Control is seized by gaming?

“Allow yourself to be a beginner. No one starts off excellent.”

The Indian Gaming Ecosystem

Houses some of the fastest-growing start-ups in the country, providing massive scope for investors in this space over the coming decade. Investors from India and abroad including names like Tencent, Stead view Capital Management, Sequoia Capital, and many others, are investing generously in the sector.

As per the investment promotion agency Gaming start-ups in India have attracted between January and September 2021, $1.6 billion was received in funding and mergers and acquisitions. Out of this, real money games attracted $700 million.

“India’s gaming opportunity is at a once-in-a-generation inflexion point, growing 35% year-on-year for the foreseeable future. That makes it a tremendous asset class for investors looking at outsized returns over a consistent timeframe,” says Justin Shriram Keeling, Founding General Partner at the country’s first gaming and interactive media fund, Lumikai.

Future of Gaming in India

Over the course of this decade, it is projected that the Indian esports sector, which is currently considered to be in its infancy, would expand dramatically as Indian expertise in video games and esports swiftly catches up with that of the rest of the world.

Gaming on consoles is growing more and more common in India, and this trend is set to continue. In fact, a number of developments in the internet infrastructure are expected to boost the growth of console gaming as well. As more people choose to work in the field as a vocation, the Indian video game business is booming and bursting at the seams with talent.

Given the rate at which the gaming business is changing, the upcoming generation can be primarily seen making a successful career out of gaming.

A “massive amount" of money is being invested in gaming globally, and India is benefiting from the same. “India has been a beneficiary of the fact that capital inflows to China have slowed due to the strong stand China has taken against gaming.

Moreover, Capital Infusion allows companies to attract talent to the ecosystem, which helps drive innovation and entrepreneurship. Already in the last two years, we have seen game development studios go from 25 to north of 500. These game development studios are now building games from India, for India and the world. We are seeing a new kind of entrepreneur coming into the gaming industry, with a new paradigm in terms of defining what gaming means.

Gaming is still a Growing Market – Aim for the core

Despite scepticism about gaming among investors, it is a massive and rapidly growing market. The global market is $152 Bn and growing 10% year over year.

Therefore, at people have not shied away from investing in gaming. Beyond their personal experience with the industry, they are bullish on gaming for several reasons:

• ???Gaming is a huge market that will only continue growing.
• ???Gaming today is more than just the games themselves – with eSports it is a complete entertainment experience.
• ???Games have an incomparable ability to grow fast.

Games as a "PLATFORM"

You do not build a game, you build a live entertainment platform. One of the most exciting evolutions of the gaming industry is the move from the old days of games as?‘packaged goods’?to these days when successful games are full entertainment platforms. The evolution took many years, and started in the pre-internet-connected-games era when a game was a project that ended with its actual packaging; games were sold in video games stores and the team that worked on the game moved on to the next project once the game was ready. The last stage in the evolution saw games adding many meta layers which are aimed to keep users engaged often with no real connection to the game itself.

The purpose is simple – if we have millions of users playing our game daily, it is in our interest to turn the game into an actual platform where ‘there is something cool every day’. So that we can call it ‘Games as a Platform’. Like having live concerts in game; a card collection or a virtual pet layer on top of the game which could completely disconnected from the main game loops; a live hosted activity which is an option and not related to the actual game progress – these are all examples of successful publishers/developers who tried to turn their games into platforms. We expect that in the years to come there will not be successful games which are not ‘Live Ops games’.