Indonesia Has Potential to Be King of Gaming Industry Driven by eSports: Google

TEMPO.CO, Singapore - Indonesia has the largest gaming market in Southeast Asia, which is supported by the reasonably massive development of eSports and mobile gaming.

“Indonesia has the potential to become the king of the gaming industry in Southeast Asia, especially since the government supports eSports development,” said Sami Kizilbash, Google's global head of accelerators and experts, during a graduation day ceremony of the ″Indie Games Accelerator 2022″ held in Google Asia HQ, Singapore, on Tuesday, 13 December 2022.

Indie Games Accelerator is a three-month training program for independent game developers from around the world.

The progress of Indonesia's eSports, said Sami, makes Indonesia's position quite unique compared to other countries in Southeast Asia and Asia as a whole. “Indonesia is now the fifth largest gaming market in Asia. The first is China, followed by Japan, South Korea, and India.”

Not just being the market, Indonesia also has the opportunity to be a key player in the gaming industry with a large number of gaming studios, both large-scale and independent ones.

Google records that Google Play is home to more than 10,000 Indonesian developers, and over 150 million Indonesians visit Google Play every month, searching for apps and games.

“Google Play allows both big and small developers from all over Indonesia to develop on our platform. We have seen many successful Indonesian developers in a very competitive global market,” said Kunal Soni, Director of Google Play for Southeast Asia and Australia.

“We are committed to supporting developers to keep building businesses, games, and applications that can connect more than 2.5 billion users on this platform,” Kunal said.

Based on the eConomySEA 2022 report, Indonesia’s online media which includes on-demand video, music, games, and digital advertising was projected to reach US$6.4 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) by 2022 and US$11 billion in GMV by 2025, with a 19 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2022 and 2025.

According to this report, 34 percent of Indonesians play games at least once a week, and 13 percent of them spend more than one hour per day playing games. Meanwhile, the revenue of the global gaming industry was forecasted to reach nearly US$340 billion by 2027, with most of the growth expected to come from Asia.

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