The attempt by India's organised gaming sector to rebrand cyber cafes as gaming parlors has been short-lived with a report on Gaming in India by IAMAI and IMRB showing that the influence of cyber cafes as a prime source of gaming has reduced. In 2008, 53 percent of gamers used unbranded cyber cafes - it is now at 35 percent. The report is based on a survey of 20,000 households, 90,000 individuals, 1000 SMEs and 500 Cyber Cafes followed by a secondary research using information from various published and private sources and other research bodies. The total PC and console market in India is estimated to be around $20 million. There are 9.8 million offline PC gamers, 7.2 million online gamers, 1.1 million play on their consoles and 6.1 use mobile phones to play games. Gaming Firms Failed To Monetise According to the report, in 2000 firms such as Contests2Win and Hungama experimented with incorporating brand experience into gaming, but "somewhere along the way, the companies were not able to capitalize the audience". The typical gamer in India plays games three times a week but spends less than Rs 150 per month on gaming. It also notes that there was a dearth of innovation in the industry which made it difficult to monetise games. This changed in 2007 when both domestic and international publishers started generating a multitude of games across categories, leading to a near-doubling of online gamers in the country. The report states that the number of gamers…
