India Takes Third Spot in Global Gaming Installs, Says Unity Technologies

Unity Technologies, creator of a popular creation engine that reaches nearly three billion devices worldwide, on Thursday said India is now ranked third in global gaming installs, surpassing Brazil and Russia.

Quoting Unity Analytics, a company statement said the latest market research shows India has risen from the ninth position in January this year to the third spot in global install rankings, surpassing Brazil and Russia to become one of the world's largest gaming markets.

This is due to a spike in India's adoption of high-end mobile devices with larger RAM size. In one year, mobile device count with 1GB RAM has grown from 31.6 million to 100 million in October 2017, it said.

"Unity analysed and studied the ongoing market trends and development in the Indian mobile industry. Based on our findings, we believe the mass adoption of high-end mobile devices will give the Indian gaming ecosystem ample opportunity to innovate and provide compelling content to development platforms," Quentin Staes-Polet, Director of South Asia Pacific at Unity Technologies, said.

"Driven by the massive rush of cost-effective, high-end smartphones and the 4G revolution that began last year, the Indian mobile gaming market has been expanding at a rapid pace," said Rajesh Rao, Chairman of Nasscom Gaming Forum.

Unity is uniquely positioned to help understand trends across the mobile industry, with 87,000 made with Unity games and experiences generating 2.4 billion installs across 1.1 billion unique devices globally each month, the statement added.

Separately, Tech Mahindra and Unity Technologies announced a partnership on Thursday.  Tech Mahindra in collaboration with Unity will open a Centre of Excellence (CoE) at its Bengaluru campus, targeting the communication, media, and entertainment segment.

According to a statement issued by Tech Mahindra, the CoE will specialise in augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/ VR) solutions targeted at the communication, media and entertainment segment using Unity 3D as a platform. The centre will also focus on catalysing and facilitating training, consulting, advice and research to the developers in the AR/ VR domain, it said.

Dave Rhodes, Chief Revenue Officer, Unity Technologies, said the next cutting-edge technology will be in the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) space which is fast catching up in almost all major domains.