches are for mobile devices which is why most of the gamer base (about 75%) have a smartphone costing below Rs 20,000. Free games are expectedly more popular showing 22 times more revenue than paid apps. For the genres, where most of the people reside are strategy games, puzzle games and action games. While heavy gamers incline more towards strategy games, Casual games opt more for puzzle games.
According to the report, the majority of gamer base plays up to 6 games simultaneously and more than half of them are influenced by referral or peer group i.e. they jump into a game after they were referred by someone. Also, 25 percent of gamers don’t associate a value paying for a game i.e. they expect to play more free games.
For the survey, the report claims that they covered over 3,000 respondents from 16 geographies including Delhi-NCR, Jaipur, Lucknow, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Vishakhapatnam, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bhubaneshwar, Patna, Guwahati, Agartala and Shillong. And most of the respondents resided between the age of 18-55.