Mukesh Ambani, Ruchir Sharma Talk About Online Gaming Potential in India
Potential of gaming in India is the talk of the town. The big guns in the business and research sectors are talking about gaming’s growth potential and driving factors in the country
Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, while recently speaking with Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella, said, “Gaming will be bigger than music, movies and television shows put together… There is a huge potential” for gaming to grow in India, as per a report by EconomicsTimes.
Ambani sees a huge opportunity for gaming in India due to increasing broadband connectivity and a huge supply gap in the Indian gaming market. He didn’t comment if his new wireless upstart Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. will venture into gaming.
As per a KPMG 2019 report called The Evolving Landscape of Sports Gaming in India, revenue from online gaming is expected to rise from 43.8 billion rupees ($610 million) in the year 2018 to 118.8 billion rupees by the year 2023.
Writer-Analyst Ruchir Sharma also recently said that gaming is India’s new favourite pastime, while speaking with NDTV’s Prannoy Roy about the top 10 trends of the decade to come. In the chat, using research data provided by Sharma, Roy pointed out that, compared to music and films, gaming has a bigger global market size.
Sharma thinks that this growth in the gaming sector is not just because of smartphone use or internet penetration, but also because there has been a substantial improvement in the quality of games being served to users.
As per Sharma’s research data, more money is being spent on gaming than other, more common, pastimes—Twitter has $8 revenue per user, Facebook is at $19, Google is at $27, while Fortnight, which is a game, is at $96. There is a rise in the game app development companies in the Indian market, and India also has the highest game downloads in the world. However, Sharma thinks that for the mind space that gaming occupies among users, it is not being monetised as much as the market opportunity allows.
Commenting on the talks about gaming among the the likes of Ambani and Sharma, Nitish Mittersain, Founder and MD of casual and real-money gaming company Nazara Technologies Ltd., said, “It is really thrilling for us to see stalwarts like Mr Mukesh Ambani and Ruchir Sharma finally talk about gaming and the big opportunity in India today. As India’s largest esports and mobile gaming platform, we at Nazara are witnessing a strong growth momentum in all of our offerings and believe that it will surge even further. We look forward to continue working with the ecosystem to help make India the biggest gaming market in the world.”
Nazara recently announced its intention to invest about US$20 million in startups in gaming and sports in the Indian sub-continent, Africa and Middle-East over the next one year.
