Ibibo eyes 50% share of India's social gaming market by FY 14

Online gaming company Ibibo aims to increase its market share in the country's social gaming space to 50 per cent in the next two years, from 30-35 per cent at present.

"At present, we capture 30-35 per cent of the social gaming market. In the next 24 months, we are targeting to garner 50 per cent market share," Ibibo CEO Ashish Kashyap told PTI. To achieve the target, the company is working on improving its offering over the mobile platform and also increase the number of developers it is working with.

"We are aggressively improving our mobile platform. One of the big focus areas is to go to the access device. Hence, we are focusing at pre-embedding Ibibo platform on mobile phones," he said. The company, which introduced multi-player gaming on mobile phones about six months ago, expects majority of gamers will access games through mobiles in the next few years.

"More than 25 per cent of the usage at present comes from mobiles. We expect this to scale up to 60-70 per cent in the next two to three years," he said. According to a report by Ficci and KPMG, the social gaming market in India was Rs 240 crore in 2010 and is expected to touch Rs 1,430 crore by 2014.

Quoting the report Kashyap said, "India has close to 12-13 million social media gamers. Growing at 14 per cent annually." He added that social gaming has a lot of scope as it appeals not only to gamers but also non-gamers who want to socialise with their friends. Ninety-eight per cent of the users on Ibibo's portal are from India, with about 55 per cent of the users from tier II and tier III cities.

In the next two to three years, the company expects the users from these cities to increase to 70-80 per cent.

Other major players in the social gaming space include Zapak, Yahoogames and Miniclip. Some game developers that Ibibo works with are Plinga of Germany, Pixonic of Russia, games2win of India. Ibibo already comes embedded with Samsung, LG, Nokia etc devices and HCL tablets.