The third panel at the IAMAI Digital Entertainment Conference focussed on Online Video and Gaming. The panelists of this panel were:
- Ajay Khanna – General Manager, EA Games India
- Bruno Goveas – Head Marketing & Product Management, Akamai
- Parminder Singh – Business Head, Technology, Google India
- Ashish – CEO, Ibibo Web Pvt Ltd
- Rohit Sharma – COO, Zapak Digital Entertainment Pvt Ltd
- Panel Moderator – Jaspreet Bindra of Microsoft
Ajay Khanna – General Manager – EA Games India
Top Global trends in Gaming
1) Boost your recession immunity play a game.
2) Gaming is one of the most cost effective ways of entertainment
3) Casual gaming is 2 B + dollar biz globally
4) Music related games 1.2 billion dollar games Rock band, guitar hero, dance dance
5) Girls interest in gaming is increasing
6) MMO’s -Â Money and Micro transactions – Micro transactions are more popular in asia i.e. china and korea
Some futuristic Insights
Everything will be a game in Online.
Future of the console – MMO console gaming
Apple’s Steve has revolutionized gaming: Mobile gaming on iPhone.
Bruno Goveas – Head Marketing & Product Management, Akamai spoke on Akamai’s solutions.
Parminder Singh – Business Head – Technology, Google India
- Storage is key for digital entertainment
- Over half of the videos on youtube are seen atleast once a week.
- Spoof of shakira got 13 million views versus thousands of views to the original video
International Example of Impact of Digital on Entertainment
Book touching the void – 1988 Failure commercially
Into thin air – 1998 best seller
Today Touching the void sells 2 is to 1 to the best seller Into thin air due to amazon.com
Indian Example
Gunda – Mithun B grade movie released in 1998 has taken off after a blogger blogged about it. A internet success story.
Statistics that indicate trends
- In 2005 search for blogs over took search for magazine Google search trends
- In 2006 the search for videos overtook the search for music
- More search happening for Video in India than in US.
- In USA search for TV Shows is more than in India.
- As internet evolves people refine their searches. Hence tv shows will increase vs video searches.
- Search for friendship is going down. In a mature economy online is a mirror of offline.
- Dating as a search term is coming down.
- 69% of Online Indians are on social netwroking sites.
Ashish Kashyap – CEO, Ibibo Web Pvt Ltd
Ashish pointed out a single reason for online videos to take off in a social networking scenario. He stated that most users create content due the following reasons
Self expression -> Self advertising -> Recognition Cycle
Self expression – To express their thoughts and belief’s
Self Advertising – To show off their skills, talent and looks
Recognition Cycle – To be recognized by peers, viewers and commentors of content
Rohit Zapak – COO, Zapak Digital Entertainment
India is not a nascent market for gaming
- Case in point: Zapak has got 6 million users – 40 gaming cafe’s
- Internationally Gaming revenues have crossed music revenues
- Gaming is divided into -Â Console – Online – Mobile – PC
- In terms of numbers online and mobile is showing the highest growth.
Key Online gaming markets
- China – 2.8 Billion $ by 2010
- Russia – 1 Billion $ by 2010
- Brazil – 850 million $ by 2010
India is lacking due to the broadband penetration. The day we have 50 million broadband users we would be a big gaming economy.
India’s projected Internet userbase and gaming userbase
In 2010 Indian Internet users will be 108 million and in 2012 170 million users
While during the same period online gamers would be 20 million and 40 million respectively
Key growth drivers for gaming
- Broadband
- PC penetration
- Good content
Zapak’s Vision & Future Plans
- To Capture all aspects of the gaming value chain
- 95% of our content comes from outside of India – India has zero game dev capability.
- MMO’s require high broadband and hence a shared access strategy i.e. gaming cafe’s
- We should have 300 cafe’s by 2009 and by 2 years we should have 3000 cafe’s
- 50% of online revenues come from cafe’s
- Development Retail network – payment cards – cash cards and games for kids
All in all this session was insightful especially from a statistics standpoint that were given out by the panelists
Indian has some superb / brilliant game development talent. (ref. above zero game development capability) I wonder the why we underestimate our potential.