The Hindu Business Line : Hooked!

India is hooked to mobile gaming, if one goes by the recent Nokia contest. And as the youth get more playful, telecom players are bullish on the business opportunity. If mobile games be the food of entertainment, play on.

HEARD of a guy called Sachin Sapra? Sachin walked away with a cool Rs 10 lakh last month by winning a mobile game contest organised by Nokia, the leading mobile phone maker.

Nokia had launched a countrywide hunt to find India's `Mobile Gaming Champion' as part of a campaign to popularise its latest N-Gage mobile gadget.

In six weeks, over 26,000 mobile game enthusiasts in 47 cities participated in the contest, but in the end Sachin, who played `Hero Commando,' won.

Such a response to Nokia's contest is a reflection of India's playful mood with mobile phones.

"We believe that India is on the verge of a gaming revolution. This is only the beginning," Gautam Advani, Multimedia Business Director of Nokia India, said in a statement after the contest.

An explosive growth in mobile phones - India today has more mobile phones than all the land phones issued since Independence - and keenness among the youth to go for the latest handsets, coupled with falling service costs, are the main reasons for a great beginning to the mobile gaming revolution in the country.

A recent study by In-Stat/MDR, a technology market research firm, has put the size of India's mobile gaming market at about $26 million by the end of 2004.

In-State MDR expects India to be one of the most important markets for the mobile multimedia growth. By 2009, mobile gaming in the country will rake in about $336 million, the study has forecast.

Globally too, mobile gaming is expected to leapfrog in the future. In the US alone, some 79 million users will play games on their phones by 2009, generating revenues of $1.8 billion annually, In-State/MDR says.

Mobile phone service providers have already realised this huge potential. Companies such as Bharti, Hutch and Reliance Infocomm are offering a wide range of games that can be downloaded and played.

According to Mohit Bhatnagar, vice-president, value-added services and new product development of Airtel, Bharti's cell-phone service arm, the company has seen a 500 per cent increase in daily downloads for its value-added services over the first quarter of this year.

Moreover, the popularity of mobile gaming is not limited to big metros alone as smaller cities are also discovering new ways of spending time on entertainment.

Hutch said in April this year that on an average 1.20 lakh mobile games were downloaded by its users, which is a 50-fold increase from the 2,200 games downloaded in February last year. The company announced over 250 Java-based mobile games.

From being a country where a telephone was a privilege and luxury not so long ago, India has become a hotspot for mobile phone services.

Today, India has more mobile phones (44.5 million in October this year) than land phones and every month more than a million new subscribers are added to this list.

Such explosive growth has prompted Nokia to announce the setting up of a mobile handset facility in the country.

A number of handset makers from across the world are fighting it out in the market, offering the latest gizmos.

Nevertheless, for service providers, India is a tough destination in the sense that the country has one of the lowest billing rates in the world.

The revenue per minute for mobile services was only Rs 1.80 for the quarter ended June this year, which is the lowest in the world along with China.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has said in a study that the average revenue per user in India is just $11 per month, compared with $57 per user in the US. (In China, this is only $10).

The cut-throat competition prevailing in the market leaves very little room for service providers to hike rates.

Perhaps the only way to boost revenues is by offering more and more value-added services such as games.

And nobody wants to miss out on the chance to introduce a new game.

So when a cricket series is on, or a film is released, or during a festival, a new game is out for download.

For instance, Airtel launched Java-based games during the Indo-Pak cricket series.

"We have offered our customers a chance to play the Sachin Tendulkar game, Run with Sachin. This game alone clocked more than 10,000 downloads," says Bhatnagar.

Some other games are Rangleela, Rang Barse (during Holi season), Cupid's Arrow (for Valentine's day), Munna Bhai, Spiderman, Predator, Mummy (on films).

There is no data available as to how much revenue the service providers make out of game downloads.

But according to some estimates, earlier, value-added services contributed less than 5 per cent of a GSM-based mobile phone operator's quarterly revenues in the past.

Now this number is expected to be in the region of 8-10 per cent. Internationally, this is around 15-18 per cent and India too should reach this level soon as services such as GPRS take off in a big way.

The growing fad is also helping the content and software sectors. Game developers such as IndiaGames and Mauj stand to benefit immensely from the mobile gaming revolution.

AirTel says it has tied up with IndiaGames, Mobile2Win and IMI Mobile to source games. Hutch had earlier announced a tie-up with Mauj to create exclusive games for its subscribers.

Such alliances have also led to the creation of games with Indian themes, giving a familiar flavour to gamers in the country.

More opportunities should come the way of content developers in the form of outsourcing.

Picture by R. Ragu

vipin@thehindu.co.in

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