India has lately achieved a new record and has now become one of the top five markets for mobile gaming on the basis of the number of users. This has been reported by leading mobile video advertising platform in India, South East Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region called POKKT.
It seems that with the rapid increase in the introduction of smartphones at a reasonable price and also the launch of cheaper data plans has triggered a huge surge in mobile gaming in the country.
“As much as 89% of all game revenues in India were generated by mobile games,” said Rohit Sharma, founder of POKKT. “These gamers are highly engaged; almost one-third play five days per week or more, and nearly 40% spend more than six hours per week playing mobile games.”
According to the reports, more than 222 million active gamers have been spending an average of 42 minutes playing mobile games each day over five sessions in India as of 2017.
The most played game in India is the Ludo King which has crossed 10 million daily active users (DAU) mark, whereas its monthly active users are at about 70 million. The second and third positions are held by Subway Surfer and Temple Run with DAU of 5 million and 2.5 million, respectively.
With this, various Asian gaming players including Tencent Games, are looking for investment opportunities in India. When the big mobile gaming markets such as the US and China are saturating, India is emerging as a gaming zone.
However, in India people do not spend much money on games. Even on very popular games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans, less than 1% of daily active users do in-app purchases in the country.
“There is a huge opportunity for a freemium model which creates advertising as monetization medium for mobile gaming,” Sharma said. “The biggest ad form is rewarded videos, where a user can be asked to watch an advert instead of spending money. We have seen that users prefer to watch these rewarded videos,” he added.
Talking about the gender diversification, while male 15+ users spend 10-20 minutes per session playing mobile games per day across 4-5 sessions, female 15+ users and mothers play for about 8-12 minutes per session across seven sessions per day. Kids have an average session time of 10-15 minutes and they play 4-5 times a day.