Growth of India as a destination for games

hi everybody we're gonna talk about India it's a very small country with a couple of people in it so I'll start off just roundabout do as anybody already have games deployed in India no so you're coming in fresh fantastic okay so India India is a very small country with a couple of small handsets with a couple of people playing games hi I'm Scott so I've been in mobile been gaming for almost 17 years I was back in PC when PC when China came online so I saw a lot of really really exciting advancements in technology and growth when China came online the parallels between China and 2004 and India now are unbelievable as

far as handset penetration far as engagements times the amount of time that people are spending in games is remarkably similar and I'm here to tell you why if you don't have an India strategy you need to have an India strategy India why everybody who's if you've been in mobile for a while you're probably thinking in India great there's a lot of people there but I don't really know anything much more about it so I'm gonna be very very quick we're running low on time so I'll blow through this very quickly but if you have any questions please don't hesitate to come grab me afterwards this is a subject I'm kind of passionate about I've been doing India for about five years now I saw like I said when China came online I saw a lot of developers that said hey we missed we missed this boat we missed the chance to really get in early in China and really get in and when you know the audience was fresh I want to make sure people don't miss India India why India the first one is growth and growth is

that a scale in India that just is unprecedented you don't see the kind of growth that we're seeing in India today that you see anywhere else in the world there's 1.3 billion people in India that number is second only to China and China right now has 1.38 billion India has 1.3 1 billion so they're about 700 million people behind they're actually expecting that India is gonna overtake China in about three years as far as population I'm sorry by 2024 so I was a little off mobile only has replaced mobile first consoles really don't exist tabloids don't really exist PC people that play on PC most of the people that I've talked to it's their work machine if they want to game the game on their mobile and this is pretty easy about 77% of people in India right now have a

mobile subscription and I'm gonna put a big caveat on this just because they have a mobile subscription does not mean they have a smartphone it means they have a connection to the outside world 77% that's about a billion people right now that are connected of that billion people about 387 million of them are on smart devices to put that in perspective again that's about about how many people we have here in the United States they have their population on smart devices in India actively using them and for most of these people this is their connectivity to the outside world so they're banking their entertainment their communication all that runs through the same device this also has been growing as far as the number of devices have been growing steadily over the last couple years in 2016 that actually grew about 20% and to put it in perspective the mobile market grew about three percent so again 18 versus three we're just talking about growth it's

just it's it's an unbelievable amount of growth that I don't think we'll ever see again this number of 387 is expected to jump to over 550 million by the end of 2020 so you're talking about another hundred and twenty million smartphones being put into market in the next year so again if you're making a game if you're making an app could you use an extra hundred and fifty million people in your app the answer's no what are you doing here but if the answer is yes then look to India it's still an unbelievable growth market and again the last piece I think is most important is if you're a game developer this is where people play their games in India you're not fighting with consoles you're not fighting with pcs you're fighting with the person sitting next to you Youth is king and I this is the more I dig into this in India the more bottles my mind one out of every ten people on the planet Earth is an Indian under 35

so again we look around this for this you know this conference one out of every ten is gonna be somebody that's an Indian the median age in India is twenty seven if you think about what you are doing at twenty seven you probably were out of university you got your first job you've got a little bit of disposable income maybe you got your first nice new smartphone you're probably gonna engage with it again the time is right to be able to have disposable income to have a device and to be gaming the last piece I'm gonna mention on this is half of their population is under 25 so again 1.3 billion people half of them are under 25 that means that there's a lot of growth ahead of it for a region a lot of people are gonna be playing your game for the next five years seven years ten years hopefully beyond that two-thirds of the population is under 35 again if you're making a game that's gonna have some a long tail to it India is a great place to kind of keep your players and keep them active everybody knows if you've been watching

download charts India is kind of a monster when it comes to downloads about 58% 59% of the downloads in the world in 2017 occurred in this one region in a large majority that is games and not only are they downloading a huge number of games but they're also engaging with them and stayed engaged with them so typically on gaming most of these players are playing for more than 60 minutes a month I'm sorry over 60 minutes a week and they're engaging with about a third of them and I'll touch a little bit on engagement and monetization a little bit later but the last piece again is is the usages through the roof Indians spent about 50 billion hours in apps last year 50 billion that's that's a massive massive number and again if you always say we want to capture 1% of that market that's a good market to capture 1% of the last piece I'll mention down here is mobile traffic represents about 80% of

the traffic that's coming out of there their web traffic so again pcs just don't really exist tablets just don't really exist mobile is king Mobile's really everything what's driving these and I kind of touched on this a little bit massive massive massive increase in internet availability right now as we mentioned earlier there's about a billion people on multiple subscriptions right now only about 33 percent of the market it has internet connectivity so people will have a subscription again that can make a phone call but you're not going to get connected to the Internet why is this important this number is expected to jump to 53 percent by the next three years so if you can imagine all of a sudden you have a billion people and you're adding another 20 percent in over the next three years that number is gonna get enormous it'll give you a quick comparison as far as internet availability look at some of the other big markets South Korea's 88 percent Japan's about 83 Hong Kong's

about 81 United States is about 75 so we're comparing 75 percent penetration versus 22 you can guys can start to see why I get excited about this region there's just such a massive group of people that haven't come online yet and aren't gonna be anxious for content data costs I laugh every time I go to India I can get a subscription into India that would be my internet connectivity I could pay roaming charges and it would be cheaper than what I pay here for less a good example is what used to pay for one gigabyte of data is now you get 60 gigabytes of data a lot of these carriers are geo is a big famous one they made an enormous bet where they just said hey if we give everybody really really cheap handsets and we give them free data every day they'll get hard to develop a pattern of using this right now you get a gigabyte of data every day just to use if you don't use it yeah it goes away tomorrow you get another gigabyte versus my plan here in

the US where I get seven gigs for a month it stinks and I'm paying 30x what I would be there in India you can imagine again all of a sudden you're 27 years old you have internet connectivity you have data that if you don't use it it just goes away why not let's go for it touched on this a little bit earlier massive increase in disposable income people are starting to get out of university they've got their first job they've got a little bit of spending cash this number actually is a 1.6 increase year-over-year to about 3.7 billion dollars so just just the ability for somebody to buy is growing dramatically maturation of talent everybody you know in the years past if you needed services if you needed QA if you needed to outsource something to India you'd send us India I was fantastic these shops now we're spending all this time in okay they started out cute doing QA then they went to localization and they went to back-end now all that is fully matured and they're they're building their own Studios are building their own content

why this is important is local content is always gonna be key last one digital wallets and I'll go off on a very quick story there was an event that occurred in India it was called D monetization and the closest I can I can explain this to you is if you get on a plane and you flew to New York when you got off the you got off the plane they said oh by the way if you have a hundred dollar bill in your pocket or a fifty dollar bill in your pocket that's not worth anything anymore it's not just garbage you can throw it away so much so that when this event occurred and it literally happened overnight people were out burning cash out in their front yards because it wasn't worth anything if they deposit into a bank they'd have to pay taxes on it so they just said it will just burn the cash insane but as a result digital wallets got huge one of the one of my favorite sources a company called Paytm PTM was you could fill up your you know account you could you could send a text message you could accept currency that way PTM launched in

2010 they grew up to about 11 million users kind of no big deal this diamonte monetization event occurred in August 2014 you can imagine what happened overnight they jumps they're expected to hit over 300 million years by 2020 so they went from 11 million users to 104 million users in about 60 days again talking about scale if you guys were launching a game and you went from 11 thousand users to 11 million users you're probably very happy these kind of things can still happen in India again why are we all here gaming why is this all who cares there's a lot of people great what does this have to do with gaming lots and lots and lots of gamers if your only device that you have in your pocket is the same one that you use for banking used for communication you're gonna value that tool but if it also can provide you super super inexpensive entertainment how many of us have sat

and watched YouTube while we're waiting for our plane now imagine that for 250 million people they're all trying to find something to play Indian gamers spend about 15% of their device spending online just playing games so you figure 15% of your day is dedicated to playing a game that's dramatically higher than what we have here and I'd like to point out this number is actually additive so they're not taking anything away you're not taking away from your YouTube time you're not taking away from time sent with family or work this is just purely you found another 15 percent of your day to play a game and I'll just touch on this real quickly pub G was a ridiculous phenomenon in India we asked about a thousand players do you know do you play pub GT no pub G about 62% of the people respond and said yeah absolutely I play and what's more exciting is about 25% of them said yeah I pay for more I play for more than eight hours a week so almost you know almost a full workday I spend just playing babji and I think what's

most exciting about this in India is about a third of them 11% I'm sorry a third of them said we do spend money on this on a weekly basis and 11% of them they said they spent more than about twenty dollars a month which for India is a big deal that shows the LTV is going up dramatically grow the market again I've touched on this a little bit 89% of all gaming revenue in India came from a mobile device ninety percent ninety percent of what was spent on a device was a game like that's huge on a mobile there's no consoles no pcs all going to what you guys are working on today the other piece all I'll touch on here again is if you're developing a game and you want to get user feedback user acquisition in India is still incredibly affordable if you go to the UK you try enquire user you're spending about a buck seventy you come to the u.s. it's about two dollars and 20 cents and this is a blended rate in India that you can

get that down to about 16 cents so you can either get 100 users or you can get one if you're testing out your game you want to get my balls you want to get features you want to understand how people are using your content India is a great great place for this regionalization oh that should that end should be there regionalization of distribution this goes back to Google Play and Apple or Google Play is dominant I mean the Google represents ninety six ninety seven percent of the market in India and what India is starting to do is it's always been a failed market that's been traditionally difficult to monetize Google Play is doing an amazing job of putting stuff like p.m. engaging with them they're doing scratch cards enabling you know credit things of that nature things that can get people that are used to spending money in a certain way enabling to spend that money in that same way but now into your game last one is just the evolution of the mindset people will just keep playing games they're playing more and more games as you know what we're

hearing from Google is devices are actually churning around every eight months any consumers are acquiring a new device what that means for you is you're not worried about having to support older legacy handsets those are going out of market very very rapidly here in the US that number as far as how quickly we're upgrading devices is actually lengthening out in India it's going the other direction so most devices now are gonna be 2 gigabytes of RAM of a very fast internet connectivity very nice screen and usually it's significantly cheaper than here in the US the other thing I'd like to touch on here is is free-to-play versus paid paid doesn't exist in India just doesn't free-to-play is the only way to go supported is still a huge usually represents about 75 percent of your revenue in India I think one of the top we looked at the top hundred freemium or free-to-play games that we compared them to the top hundred premium games is about 22 percent I'm sorry 22 X the

revenue on free-to-play there's just a massive massive push into free-to-play and the reason for this is just mindset I think most of the Indian game players that I've talked to us to say we expect value we're not gonna pay money in for something that we don't understand the value or we think we can get it for free in an android marketplace where there is some piracy that that's a concern I threw the slide in because I want to talk about monetization we talked about kind of you know another 22% of players come in online for at 250 million gamers now this number is expected to jump over 300 350 million in the next two to three years why this number is important is this is the growth rate year-over-year of how people spend China 3% increase great 3% is nice u.s. 1% who cares basically flat India 75% that number continues to grow a year-over-year people are spending more and more every year and the reason for that is suppose

we'll income he's a purchase and frankly the games are getting better the games that are coming into India now are gonna be more we call them global games so they're gonna have multi players they're gonna have cohorts they're gonna have live ops they're gonna have long legs on their games and so people will continue to spend this number I think will continue to grow I put in Tunisia up here to give you an example because in the next slide you'll see why this is important if India if this number becomes this number this is where the market is gonna go right now we're at 2.4 forecast and I think this number is actually a little bit low again a simple jump in LTV from $23 a user to $50 a user that's a jump but it's not an unrealistic jump it's not it's not out of the realm of possibility and all of a sudden just because of the number of people in here 5.2 billion dollars I mean that's just a massive massive number self-promotion that's shameless

if you have users in India if you have a game that has a user based in Indian you're not monetizing it if you're LTV for any of your users in India is low come talk to me we work with a ton of developers and what we do is we call it regionalization we'll take a look at your game we'll say here's the things we think need to change if you want to engage in it with a user in India better work with you guys and make it work make it work shameless but I think it's it's it's worth your time again if this number becomes this number wouldn't you rather be ahead of it versus behind it I think it's worth the call it's worth a conversation questions I have no time I I'm two minutes over so come find me afterwards [Applause]