Social gaming is fast becoming a rage among Indian networking users.

Twice a day, Sunderajan Palepu logs on to Facebook to challenge his friends to a round of “Who has the Biggest Brain”, an online brain-training game. Palepu, sales manager with a leading FMCG company, has already upgraded to a premium version of the online game for $1.99 (Rs 100). “For me, social gaming is a form of communication that is more interesting than e-mail or instant messenger,” he says.

ComScore reports that networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, iBibo, and Hi5 draw maximum number of social gamers. “Unlike traditional online casual games, users playing inside a social network aren’t competing against strangers. They play with friends who happen to be online at the same time,” says Meisha Grover, a regular gamer at Orkut.

Around three million global users play Pet Society — another social game on Facebook – every day, and an average play session lasts around 30 minutes. Grover believes that social gaming is emerging as the latest mode of contact between youngsters in the virtual world.

Games2Win co-founder and CEO Alok Kejriwal must know. Games2Win’s Internet Cricket League (ICL) application is a roaring success on Orkut. The company claims that it recorded 20,000 installations of the game within 15 days of the game’s launch. Soon after, ICL was being played more than 6,500 times a day.

Kejriwal says, “On an average, users spend more than 6-10 minutes on games like ICL, inviting their friends to better their scores.” His company is rolling out 15 more social games this year, including two games that will offer users options to send freebies to their friends. Kejriwal notes, “Players have a tendency to decorate their virtual spaces and give gifts to friends. We will bring these features to Games2Win apps soon.”

Online communities play a key role in the distribution of social games, since users go by word of mouth while picking up these apps. MySpace and Orkut have taken established games such as Scrabble, Risk, Boggle and Battleship and moved these inside their social networks.

Google’s social networking platform, Orkut, claims that of the registered one million users, every user spends about 15 minutes to a couple of hours on average on social gaming applications alone. Orkut has close to 3,000 applications, and several popular social games, including Teen Patti and Galli Cricket, among others. Rahul Kulkarni, product manager of Google (India) says, “Indian audiences love the combination of cricket, Bollywood and the idea of staying in touch with friends.”

Hi5, a social networking portal that boasts of 60 million unique visits every month, has taken social gaming seriously. Ramu Yalamanchi, the founder and CEO of Hi5, says that for Hi5’s target audience of 15- to 24-year olds, “social gaming represents a major expenditure of time and money globally. Hi5 games engage our users, keeping them on the site longer and driving them towards new forms of monetisation for our business.”

At a recent social gaming summit in San Francisco, US, Kristian Segerstrale, the CEO of leading game developer Playfish — which has 5 out of the top 10 apps on Facebook — said that the phenomenon of social gaming was set to draw in all gamers, even the heavy duty ones. “Instead of buying games off store shelves and playing them in solitude, hardcore gamers will prefer to play games where they can stay in touch with friends,” he predicted during the summit.

Playfish has over 50 million registered players on Facebook today, out of which around 4 million play it every day.

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