Over the past few months, gaming companies have been working overtime to get the best and latest of real life stuff on to their platform. The collaboration between BGMI and Spiderman No Way Home is a case in point that India's mobile gaming is on the upswing.
A recent report indicates that this is so and ascribes the spurt in mobile gaming from smaller cities and towns across India for this boom. The Mobile Gaming Report 2021 pointed to a sharp rise in the total number of online gamers during the year with the top 30 cities reporting a spike of 170% compared to the numbers in 2020.
Small towns, big aspirations
While Delhi continued to lead the way in the total number of gamers, it was joined in the top-5 cities by Jaipur, Pune, Lucknow and Patna this year. As a result, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata got knocked off from the top slots taking sixth, seventh and twelfth positions respectively on the top-20 list of cities with highest gaming growth.
The report, prepared by esports and skill gaming platform Mobile Premier League listed out Siwan (Bihar), Baimanagoi (Chattisgarh) and Sri Ganganagar (Rajasthan) as the cities with the highest growth rates. Other cities reporting a sharp spike in the number of mobile gamers include Alwar (Rajasthan), Muzaffarpur (Bihar), Dhanbad (Jharkhand), and Palanpur ( Gujarat).
What was interesting is the fact that none of the above states had even a single big city contributing to mobile gaming numbers. This, according to the authors, indicates a growing trend of mobile gaming becoming a regular fun activity in smaller towns and cities of India, thanks to growing internet connectivity and mobile phone use.
Old gaming habits die hard
Carrom, Fruit Dart, Fruit Chop, Runner No. 1 and Block Puzzle were some of the top games that were played across different Indian cities, the report said adding that the games like Pool and Chess also saw a sharp spike in the number of gamers. The MPL platform itself registered 1.3 million esport players in 2021 playing half a million games that generated 17 million live viewership.
In a earlier report, global consultancy firm EY had indicated that India's domestic market for online gaming would grow from $906 million to more than $2 billion over the five years starting from 2019. However, the growth would continue to remain skewed in favour of mobile gaming over computer games and console games.
The report further claimed that India's gaming market would outpace the global growth average over the next few years. Online gamers in the country could grow from around 360 million in 2020 to 510 million by end of 2022, the report said while highlighting that more than 85% of these are mobile gamers.
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