Virtual life: Gamers try out a variety of action, adventure, racing and strategy games at SKOAR 2006 (Bottom), whose theme was 2 Hot 2 Handle

BANGALORE
July 7-9, 2006

With trembling, sweaty hands, I look around a dark corner, my Heckler & Koch USP (universal self-loading pistol) .45 drawn, as I warily eye what appears to be a deserted pathway between the building I am standing in and the next, where I know there are half-a-dozen terrorists waiting. The next 10 seconds are nerve-racking as I cautiously nose ahead, keeping an eye out for the armed terrorists I have to dispose off in the next few minutes. Just as I am beginning to feel safe, a blinding burst of gunfire rakes our unit, and we find ourselves cornered and outnumbered. All hell breaks loose over the next 30 seconds, as the disoriented and cornered counter terrorists (that's my team!) fire in all directions to try to stave off the inevitable. As it turns out, our bravado is of little help, and we are liquidated by a team of skilled marksmen in less than a minute.

Fortunately for me, rather than deepest Iraq, I am actually at SKOAR 2006, an annual gaming expo held this year at Bangalore's Sree Kanteerava Indoor Stadium, where around 50,000 others jostle for an opportunity to try their hands at myriad varieties of games. Blood and gore are actually lower down the pecking order, with visitors preferring to queue up for a knuckle-whitening ride of Need for Speed. What adds to the attraction for hardcore gamers is the presence of computer chip, hard disk and peripheral vendors, all looking to hook them with an array of top-end products. "We have an entire range of gaming peripherals on display, including mice, keyboards, steering wheels, gamepads and joysticks," says Moninder Jain, Director (South East Asia), Logitech.

While games have for long been restricted to those who could buy consoles or game titles overseas, the arrival first of the Sony PlayStation and more recently of Microsoft's Xbox seems to have catalysed growth in the Indian market. At Rs 100 crore, the market for video games is said to be growing at 100 per cent a year in India. The Sony PS stall, run by Milestone Interactive Software, the India distributor for the handheld, is swarming with gamers trying not only the PS, but the very nifty PSP (PlayStation Portable) too. "Consoles are more fun than playing on a computer, since you can plug it into a large screen TV and enjoy better game play," says Gaurav Aggarwal, 15, who is set to junk his ps2 later this year when the newer ps3 hits Indian store shelves.

Unlike global markets, Sony has something of an unchallenged position in India, with the Nintendo DS hard to come by and Microsoft launching its gaming consoles in India nearly a year after its global launch. Despite this headstart, Jayant Sharma, Chairman and CEO, Milestone Interactive Software, says Sony has a long way to go, since "90 per cent of all console sales in India are in the grey market, and we are just beginning to scratch the surface."

Testing ground: Visitors check out games and equipment at the Logitech stall (Bottom) and BenQ's latest range of flat LCD monitors

The infancy of the Indian market has, however, not stopped several Indian vendors from also making a sizeable investment in the market. Sify, the online portal, for example, has created A3, perhaps India's first massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that sees gamers collaborate across the internet on their missions. While this genre of gaming has achieved near-cult status in countries such as South Korea, where broadband is pervasive, it's also beginning to grow in India, with titles such as Ragnorak and more recently A3. "There's going to be a lot more action around the MMORPG market in India, since the number of broadband users has increased from 100,000 last year to over one million today," says Rajesh Rao, CEO, Dhruva Interactive, a Bangalore-based games developer for the $30-billion (Rs 1,41,000-crore) global industry, besides the Indian market.

With 100 million-plus mobile subscribers now in India, Rao also reckons that mobile games would be an easy and profitable way of growing the game-playing population. According to some industry estimates, the Indian mobile gaming could grow to $100 million (Rs 470 crore) in the next four to five years, given the rapid growth in cellular user base and increasing preference for high-end handsets. "Around a quarter of the user base has Java-enabled phones, which are required for gaming," says Rao.

Coming back to the expo, the second edition of SKOAR did leave some visitors spellbound, but there were many visitors who left the venue unimpressed. "The games at the venue were at least two-three years old and the queues were far too long," says software engineer Vishnu S. Iyengar, who adds that aside from the Sony PS stall, there needed to be a wider selection of gaming gear. "There have been at least three new consoles that they could have demoed at this event instead of just having the dated PS," he argues. Organisers, take note.