Akamai's Plan To Get 500 Million Indian Gamers Online In 5 Years, Almost All On Mobile Phones

Gaming in India is reaching a tipping point. From something that pimple-faced kids engage in against their parent's wishes to a serious professional career choice, gaming is slowly gathering momentum as an entertainment activity -- whether you like it or not.

However, one of the biggest pain points for gaming in India -- something that's holding back the juggernaut -- is the poor connectivity for online gaming. Whether it's cellular networks or fixed broadband, India's connectivity landscape is too complex to overcome. Despite many attempts over the years, few have succeeded.

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India may not have a lot of PC gamers, and it definitely doesn't have any console gamers. But it does have one of the biggest, fastest growing mobile phones markets in the world, and that's where games are largely consumed in India right now -- something that's going to drive the rise of gaming in India over the next five years.

These aren't my words. This is what Nelson Rodriguez, Global Director of Media Industry Strategy at Akamai Technologies believes. I had an interesting 30-minute conversation with him on all things gaming and technologies that enable worldwide online gaming. Excerpts follow.

Role of CDN (content delivery network) in driving online gaming

Being Akamai we work with most of the big game publishers all over the world -- companies like Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft, just to name a few, those are all Akamai customers. And then of course we have customers here in India as well like Reliance and Games2Win.

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So if you think of the list of companies we work with, you start to realize how important CDN is for the gaming business. I feel like the key innovations in gaming over the last 10 years has entirely focused on making games easy to play. So reduce the barrier for price, for complexity, for technology.

Think about the time when we were playing games 10 years ago, the game cost $60, you needed a high-end PC to play the game on, and the game themselves were very complex. And fast forward now, the success of the gaming industry and popular titles has been shaped by more accessible games -- games that are less difficult to play, even if they have layers of skill, they¡¯re still pretty easy to start playing.

Not only that, you¡¯re playing games on your mobile phone -- no dedicated gaming PC required -- and now you can start playing for zero dollars. Those are all innovations around reducing friction, reducing any barriers to get players engaged, and that¡¯s where a company like Akamai is actually able to help.

If you have an industry whose primary focus in innovation is making it as easy as possible for everybody to play then Akamai is able to reduce the load times, time taken to update the game, reduce security concerns that pop up in multiplayer, all those aspects of gaming that makes gaming more difficult it¡¯s Akamai¡¯s job to remove, it¡¯s our job to make it easier to play games. And that¡¯s what Akamai¡¯s focus has been for the last 15-16 years is to make it easier for players to get into games.

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So when you¡¯re playing a mobile game and the little wheel¡¯s spinning because the game¡¯s trying to load a new level or update a new security patch, our mission -- Akamai¡¯s mission -- is to make that whole process as quick as possible.

Key challenges of the mobile gaming environment

So mobile gaming is all about people in motion -- going from A to B -- trying to play a game to pass their time. Now from finding the game to installing it and clicking on the play button, but before that the game has to download and install updates, then it has to do matchmaking, sending data back and forth across the mobile network to find someone with a healthy network connection at their end. Once that happens the game begins and there¡¯s literally hundreds of thousands of interactions happening in the background.

If somebody plays an online multiplayer mobile game for 30 minutes, think about all the signal going up and down to the server -- 60 times or 30 times a second. There¡¯s so many technological dependencies just to make all of that happen. So each of these tasks and background connections is an opportunity. So for a long time we have been working on technology, particularly here in Asia, where a lot of our gaming customers use our services to accelerate the in game packets so that you have lower latency.

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Not just that but every single position in the game -- your character¡¯s position, the weapons information, the ammo inside them, your status level, your overall score, your marketplace purchases, and many many more -- that¡¯s all signal going over your phone¡¯s network. Making this process seamless is where Akamai sees its opportunities in online gaming.

So accelerating in-game packets is something that we¡¯ve been working over the past couple of years. But there¡¯s technology in the works which we can¡¯t talk about right now which will make online gaming even more accessible, as it fixes the player-to-player security and server-to-player scale issues. There¡¯s an opportunity to take some of the gaming load and push it on Akamai¡¯s edge platform where we can make a secure connection that¡¯s scalable in a way that current technology just cannot do.

We actually think there will be 300 million new players in India over the next couple of years, and trying to reach them in a way that¡¯s stable for multiplayer is something that we are working on right now.

Comparing a gaming network vs video streaming network

Each network has its own challenges. Akamai has a long history of delivering video for a lot of companies in the world. We know the challenges of a video intensive network, where the traffic is huge, the data packets are bigger, and over the world there are more people who are video consumers than gaming consumers, which is shocking to me. Even Cisco claims something like two-thirds of the Internet traffic is video traffic -- which is compute intensive, networking intensive, but it flows in one direction. That¡¯s the essential difference between a video network versus a gaming network.

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So in gaming it¡¯s all about small data packets of say 300 bytes that are going back and forth between two players over the network, but they¡¯re going like 30 times a second. And when you have a game with hundred players with this bi-directional traffic latency becomes of utmost importance.

In traditional broadcast you have video streams delayed by 10 or 30 seconds, for Akamai the threshold is 2-3 seconds delay. But the same for a gaming network, latency requirement is 160 millisecond or 200 millisecond, which is significant difference. Both video and gaming networks require very good engineering to deliver data streams, but they behave fundamentally different in terms of bi-directional data flow and latency demands.

With 5G rolling out over the next couple of years, there¡¯s going to be a significant improvement in latency, game performance, because that¡¯ll be interesting to see with 5G when mobile networks actually end up being the leading network as opposed to PC or console games on fixed line networks. They¡¯re largely all pretty much the same in behaviour.

What is the drop off point where an online gamer sort of gives up and exits a game?

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Latency obviously plays a huge part in determining the quality of online multiplayer gameplay -- the minute latency is in triple digits like 200-300 ms you start seeing gamers dropping off. But even before that, how much time a game takes to start also has an impact on whether gamers will warm up to it or not. So for instance, Rovio -- the makers of Angry Birds -- has a corporate mission where games should not take more than 10 seconds to start.

That¡¯s the time from when you press on a game¡¯s logo on your phone to the game actually starting. Because they believe very strongly that every second wasted above that limit for games to start drops players off the game. Gamers abandon a game when they think a game¡¯s taking too long to load. Every second matters.

Thoughts on gaming in India

Right now there are about 2 billion people in the world that play games actively, which is interesting because that means there¡¯s still a lot of people in the world that don¡¯t play video games. So the next billion players we believe are going to come online within the next five years, and something like 300 million to 500 million people will start playing mobile games for the first time ever in India over the same time period.

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After China, India¡¯s going to be the second biggest market. But the Chinese market is a closed market -- and not just legally. I mean Chinese consumers historically only consume Chinese or Korean games, but India is a market that consumes global content in terms of games. So it¡¯ll be interesting to see how this space develops -- whether more Indian consumers will like playing international games like PUBG and Fortnite or see whether a local game captures their imagination, like some of the rise in live trivia games not only in India but across Asia. But when you have a 500 million player market, India has the potential to build its own League Of Legends.

How will gamers live change in the near future?

When you compare the way video is consumed now versus how it was consumed a decade or so ago, there¡¯s instant gratification at the press of a button. That¡¯s something still missing in the world of gaming. There¡¯s an opportunity to make online gaming as simple and easy as pressing a button and playing the game instantly, but there¡¯s still a lot of work to be done in the backend in terms of technology -- a lot of which Akamai will announce very soon. So watch out for this space.

About Nelson Rodriguez: In his own words, Nelson is responsible for the media industry strategy at Akamai Technologies, responsible for understanding key media verticals -- gaming, OTT, publishing -- and he's spent 12 years in gaming -- working at Microsoft with Xbox, and Ubisoft, before starting work at Akamai Technologies about three years ago. Currently his responsibility covers all the entertainment and media space. He enjoys playing PUBG with his son on his iPad, whenever time allows it.