With over a 100 million PCs and growing, India is one of the bigger PC markets in Asia. But does this extend to PC gaming? Well, the answer is not quite. A good indication of the health of the PC gaming ecosystem is the number of consumers opting for discrete video cards. Depending upon which digital distribution service you speak to, 85 to 90 percent of all computers are running integrated graphics. So what does it take to harness this large potential player base? A remarkably straightforward approach if AMD is to be believed. We speak to Chandrahas Panigrahi, Director – Channel and OEM, at AMD’s Future of Gaming conference in Goa to find out how AMD plans to take gaming forward in India.
Awareness is important
Panigrahi tells us that consumer awareness is key. Right now a lot of gamers are unaware of the relevance of a GPU and the performance gains it brings to a video game. By and large, most are used to running discrete, built-in graphic cards. Due to this it’s a suboptimal experience. While he could not delve into specifics, Panigrahi did say that AMD will be running a program in the fourth quarter with retailers to effectively communicate to consumers the benefits of using a video card and the performance gains of they can expect.
A game of numbers
As we mentioned, India has a PC user base of 100 million people. Conventional logic would dictate that harnessing this user base would be the way to take the business forward. But that’s not how Panigrahi sees it. For him, it’s a question of user mentality and he sees that coming from the largest chunk of the gaming pie – mobile gamers.
If you look at it, mobidensity (mobile cellular subscribers per hundred inhabitants) is 65 to 70 percent (of the entire population of one billion Indians). PC penetration is 7 to 9 percent. Right now, lots of gaming is on smartphones and tablets. Many of these gamers are graduating from casual to serious gaming. Even if it is 2 percent from a 65 percent mobidensity is a huge number but 2 percent or even 5 percent is a small number. That base is building up.
It makes sense given this audience is one that’s hungry for solid content and looking for a better experience. It also mirror’s what Sony’s Atindriya Bose said to us in an earlier interview. Rather than basing sales and marketing strategies on audience size alone, it makes sense to target the most receptive audience.
(See: “It’s been a fantastic start”: an interview with Playstation India)
Gaming the social system
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