The rise and rise of mobile gaming in India

Mobile gaming in India is on the rise. Djuzz, a free mobile gaming portal from BuzzCity, said India continued to dominate its charts for the most games downloaded with four million downloads in November.

Downloads have gone up by 33 per cent from the previous month, said the Djuzz mobile gaming report.

In October, Indian mobile users downloaded around three million games from the site. This growth has been largely due to strong localisation of games in this market.

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Djuzz has 6,880 games spread across 29 categories from 110 mobile game developers and publishers syndicated through 761 catalogue sites. Of the 6,880 games available, 700 are ad-wrapped.

Globally too, users continued to subscribe to mobile games. Overall, Djuzz delivered 7.6 million games in November, registering a growth of 17 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

The Top 10 countries accounted for 83 per cent of the total downloads. India contributed 52 per cent while Nigeria generated seven per cent for game downloads for the month.

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Reebok ZigTech, a game which was developed to promote the company's ZigTech brand of trainers and one of the most downloaded games in the country, is currently available exclusively to Indian audiences.

The game was localised to suit the Indian market with features like a TV commercial showing the Captain of the Indian Cricket Team (Mahendra Singh Dhoni) and wallpapers with Reebok brand ambassadors from India.

"Localisation is one of the key elements required to better engage mobile users and it is likely that this trend will further develop in 2011," said K F Lai, CEO of BuzzCity.

Another reason for the number of game downloads to increase is India's bustling mobile game developer market. Among the Top 10 games, three were developed by India-based (or owned) development companies - RockeTalk, IgFun (owned by Indiagames) and Mobimasta.

The latter is a mobile marketing agency. Noteworthy, too, are Indiagames and Nazara, both of whom have multiple titles popular with Indian audiences.

"As mobile marketing continues to mature, it is vital that brands do not restrict their strategies to smartphones. Feature phones continued to dominate in many areas and incorporating these handsets within mobile marketing strategies is vital," said Lai.

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The survey further said that the use of generic handsets continues to grow despite a continuous effort for improved handset detection and the increased use of branded devices by consumers.

Markets that have a strong support for these devices are India, Indonesia, Thailand, Kenya and Vietnam.

From 20 per cent last month, generic handsets accounted for two million or 26 per cent of total download during November (up 30 per cent from last month).