By Indrani Sen
Last week, the advertising and marketing industry got an overwhelming exposure to online gaming through the “e4m Game On: Gaming Summit” over two days and the report “Everyone’s Gaming Among Us – Mobile Gaming through the Pandemic and Beyond” released by InMobi simultaneously. The highlights of the report show (i) 45% of Indian mobile users got introduced to gaming during the pandemic, (ii) women constitute 43% of the gamers in India, (iii) 60% of gamers is in below 25 years age group, while 12 % is in the age group of 25-44 and 28% is in the age group of over 45 years and (iv) Indian gamers interact 2.6x times more with the video ads shown in gaming apps than in other apps.
The FICCI EY Report on Media & Entertainment (M&E) Sector “The era of consumer A.R.T.: Acquisition | Retention | Transaction” was released in March 2020 before the pandemic hit our economy in a big way. We saw in that report that online gaming continued as the fastest growing segment with 39.8% growth in 2019 over 2018, riding on the back of transaction-based games, mainly fantasy sports, and a 31% growth in online gamers. The InMobi report findings indicate that the online gaming growth during pandemic has sky rocketed during the pandemic and it would not only continue to be the fastest growing segment, but also reflect a huge growth in the number of online gamers in the next FICCI EY report on the M&E sector.
In the e4m ‘Game On: Gaming Summit’, various speakers dwelled on the benefits of advertising through online gaming apps over the two days. On the first day, in the first panel discussion on “Gaming: The New Media for Marketers”, panellists spoke about how the use of gamification can enhance consumer engagement for a brand apart from traditional advertising. In the second panel discussion on ‘Decoding the Online Gaming Market in India’, one of the panellists, Naman Jhawar, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Operations, MPL said “This industry is going to create a lot more opportunities on the brand monetization side as well. That is something that is already happening whether it is live sports or on the online gaming platforms and this branding is going to scale up.” Another panellist Dinesh Sharma, Business Head, Commercial PC, and Smartphone, System Business Group, ASUS India, said “One of the key trends that we are seeing is that when the pandemic occurred people wanted to connect emotionally and gaming became a perfect platform to get together virtually. E-sports is trending in a manner and will become as big as cricket.”
On the second day of the Ssummit, GroupM Business Head, Entertainment, Sports & Live Events Vinit Karnik shared some revealing statistics that in last ten years the number of Indian gamers has grown by 14 times and currently they spend on an average 22 hours per week watching e-sports content and playing online games. He emphasized “Brands need to ride the e-sports bandwagon very early to reap the benefits. Today is the time for brands to evaluate various opportunities and how can one relate to this target audience and look at building brand affinity with them over time.”
Rajesh Pantina, Director of Marketing, Asia Pacific, InMobi, also spoke at the e4m Game On: Gaming Summit and shared the findings of the InMobi report highlighting the facts that online gaming is not just a young man’s game, gamers are well distributed across India (South 29%, North 27%, West 22%, East 22%) and ad recall is high amongst Indian online gamers. He explained that programmatic sampling was used for running the survey and generating responses from 1000 plus Indian consumers using smartphones across 30 cities from tier I, II, and III. The sample was targeted and weighed to represent of India’s smartphone population and the survey was conducted between February 9 and 16, 2021. The most interesting insight shared by Pantina was on the consumption of various forms of digital entertainment “People are treating gaming as a part of their entertainment bucket, which comprises also of OTT video and music but then gaming started to own that entire entertainment and relaxation genre, and it’s probably the newest face of entertainment.”
We are definitely going to see more participation by various brands in online gaming which can be either through gamification of their communication or through sponsorships and placement of advertisements in online gaming platforms and apps. In the new entertainment bucket of consumers, online gaming has an edge as it is an interactive platform while OTT and music are both passive platforms. Online gaming, therefore has the potential for claiming a higher share of consumer engagement, particularly from India’s growing youth segment. In conclusion, I feel we are going to see online gaming not only competing with OTT video and music, but also with social media in future. A day may come when family and friends will make appointments to meet digitally for watching or playing games instead of having a chat on social media.