During the panel on gaming in India, the last of day one of the NASSCOM Animation & Gaming India conference in Mumbai, Mohit Anand, Country Manager for the Entertainment & Devices division of Microsoft said that Microsoft’s break-even year for the xBox in India is year five (i.e. 2011, since they launched in 2006). About local Indian gaming content, he mentioned that MS intends to release an expansion pack for Age of Empires 3 in two weeks – Age of Empires Asian Dynasty – in which users have the choice of an Indian civilization. He hopes that this will be the “Sholay” (i.e. a blockbuster) of the gaming business in India – a tipping point that the industry is waiting for – though he agreed that no one really knows what will work here. Halo III, he said, had sales of almost 10,000 in India on day one. What the company has learned is that consumers in India don’t want a delayed version – if they don’t get it on the same day as a worldwide release, then they’ll buy it off websites. “The business is humbling – and works just like the movie business. Distributing content on a large scale is a huge logistic challenge. If you have services like xBox live, that is the killer app. It can help address some distribution issues, but since you can’t download a full game, you still need a disk. Getting it on retail shelves is a huge challenge.” The number of games they sell here per console are higher than the worldwide average. No comments on the console sales, though.
He agreed that the price of the console doesn’t allow the company to get more access, so they need to get the volume-price equation right. He disagreed with the notion that the xBox 360 isn’t a mass product in India: “Imagine an xBox 360 at Rs. 10,000″, he said. “Even the top-end of 50 million households in the country is a huge market.” What needs to improve? Broadband, retail, distribution, import tariffs,and the government policy on gaming.
Comments have been disabled for this post