Technology trends changing the face of gaming in India

VR adoption, which is quite low globally and more in India depends on that killer game that becomes a must- have

In 2015, 66 million households were part of the ‘ consumption class’ with annual household income greater $ 4,000, which is 27 per cent of India’s total households.

The consumption class will rise to 53 per cent of total households in 2025, implying a mammoth 800M+ individuals belonging to the consumption class with access to smartphones and improving data speeds that augur well for gaming in all forms — PC, Mobile and even AR/ VR. Rajan Navani, Managing Director and CEO for JetSynthesys helps us with insights about the emerging tech trends that are changing the face of gaming in India today.

High data speeds and mid- end phones will create demand for high- end games. India was ranked 67th in the world earlier this year for download speed over fixed broadband. With the entry of Reliance Jio average data tariffs have now fallen from ` 269 to ` 19 per GB. Indian users are also shifting to mid- range smartphones. According to Cybermedia Research, 38 per cent of the phones sold in 2017 were in the range of ` 10,000 and ` 20,000, compared with 24 per cent in 2016. These mid- end phones allow sharper graphics and mobile games will move towards HD realistic graphics as brand new phones will now have the processing power of an average 3GB RAM.

Mobile games ‘ Made in India’ will cater the next billion users. Despite the rage for smartphones in the country and over 30m smartphones shipped quarterly, India accounts for 43 per cent of total global feature phone shipments. Game developers targeting this segment can develop gaming apps keeping in mind app sizes and performance in low — end phones.

New apps in Android Oreo Go will have a sub 5 seconds startup time, use limited RAM and have an install size of sub 30MB. Not only will this open up 100m potential new customers, but also open doors to create local Indianised content suited for Rural and Tier 2, Tier 3 markets in India.

AI will take a bigger leap. AI is an equally important stepping stone in making our gaming experience more interactive and realistic. AI in the form of ML, context — sensitive behaviour, neural networks, natural language parsing been playing a huge role in gaming for years now. Today, it has the potential to develop and improve characters and environments in a way that users experience challenging and unique gameplay that is high on quality and visual experience.

AI is also helping production studios produce games on lower budgets as algorithms are scaled up to design stages and run hundreds of simulations and scenarios. With more complex machine learning systems evolving and ever— growing data at our disposal, we think things could greatly change for games over the next few years as developers embrace them.

VR/ AR adoption awaits the next killer game; New platforms for AR from Google and Niantic. Developed markets last year saw a notable uptick in interest in the Nintendo Switch while game makers’ waning opinions of VR, and a move away from purely mobile to focus on PC and home consoles. HTC Vive overtook the Oculus Rift as the most popular VR platform.

VR adoption which is quite low globally and even more in India depends on that killer game that becomes a must have at the same level of interest as say, Minecraft or Halo for the original Xbox to create a large enough player base to support full— time VR development. Facebook’s Oculus headset, which was launched at $ 1,200 two years ago, has fallen to $ 300 today. Google and Apple are also coming up with headsets which means VR adoption is likely to be on the rise for entertainment use cases in physical locations.

Games like Pokemon Go have shown that it’s possible to have mainstream appeal in an AR game, however, more releases of AR games involving Google Maps, that Google calls Real — World Games for game developers, will go a long way in the market seeing newer AR games. With recent announcements of Niantic, of an open real— world platform for AR games will be available to third — party developers. What is exciting is that this technology relies on neural networks, and it works in real time on your device.