Gaming’s distaff gains are showing already

MUMBAI:Avanti Jathar, 16, just loves Warcraft. A junior college student in Pune, she is hooked to the strategy game.It’s the characters she is particularly taken in by. “They are all animated and really cute,” she says.

She also likes the Harry Potter game, though not really a fan of the book series herself. “Kids in my society told me about it and I thought I must try it. The player can be Ron, Harry or Hermoine depending on the task given, so it is really fun,” she says.

She took to gaming watching her brother, a hard core gamer, but is slowly coming into her own, thanks to the wide variety of games available.

The likes of Avanti are to be found in every city these days and increasingly in small towns, too.

Worldwide, the gamer population is expanding from small groups of hard core action game lovers who shared the latest ware amongst themselves, almost like secret societies, to a more generic, broad-based class with a fair representation of women.

And the games finding the most takers are not those involving blood and gore as much as the casual, interactive kinds.

On the anvil, for example, is a game that allows you to be a part of Riverdale, where Archie and his friends live. The comic series has been a hot favourite of girls the world over and the game, when it comes, is bound to find easy converts.

Going by Sashi Reddi, founder and chairman, FXLabs Studios, among the top 20 games in the US last year were five family-oriented casual games, each of which would have cost Rs 7-8 crore to develop. 

Ernest Adams, a UK-based game design and development consultant, says the stage is now set for an explosion of women gamers, especially in the area of massively-multi-player online gaming. Talk about the lib!

In India, though, the gaming industry is still in its nascency and the population of women gamers is at best 15% of the total. Nevertheless, early signs of the trend emerging in the country may already be visible, say industry officials.

“Indian gaming was valued at $35 million last year. But it is expected to become $100 million in the next 4 years,” says Reddi of FXLabs.

Local game developers are increasingly looking at games, which are more casual, intuitive and based on social interaction.

For Indiagames, such games already account for a substantial percentage.

Vishal Gondal, founder and COO, Indiagames, says, “35% of the games we offer are casual games. A lot of them are education-based such as Bookworm and Flipword.”

Zapak, too, offers a wide variety of mindgames, puzzles, fashion and style-based games to cater to the fairer sex. Rohit Sharma, chief operating officer, Zapak says, “This is the right time develop content catering to genres other than young boys and men.”

On its part, FXLabs will be launching Dhoom 2 by the end of this year. Inspired by the Bollywood series of the same name, the game would even involve a bit of dance.

FXLabs also plans to launch a game called Agni, where the protagonist is a woman who goes through various levels of hell looking for her daughter. The download charges for such games will be around Rs 1,000.

Low internet penetration has so far limited the growth of the online gaming industry in India. The fact that women constitute only about a fifth of the total online community automatically limits the number of women players.

But, all in good time, say developers. For now, they are excited at the rising number of professional gamers.

“Multi-player gaming has really caught on in India. People are taking it up as a profession. There are about 1,00,000 such sportsmen in the country,” says Gondal.