How are people making money in India’s mobile gaming industry?

Capcom’s Asura’s Wrath features a fallen demigod inspired by Hindu mythology.

The first video game created outside of a laboratory was Bertie the Brain, a 13-foot-tall arcade game that let people play tic-tac-toe against a computer. If progress were to follow in a linear pattern, the 21st century would have brought the advent of the most advanced tic-tac-toe machine in existence. Of course, the gaming industry has been far from linear.

Now, games look like everything from Atari’s Sneak n Peek, a virtual hide-and-seek game (for anyone wondering, it’s not nearly as fun as it is in real life), to Little Big Planet, Sony’s beautiful console platformer in which a character named Sackboy explores the earth and its many cultures. When you’re not connected to the internet, Google Chrome displays an endless game in which players have to help a Tyrannosaurus Rex dodge small cacti.

With the growth of the global gaming industry – US$93 billion by 2019 – has inevitably come the question that has come to define our era: how can we make money off of it?

Finding the answer to this has been a complicated affair. Whether it’s the history of browser games in China, console games in America, or mobile games in Brazil, each gaming industry has required a unique strategy for making money.

In India, the combination of the unpredictability of gaming trends with the country’s unruly business landscape has created a noxious environment for monetization. With a growing middle class, increased access to internet, and a hardware revolution with 900 million smartphones, there should be no reason that the country isn’t the world’s largest gaming industry. Still, similarly-sized China is making US$5 billion off of mobile gamers each year, while India hopes to cross US$571 million by 2016.

People will pay for quality

So what’s the key to making money off of mobile gaming in India?

“Bollywood,” says Saurabh Aggarwal, CEO of Octro, referring to India’s massive US$2.3 billion movie industry. “I and everyone else I know grew up watching these movies. The average movie ticket is upward of INR100 (US$1.50) and everyone goes.”

Octro is a mobile gaming company that has launched some of India’s most popular apps. Its crown jewel is Teen Patti, a game based on a traditional Indian card game that has continuously appeared on the list of top five grossing games in India’s Google Play store. It works in English, Hindi, Marathi, and Gujurati and hosts a massive and interactive leaderboard culture.

Saurabh’s not kidding about Bollywood. “I’m a believer that, with relevant content, the gaming industry in India can become 200 times its current size. We have tons of good screen writers and content writers there – why aren’t we pulling them in?”

Before Octro, Saurabh worked for years in other parts of the mobile industry. “There were a ton of stereotypes about payments that surrounded the gaming market in India at the time,” he reminisces. “I can tell you honestly that I didn’t know any when entering the market.”

According to the Reserve Bank of India, there are 19 million credit cards among India’s population of 1.25 billion. Payment wallets have yet to catch on and most games have trouble convincing customers to pay for things inside an app.

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