Homegrown Developers, Localization Breathe Life Into South Asian Gaming

Editor?s note:?Hassan Baig?is?an entrepreneur who runs?White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter?@baigi. It’s an open secret that the social gaming industry is no longer the cornucopia of opportunities it used to be. Rising CPAs, falling k-factors, plateuing ARPUs and channel saturation all have made life difficult for the typical gaming studio devoid of a big network of users or a deep warchest of advertising money.?But there’s a new gaming opportunity on the horizon, and the savvy tech investor will do well to take notice of it now that it’s still nascent. This opportunity is the impending mobile gaming boom in South Asia, scheduled to arrive by 2015 for all practical purposes. Read on for a thorough look at the gaming history of the region, emerging fundamentals and future expectations. Fighting Bollywood And TV Spurred by 200,000 gaming cafes popping up across the country, China witnessed an online gaming revolution in the early aughts. Facing no serious competition from traditional entertainment media heavily tethered by government censorship, gaming companies like Shanda and Giant Interactive firmly entrenched themselves in the typical gamer’s consciousness, making gaming a life-changing pastime?in China. By 2006, sensing the time had come for neighboring South Asia to take the plunge as well, India’s Reliance Entertainment released a gaming portal called Zapak. But unlike China, the response that Reliance received was lukewarm at best, and it turned out to be a stalled revolution. Zapak is still?alive today, as are?Shanda and Giant Interactive, but whereas the latter have grown to become industry leaders, Zapak never validated the business case upon which it was built. Ultimately gaming failed to take root in India because of stiff competition from the prevalent form of entertainment in the region: Bollywood and TV. Zapak’s offerings were too underdeveloped, and subsequent interest in them was too thin to displace these highly mature regional media. Thus, other than a curious fringe, Zapak never made a dent in the South Asian universe like online gaming did across the border in China. Analysts are mistaken to equate South Asia’s lackluster past performance with its potential as a mobile gaming hub. Today when mobile gaming is en route to become a $48 billion industry by 2016, South Asia is excluded from the discussion almost entirely given its tepid history. But here’s the thing: Analysts are mistaken to equate

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