Brewing the gaming market

To say that mobile gaming is popular in India would be to make the understatement of the year. Aishwarya Ramani speaks to some of the latest entrants in this space.

The third annual Brew Developer’s conference was held at Mumbai on 29th November 2006. A gathering of youthful Brew developers from across the city was addressed by a bunch of industry heavyweights including Pankaj Sethi, President, Value Added Services, Tata Indicom and Mahesh Babu, President ASCG, Reliance Communications ltd.

Kalwinder Singh

The event opened with a keynote by Kalwinder Singh, President, Qualcomm. Singh who gave an overview of the worldwide scope of Brew-based applications. Next up was an address by Andrew Seybold, Head of the Andrew Seybold LLC Group, who spoke about the state of 3G adoption worldwide. “People who only use voice would not want to migrate to 3G,” said Seybold.

A recent study showed that while revenue figures are soaring, ARPUs are plummetting. It can be inferred from this that service providers would try to market value added services to offset the falling ARPUs. The study showed that the current VAS (value added services) market accounts for about 16.5 percent of overall mobile revenues and is likely to grow up to 22 percent by 2007.

The conference saw the launch of several applications by Astute Systems, Webdunia and Indiagames. Webdunia released “Pre-school solution Education”, Indiagames launched a new catalogue of applications including a suite of games. Astute launched Fantasy, a stock market trading application. All these applications were developed on Qualcomm’s Brew Platform.

According to Webdunia, its mobile application can help parents educate their pre-schoolers. “Although now we do target the pre-schoolers, we plan to extend this application for the higher levels also,” said Rathi, GM Sales and Research at Webdunia. Webdunia is working with Tata Indicom in CDMA and BPL Mobile in the GSM space.

The application has been currently designed only in English. “This application can be downloaded on almost all phones available in the Indian market. We plan to make it available in the international market,” said Rathi.

Apart from this, Indiagames launched an assortment of entertaining Brew applications. The common theme that runs through them is a season one—Christmas. Vishal Gondal, CEO, India games says, “Xmas is around the corner and hence it was only apt that we launch our Xmas application of ringtones and wallpapers.” Speaking about the Indian gaming scene, Gondal said, “There is tremendous scope for growth in the Indian gaming market. Right now only 1 percent of GSM mobile subscribers play games. As handset compatibility, connection speeds and GPRS access improve, the level of gaming and access to it will only get better. On the CDMA platform access is relatively easier. However the subscriber base is much smaller than that of GSM subscribers.”

When asked about the basic handset requirements in order to run these games, Gondal points out that his company’s games and applications are developed and ported to work on the widest possible range of handsets. “There are no minimum system requirements as such. When you download a game or application, the backend system identifies the user handset and sends files that are compatible with a particular handset,” said Gondal.

Indiagames works with approximately 250 operators across 65 countries; operators such as Verizon, Vodafone and T-Mobile amongst others. “In India we work with all the leading operator: Airtel, Hutch, Reliance, Tata, Idea and Spice etc ,” he added

Astute Systems and Technologies launched Fantasy, a stock market trading application at the conference. Vijay Kumar Jain, Founder and CEO, Astute Systems Technology said, “We have already developed and launched the BSE Portfolio Tracker where users get live data feeds from the BSE on their mobile phones. As per our research, users are still confused when it comes to trading. There are plenty of users who do not know how to trade. In addition, we wanted to create a new community of gamers. Being a part of gaming industry we wanted to give a novel and innovative game to the industry.”

Jain added, “Astute Stock Mania is targeted at the youth, and investors . As it is a game based on the BSE it lets users experience a simulation of real-time trading with shares listed on the BSE. They can manage their ‘virtual stock portfolio’, without any actual financial transactions or implications. This would leverage the understanding of the stock market closely since the application resembles the actual scenario.”

Astute has associated with Reliance, TATA, Airtel, Hutch, Idea, BSNL, MTNL and Spice in India as well several operators across the globe.

Gaming companies believe that the Indian market is showing potential. As the user base expands, and handsets with superior displays and processors permeate the market, gaming will go from strength to strength.