Mobile gaming to get a further boost in India: Credit Suisse

The gaming sector in India was anticipated to treble in size to over $5 billion markets by 2025 on the back of the “mobile-first” phenomenon. Now a latest report by Credit Suisse asserts that gaming is at an early stage in India and mobile gaming is being driven by mobile phones due to the emergence of affordable smartphones and 4G data services. The report opined that mobile gaming will get a further fillip with the implementation of 5G and later 6G data services. 

“Mobile Internet remains the key medium for Indian users to go online, given relatively low fixed broadband penetration. The share of mobile gaming in online games is expected to increase in future,” claimed the report. 

The same report said that gaming is one of the segments where early use cases of metaverse are expected. According to the report, while 5G will support the metaverse ecosystem, the emergence of 6G will enhance metaverse use cases. 

While metaverse is a combination of both the physical and digital worlds where people can interact virtually, it enables individuals to immerse in a virtual world through augmented reality and virtual reality. Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are expected to see a boom as these are the technologies that are required for accessing the metaverse, as per Credit Suisse. 

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The findings come at a time when youngsters from tier 2 and 3 cities are making the leap from casual gaming to professional gaming or taking up other career opportunities in gaming, such as coaching, shoutcasting, managing eSports teams, or even setting up their own small companies. 

The report further asserted that globally metaverse will open up vistas that will ultimately expand ‘screen time’ and drive more ‘bandwidth consumption’. In the process, telecom and network infrastructure companies can also look forward to 20 times higher data usage in 2032.   

It also anticipates that the metaverse should eventually bring profound changes to the entire Technology, Media, and Telecom (TMT) sector, perhaps none as soon or as extensive as in consumer electronics. 

“We expect global AR/VR headset unit sales of 42 million units (US$12.6 bn revenue) by 2025, representing a 48% shipment CAGR (and 36% revenue CAGR) over 2020-25, claimed Credit Suisse. 

It further said that three factors — a disruptive AR/VR headset maker emerges amid more applications for enterprises and consumers; a better integrated hardware-software platform emerges to drive penetration; and technological improvements such as micro-LED and fast LCD enable a better price-performance products — can drive additional growth in the sector in next few years.