The Indian market scenario
The Indian mobile games market is growing consistently and the demand for mobile games developers increased by at least 20 per cent last year, believes Najeem Illyas, senior technology architect at a reputed MNC. “So far, what I have observed is that the smartphone industry is booming and, hence, the demand for Android games has increased a lot compared to the Java games of the previous era. Android and iOS got operating system upgrades, which in turn improved the performance of games. Companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc, have upgraded their mobile hardware to improve the battery’s performance and the processing speed. Due to all of this, the demand for game development has increased dramatically,” quips Illyas.
The Indian market is a bit tricky. Any mobile game that needs to be paid for will face resistance in the Indian market. “If you look at the numbers, the market is huge. The smartphone tech-savvy people (or the younger generation) spend a lot of time with their devices. One thing that I have seen is that there is a certain group that keeps exploring games. They download, play for some time, and if they like it, they use it regularly; else, it is uninstalled immediately. There is one more group that constitutes the majority, which downloads and plays a game, and if they do not like it, they do not open it again. The app remains on their devices till they need to make space to accommodate something else,” says Swagata. identities/brands and monetise their games on their own. Since HTML5 provides developers the facility to host and market their games without depending on any particular platform-based app store, people are now slowly turning towards this platform due to its enormous power and the features it supports for Web-based games.
“Also, the smart-gadget revolution has led to customers adopting browser-based games on a large scale now a days; so developers are looking for an alternative solution and HTML5 is perfect for such games. First of all, it is open source and gives a lot of freedom to developers to convert their ideas into virtual-reality at a cheaper or at no cost. The second reason is that the size of the development team required for games created for small gadgets is much smaller. Also, the cost of development is much lower than what it is for console-based games. The support of technologies like SVG and WebGL for HTML5 also plays a key role in developing innovative and powerful games for the Web and mobile,” explains Pradeep. Industry pundits definitely expect a bright future for HTML5 in India due to the immense developer resources available in the country.