RComm bets big on online gaming

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Mumbai, Feb 23: Corporate giants are finding e-gaming a lucrative investment. Reliance Communications, which forayed into the space about three years back, with its nationwide multiplayer gaming initiative ‘Game Box National Championship’ (GNC), is planning to drive e-sports as a major sporting activity.

The firm has also roped in Intel—the world’s largest chipmaker—to be the principal sponsor of GNC-08. Intel will thus bring in high technology processors to create better gaming experience. With this, it has also been able to attract about 15,000 players in GNC-08 from just 4,000 people when it started the championship.

India is expected to be the largest hub of online gaming market, which is likely to grow 40-fold from $5 million in 2006 to more than $200 in 2010, according to Pearl Research estimates.

According to sources in Reliance Communications, with the required the infrastructure in place — 1,00,000 km of long distance optical fibre cable and retail access with 246 Reliance World outlets and bandwidth to support the multi player gaming system—the firm is now looking to invest a huge amount to buy new games from various markets like US and Korea, the largest producer of online games.

According to Sunil Buch, head-marketing and corporate sales, Reliance World, “We want to be a pioneer in the multi-player gaming and now we are bringing in more interesting games for the youth.” The firm is also looking forward to introduce casual games for women from next year, he added.