An overview of India's mobile games industry

[Music] we talked a little bit about Chris mentioned in the panel earlier about about the Indian market and how rapidly it is growing and how actually you know how to be able to break into that basically its before we get into the slides if you look into where China was about five years ago we're in very we're starting to see some downloads where you're starting to see some revenue but it was very close nobody knew exactly what was happening I would say that you know India is right now they're times ten because it's very complicated compare is you know good thing about India is that you're not talking about only the external 100 750 channels which were mentioned in the previous panel we talking about four or five different channels where you can get the download from but those downloads are there but how do you make money how do you get to the users how do you how do you reach out to the consumers where it eventually

becomes your players in the mix so if you look at from the Indian market the this year it's about 2x the global media entertainment industry where the focus is going it's growing at 13 to 14 percent month and month currently and if you look at it it's the growth of since 2014 if you look at it from 14 to now it's a cumulative growth about 15 percent but it was not so a 20 percent but if you look at the last six months the growth has been significant and there has been multiple reasons for the growth one being you know these the network's availability the smartphones and I get into a lot of that in the later stage I've actually picked up a lot of my slides actually changed them in last two days because there's a study which came out with Google and KPMG did this study and in there and they just published the report so I actually picked up a lot of new and relevant data for the market because it was very relevant for this for the market preside so if you look at it the Indian global market they're about 190 million gamers

roughly and it's becoming about a you know and actually the report is saying that it's going to be become a 1 billion market by 2021 and the reason that is is that the growth of 300 million to a billion in 4 years is it doesn't seem that great but this is the revenue opportunity from the prenup from the in-app purchases you not talk you're not talking about the the ad revenue we're not talking about the branding we're not talking about the cumulative growth coming in from the ancillary channels so if you pull it all together we anticipate this is going to be about ten plus billion dollar market because the way you reach out to consumer it's a huge growth on that component and if you look at it what is working it's you know interestingly the the casino market there is a real-time money market that you know they'd be the real the localized version of the casino is a play market drives close to about a hundred plus million dollars of real

cash money in there that expected to grow to a billion it in itself cricket drives a significant amount of running a revenue Bollywood drives a significant amount of downloads and then the stars or the you know or the the actors or other talent drives a significant amount of engagement so different components drive different different components in the marketplace so if you look at the gaming market so gaming revenue going from 292 a bill in next you know with a three and a half percent a three and a half times growth if it is less than about five years online gamers growing almost tripling in this and in the way they have cross defied online gamers is dip with mobile gamers online gamers html5 gamers all of them together what they have not done is a console they've kept raters separated that out in there what is driving is the the number of Internet users so I'm going up to 750 you know seven about 750 million users from where it is currently digital

payments is a big component in India right now the digital I mean only less than two percent the people have credit cards in India it's a cash economy changing very rapidly to the digital world there's a wallets like what we are used to Apple pay or Google Wallet I mean there's just multiple wallets which are doing well the Google digital payment mechanisms are coming in where they're connecting to the direct carriers as you know but 97 percent of the market in India is prepaid it's not postpaid so people actually put the money to you know in their accounts in the carriers and in their actually using that as a wallet to do transactions and that's what's going to change the economy significantly because Google is betting on these DCP is what they're calling is a direct carrier integration for payment mechanisms so if you are let's say if you're here on a chain tier Verizon insert paying them at the end of the month you know you say I put $100 you use that hundred dollars to do multiple transaction not just only for buying yourself one minutes or data but

you're doing that as a transaction mechanism so that's becoming a big big play in the marketplace so if you look at the another reason why the device Sita why the growth is going to be so huge is because of the availability of devices they're adding about 30 million devices a month in India right now if you look at it six months ago they were less than 50 million smartphone users and that's growing up to be about 500 you know about half a billion within the next four years they expected to close that year about 300 million by end of this year so numbers are huge what the number of your new users who are coming in and these are not the phones with Gio and I use them and if these are not the iPhone so these are not the Samsung's or these are not ALJ's they are there but they're in a very high-end market the devices which are selling are localized versions of the Chinese devices less than you know $100.00 $150.00 retail price so and the average device ownership is about eight months in India so every eight months these guys will go

in and change the devices because the market you know the device capability changes quite quite dramatically so it's a Saudi mr. market size is about the second largest right now in the smartphone's it's about two and twenty what they're saying it's expected to buy this India they'll say it about three hundred million devices they are the internet or online people connected or significant a lot of people connect 90 plus percent of the people connect through their mobile device it's not what we see or what we use as a Internet our first device sometimes as computers or laptops there it's all about mobile a lot of the people do not have or never connected to the Internet through through the through the in computers or laptops they've done it directly through this in the last for two years and the last specifically last two quarters Google Play has been a dominant factor it's been driving a significant installs for the number of users put here so there if you look at it they're saying it's about

a 5.3 billion and this is the prediction from Google that they'll hit 5.3 billion downloads by 2020 Justin in there I think we're going to make that number you know what we're seeing on a daily basis is a number of downloads increasing in last six months we believe that number is going to come much sooner it's coming in next 18 months itself so the number average user consumption of our game or an app is four times of five times of what we typically Dutch have over here so that every the whole economy in the whole world lives on the app world here in that market so the Irani your growth if you look at just from monthly basis it's just so much you know significant and then more and the desktop is not dying the desktop or online gaming a lot of you know here we stop playing you know we stopped me not playing on the online and we run one of the biggest online gaming sites and in India and in Asia and our numbers have been steadily growing but if you look at this it seems like it's you know pretty flat on there but the overall market by

is so increasing and a lot of people when we constitute of the growth in the mobile its html5 players coming in and wanting to play the games I mean there's a casual games being played on you know on the on these sites as well so there's online and desktop are to a certain extent merged commodities to you know because a lot of players are coming in from their care from their from their browsers to be able to play this game the game downloads are increasing significantly and if you look at it from 14 to 15 to 16 and the 17 we is expecting this to be a 4x growth because localized words in the regional regional content is gaining a lot of traction the the time of time spent on an average time is spent within the game it's significant and if you look at the number of sessions and number of time it's typically about 2x what we have here in the US so if an average session here was what five and a half six minutes we see that sessions about four

point a half minutes there but typically they'll have four or five sessions a day you know because a lot of people spend a lot of time commuting so if you look at within the 8 o clock to the 10 o clock what is a commute time and again in the evening those two are bracket and two are in the evening in the morning and evening brackets significant amount of uptake happens and that's not only gaming but also video consumption and the short video consumption and and other content types do really well there so we a lot of the courses which I get asked is how do I make money what is working what is not working in India I mean monitor premium is the way to go and digital you know in the international companies like candy crush and you know the clash of plans do make money through through their you know through the regular in-app channels it is you know there are a lot of you know I mean if you look at it a candy crush I think has its India's number five or number between the top five players or countries where the number of sessions if you look at it are significant in there but it's not driving the number of

installs Subway's so for I mean if you talk to the kilo guys Kido guys are you know if you look at it they are saying that you know they're getting so many downloads so many downloads on a daily basis in India compared to the global numbers it's just significant I mean they're actually starting to integrate the regional and indianized theme so it was actually four clones which have come up I mean if you actually look at the companies who've done the clone from India it's increasingly interesting to see that these games look exactly like that just on an Indian team and they're you know and all of these guys have five six seven million doubts just just on adjust like hopping subway surfer the temple run so these games are making downloads these games are making revenues but nobody is able to figure out by local localized version of how to actually connect the boat where you have more downloads and you have the revenue as well

so what what what is working what is not right I mean if you look at it the kind of genres if you look at three years ago it was all about sports was all about cricket it was all about racing those were the only two genres which worked in India interestingly the strategy gains and they are starting to pick up people are getting these are the gamers who are spending a lot of their time in trying to play these have a longer session time these are people who's spending money these are people who are engaging on a traditional model from in-app purchases but skill or chance based games which what we call online casino games is driving a lot of revenue that's where the total you know where this is real cash money which is being spent mostly on through the online casino online html5 so people are playing from their mobile devices but through a browser-based game with environment because of Apple and Google does not enable them to have real component so premium still drives a significant amount of engagement 90 plus percent of the games are coming in from

the premium model in our traditional mobile world but if you take that what people are playing it's a real cash money on the casino base rhythm which is driving the most monetization people if you look at the r2 or you know some of these players it's close to what you know $1,000 a month what they're spending in the games on a real-time cash basis so it's it's a you know they're really taking the casino to a completely different world I mean the number is you know it's very similar to traditional gaming world but little more skewed towards the male audience in that market where people are you know obviously male or male players but what is very interesting is sixty percent of the people who are playing these games are young audience they're less than 24 and they're spending a lot of their time in engagement at these games because they've grown up if you look at the anything anybody you know 80 is about there they did not grow up

playing games you know India was never a gaming nation so they've started playing games mostly on the mobile world there are few players who play on the PC or the MMO G's or console but console is very very tiny we have you know we we we have our codemasters which is our console business when we look at that I mean after numbers are so small in that market it's just you know it's just very very you know insignificant in the overall mix of things but what are the you know as I said the top genres is becoming you know puzzle it's becoming action it's becoming adventure which was not the case it was only used to be about sports it was only used to be out racing but you know these puzzle genre is a standard we just released a game on the action genre and it's getting a pretty decent traction in that market base but if you look at the number of smartphones time versus game it's about 7% of the total time is being spent on playing games on their daily time and

it's in it and people spend a lot of their time on the phone I mean if you see if you go to India I mean 90% of time you'll see people you know on the phone all the time and it's in the what's up actually which is the you know which face for quiet is dominated by Indian market I mean if you did take away the whatsapp users in India I think 70% of the users will disappear will be because they connected somehow the other through that market the data consumption has increased quite dramatically in last six months there's a 4G was launched about six months and when they launched 4G one of the the new carriers actually launched 4G at a at a price point of which was very very cheap called zero so the whole world moved to that you know when you give them something free people could move start moving to there they came up with a very interesting strategy where they give away data for free and they gave away content for free and they came up with a device which was less than 20 bucks so the whole world moved to their to that environment where they they've been able

to acquire about 200 million users in less than six months and they've started with charge but they've priced the way they've priced it is about one tenth of everybody else how they were selling data so the data consumption which is what they talked about 200 MB per data actually used to be you know less feed about 40 50 MB and they're actually anticipating about four to five gigs of data by end of 2017 and average consumption which is humongous change in the world and that will drive a lot of our the way the games are going to be because if you sold games if you were good market targeting the market in India the average size of the game which they everybody said oh don't do anything more than five or seven Meg that's what you would have heard but now the games are about 30 40 20 to 40 Meg's you know you can get 30 40 Meg's which are actually getting decent downloads you can down you know you can get the number the number of downloads are significant in that market you're talking about a game a typical a game could be doing about five million downloads a decent game which is Midway an average should be doing about 10 to 15 and if it's a

decent hit you talk about 4050 million downloads and we talking about this is not numbers over the years we talked about two three months downloads download can are increasing on a day to day basis if you look at the the guys who are into the gaming talk when you get into the heavy gamer component the action and and the puzzle games are driving a lot of consumption in there I mean if you have somebody who's playing an action game if you get a C or D kind of app alone or if you get somebody you know even the even the clash of COC does so much more engagement in India compared to the other clans who are spending you know who have you know whatsapp group which is not even run by the COC environment Eames they run by themselves where they're actually collaborating and they have their own world which they've built together just to be able to go after this game so significant amount of interaction there the the number of minutes goes up to 1700s which is significant if you look at it overall break it down on a day to day basis the

amount of time and effort they're spending in there and and as well there was a comment made in the car in the in the panel it's simply something similar to China right I mean a lot of people over the weekend is connected through the world through the gaming because on the weekend there it's not they're not going out and spending time and going and you know in doing multiple other activities they are connected on their smartphones either watching content through the videos or short videos or playing games so signal a very very engaged environment and engaged world there if you look at the numbers are when you look at from they go back to the numbers you go back to saying male versus female consumption we saw that 83% and 17% consumption 83% being towards meal but when you break it down further that numbers are not that different for the male gamers and the female gamers I mean if they want the in their you know the the engagement patterns are very much similar to you know from a go there but

the numbers pick up significantly after 8:00 o'clock in the night it's a late economy a lot of people don't get back to work till about 8:30 9:00 so this is a consumes the commute time so when they're back home so if you see it from 8:00 to 12:00 that's about 50% of your consumption of your content happens and a lot of downloads actually happened after 7:30 and interestingly if it's a big game if it is anything about 15 Meg you will see those downloads happening between 10 and 7 on a Wi-Fi at work people will download it but you know consumption will happen much later because people don't you know they're very very conscious even though the data has become very cheap and it's readily available but still people are very conscious of of the data they will you know they've also drop your game they will start being a devil you know uninstall your game because it it's always connected or it requires a very constant connection back and forth you know and we I think I get into a little

bit of value phones here we are we talking about the average phone price is when we say about 20k that's 75% if you break it down so 20 20 K rupees is close to about $250 but if you break that down you know further but more than 50% is less than $100 of retail prices for a device so when you have that you know that cheaper for device obviously their memory footprint is less their storage footprint is less so they're very conscious of the size of the game and they're also very conscious of because there's typical uninstalls happen a lot so you will get a game if you can't engage them in this first 2-3 days they will uninstall it very quickly so when we track you know when we track on the global games business I don't track that much of my uninstalls because I know once I've gotten the player once they've gone to the patooie they will stick around for you know three four five seven days and I can look at a mouse here we

actually track on a dowser so much more important for us because my if I can retain them on day one my numbers are done but day two our numbers are very different and my day three numbers are very different so you will very rarely have somebody playing your game for months and months and months so the longevity of a game is very very limited so you constantly getting new users inquiring them and if you can create a you know a network where you take you don't use it from one game to the other to there because they will get bored and you will lose users on a regular basis because they don't want to keep playing the same thing so so how are they downloading the games this is a very interesting phenomena from that perspective there is still a subscription model which the carriers or director marketing component works and in there you can actually every big gaming company has their own subscription channels they run about a million plus Dow's just to be able to download you know driving downloads and engagement so that number you never get to see because they are not coming from Google they're not coming from Apple or they're not coming from traditionals

some of the old java games still do well some of the old html5 games do well something has a Tizen store which is it Tizen OS that does okay so you have to start looking at all the native channels to be able to drive engagement and downloads I think the market will change in next three to six months with Google integrating with all the carriers where the subscription used to be off tech channels where it was connected to t payments through there through the carrier billing but I think it might shift to to the to the Google and with with this micro transaction model they have a the biggest micro transaction which happens is 20 cents in India right now they're talking about potentially even bringing it down further so it could be a starting point could be five cents for the micro transaction because what a typical subscriber in India about 50% of downloads or monetization happens through the subscription models they pay on a daily basis they will buy a daily subscription for a certain price point and they can

download up to 40 games that day and they can get to play so that's those some of them have ads but majority of them are ad free models in the marketplace so when you look at the growth you have to look at the linguistic aspect of it at about 23 languages there are localized you know we have to localize them you have to region eyes them you can't just take a game from global market and just release it in India and hope that you'll make money we could hope but very difficult to make money because they're you know because of these channels or because of the because of the different monetization aspect of it Internet users are expanding localized content localized developers are expanding quite significantly their new developers coming on our daily basis trying to understand the market but you're looking at if you want to launch a game you want to be successful in India you're looking at about five to six languages you want to typically go after so just to be able to wrap up what is the market gaming trends young definitely a very young audience the all connected mobile you know it has to be

mobile focus don't look at just online only from an internet but it's to be browser-based mobile based consumption engagement is extremely extremely high you cannot compare them okay I have X consumes engagement in the global markets it should be 2x or two and a half x it all depends on the game and the genre you are you could have 5x or 6s engagement which you would not you know which you would not typically see and then obviously a smartphone devices there are devices which are available which we don't support there are in India I'm supporting about thousand dot devices on an average game which we were testing on we testing about 600 plus devices just to be able to get them out market and 90% of those devices are not available outside India so you want to be able to work with the localized partner just to be able to understand what devices and how to support if you can support one and a half gig memory footprint that's not what work with you know they go down to 256 MB or a 512 maybe memory footprint to be able to support those Android devices and it's all about Android the Android Market so just to be

able to wrap up significant amount of players 59 percent of the players are 20 you know 20 in mid-20s 82 percent of our mobile devices people play on they were on the online world and they are talking you know consumption even when you look at a PC is there but limited only through browser and tablets are very very very few pejorative your games have to be on the small screen perspective I don't running late here on the time anything any questions which you have or yes please iOS has really been in the India market up so now I know the Apple is making a concerted effort now Jen what do you think the difference is going to be in the market once that happens I think that's going to be a big market I mean Apple has made a huge commitment in in in India and last three to four months where they've even set up their labs and stuff with the low end you know with it it's very going to be hard to be able to sell a thousand dollar devices if they do get went to stock manufacturing which seems to be the case the rumors are that they're going to have a device available

for about two hundred Bank $200 price point it will change you will have a lot of players moving to a you know Apple and iOS but it won't be like a it won't be like China where a lot of people even they were expensive everybody went and bought their device because it was a status symbol it's not that of a status symbol in India they want more for diversity in the devices just be able to say that okay I'm on an Apple device so it's a cultural difference which is surprises the more the domination factor than just a status symbol you'll have few people who on the top of the end they'll use Apple but you have to get to the mass market you [Music]