Delhi, Feb 3 : These are rather interesting times for gamers. A statement backed by two very recent developments. The first lies in the recent budget announcement, making the Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comic (AVGC) sector a priority. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that an AVGC promotion task force will be set up with all stakeholders to build domestic capacity by employing youth and serve the domestic and global market. Gaming in India has been catalysed by better smartphones, increased internet access, popular titles, influencers, and the global pandemic.
Though the Indian gaming industry stands at just 1 per cent of the global gaming market, it is generating $1.5 billion revenue, which is expected to triple to over $5 billion by 2025 on the back of the “mobile first” phenomenon. A BCG-Sequoia India report said the gaming industry in India has seen a growth of almost 40 per cent in 2019-20, with 86 per cent of this market comprising of mobile phone users.
This is higher than that of OTT, television and social media platforms. According to a KPMG report, the number of online gamers in India grew from 250 million gamers in 2018 to 400 million gamers by the mid of 2020. The sector has witnessed tremendous growth in the last five years and is expected to treble in value and reach $3.9 billion by 2025. Over 50 per cent of India’s population is below the age of 25, and 60 per cent of the nation’s gamers are under 25 years of age. Though the Indian online gaming market is at a nascent stage, it is among the fastest growing online gaming markets in the world.
India has the world’s second highest number of gamers. But not many Indian studios have made a mark on the global stage due to low consumer spend on games and relatively lower game design capabilities. Now with gaming being accepted as a mode of entertainment, this is expected to change, along with increased investments in the sector. The Indian animation and VFX industry is expected to expand to $2.3 billion by FY24 from $1.2 billion in FY19. As per a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)-The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report, India has less than 10 per cent of the global market share in VFX and animation. In 2020, the I&B Ministry had announced it will establish an AVGC Centre of Excellence (CoE). Following this promise, the first AVGC CoE was launched in Bengaluru.
In July last year, Minister of Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur told the Rajya Sabha that the Union Government has decided to set up a National Centre of Excellence for Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics for creating a world-class talent pool in India to cater to both the domestic as well as the international industry.
This shall be set up as a collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Anurag Thakur went on to add that , in order to support skilled manpower in the animation and VFX sector, Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute and Film and Television Institute of India will run courses on Animation and VFX. Karnataka currently has 71 AVGC studios that develop hundreds of games and apps that are available on various app stores. In fact, one of India’s unicorns, gaming firm MPL that joined the bandwagon with a valuation of $2.3 billion, is based out of Bengaluru.
The State also is home to some of the bigger gaming studios. The huge potential of the gaming industry can be gauged from the recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, and now the takeover of Bungie by Sony Interactive. In what seems to be a time for large scale acquisition of big entities, another legendary gaming studio Bungie, the developer of games like Halo, Destiny and older games like the Myth series has now been purchased by Sony Interactive at a total valuation of $3.6 billion.
Though nothing compared the purchase of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft which clocked in a whopping $68.7 billion that elicited quite a response from gamers. With Bungie, Sony will house the talent behind the hugely popular Destiny series, and it seems likely the company will use Bungie’s expertise to help create similarly expansive and long-running live service titles. Sony is renowned for its expensive single-player games like ‘God of War’, ‘Ghost of Tsushima’, ‘The Last of Us’, and ‘Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’, but it doesn’t have its own take on ‘Fortnite’ or ‘Destiny’ that’s updated regularly over the course of many years to keep players coming back. (UNI)
