Farmville author: India will become one of the centers of the mobile gaming industry

Mark Skaggs, author of Farmville and Empires & Allies, now works for the Indian studio Moonfrog Labs. The game designer is convinced that this country is waiting for a big boom in the mobile gaming industry.

In the image – Mark Skaggs. Source – VentureBeat
Skaggs got into Moonfrog Labs after 7 years of working for Zynga.

The game designer did not choose India by chance. Skaggs came there twice for work, and as a result he acquired professional contacts and found like-minded people.

These visits convinced Skaggs that India is ready to become the center of the mobile gaming industry in the future.

The mobile games market in India is relatively small and amounts to $200 million. For comparison, the volume of the Japanese market in 2015 exceeded $ 6 billion. However, according to analysts, this state of affairs will not last long. 100 million smartphone users are added in the country every year. By 2017, this number will be 314 million.

The number of paying users in India is still small. And the smartphones on which the games are installed are low-power. The volume of one download is limited to 8 megabytes on average. Skaggs believes that the limitations that this imposes are inspiring. “There are no things that we take for granted. It makes you look at the world in a new way and wonder exactly how the games were made in the last five to ten years,” he shares.

Let’s add that not only Skaggs considers India a promising destination, but Moonfrog Labs is a noteworthy studio. In March 2015, the Bangalore-based company raised $15 million for development. Now there are 80 people in the studio staff. Everyone except Skaggs, who lives in Dallas, works in Bangalore.

Source: VentureBeat