Mobile gaming is a booming industry all over the world, but its growth is to a large part fuelled by its recent meteoric rise in Asian markets, where console and PC gaming are not keeping pace. China and India together boast around 1.2 billion smartphone users, which shows why these countries in particular are promising marketplaces for the growth of the industry.
Even just a fraction of this potential player base would likely number higher than anticipated markets in many European countries. Given the fact that mobile games have recently been successful at attracting the players that console and PC gaming have left behind – older players and women – mobile gaming looks ready to grow explosively in the second half of 2020 with China tipped to see mobile gaming dominate 70 per cent of its gaming market by the end of the year. Yet in India the equivalent number looks set to be 85 per cent.
Indeed 2020 has already seen mobile games massively increase their hold on the market with India in particular recording a surge of both more users as well as more time spent by users playing mobile games. This isn’t a passing craze – the steadily upwards rising trend of the Indian mobile gaming market was predicted several years ago and has been covered consistently since then.
Current trends in the technology market indicate that Indian millennials and new gamers alike are choosing smartphones over consoles. It has been suggested that the cheap cost of data in India coupled with the prohibitively high cost of console gaming has pushed gamers towards mobile gaming over other alternatives.
Hand in hand with the growth of the mobile gaming industry, casino games for smartphones are increasing in popularity. While games like Teen Patti (an Indian card game for those who do not know) are currently well-established in India, the huge mobile casino earners of the European and American markets are poised to enter the Indian smartphone market in the near future. Indians are keen casino players; online blackjack is especially popular in the nation as are other classic casino games.
As an ever-greater number of India’s population receive access the internet, it is expected that more players will begin using their increasing amounts of disposable income to access gambling markets via their mobile devices. The popularity of sports betting in the country is rising whilst many of the largest casino operators have begun marketing their products in India.
The growing number of internet users in India has enabled the countries younger population to discover and become part of professional gaming scenes. Due to how quickly South Korea and China revolutionised their society from a technology point of view, esports (competitive video gaming) gained huge popularity amongst 14-28-year olds. Young Indian’s have now been able to jump on the esports bandwagon too.
Annual global esports revenue looks ready to break $1 billion for the first time ever this year, up 15.7 per cent from 2019. This also spells huge promise for the nascent Indian e-gaming scene with companies like Tencent hosting a tournament with a prize pool of over $65k. This too will help fuel the momentum of mobile gaming growth in India, and 2020 will be a fascinating year to follow for the industry’s developers, publishers and consumers alike.