Behavioural analysis of Mobile Game lovers during the Indian festive season

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What Christmas is to Westerners, Diwali is to Indians. For those who seem unfamiliar with the term Diwali, it is the festival of lights splendidly celebrated in India, generally falling during late Autumn. It is marked by people decorating their houses with diyas, candles and rangoli, meeting and exchanging gifts with their loved ones, worshiping goddess Lakshmi, the epitome of prosperity and wealth, and burning crackers at the day’s apogee.

In comparison to the regular mundane days, voids which are generally offered and preferably killed by handhelds, is not available on the day of festival amounting to people spending less time on phone and more time with family. In order to check the validity of the statement and the importance of this festival amongst present Indian population, we at GreedyGame, decided to conduct a case study on our internal traffic sample set to understand the behaviour of mobile game players during Diwali.

Comparative study of the Ad Traffic and Daily Active Users on and off Diwali

Shown below is a geographical map of India (courtesy: kepler.gl), displaying the percentage dip in the ad traffic on Diwali. A dip of 12.5% in the numbers of daily active users and 15.1% in the Ad Traffic was seen on the day of Diwali with Uttar Pradesh registering the maximum contribution in the overall dip closely followed by Delhi, and Bihar sealing the third spot in the count.

Being Religious?

The Diwali pooja, is generally scheduled in the evening, with the pooja time differing from cities to cities. Thus, to check the importance of the festival amongst the Indian metropolitan city population, the percentage change in the ad traffic and daily active users was studied during the pooja and it was noted that as compared to the usual days, the time slot devoted to pooja, registered a dip in the numbers of both users and ad traffic for most of the metropolitan cities, with Kolkata and Chennai being the exceptions. The city contributing the maximum dip in the ad traffic was Hyderabad, closely followed by Visakhapatnam. The number of ad requests from Hyderabad followed a decrease of 7.7% as compared to a usual increase of 8.35% and Visakhapatnam showed a decrease of 5.4% as compared to an increase of 4.33% during the evenings on regular days.

Heading towards the dip in the number of daily active users, Visakhapatnam topped the suit, followed by Hyderabad with numbers being 5.3% and 5% respectively.

The candlestick charts shown on the left describes the percentage variation in Daily active users and Ad traffic during the Diwali week in the time slot 6–8 P.M. with the lower tail referring to the Diwali day for each city except Kolkata and Chennai.

Apart from Diwali, a couple of other festivals, also fall in the same week. This allows people to enjoy a bunch of consecutive holidays. And as people mostly get a lot of leisure time during Diwali holidays, the number of daily active users were seen to rise again by 5.2% on 8th November and by 6.6% on 9th November as compared to the Diwali day.

Being a Responsible citizen?

The ban on burning of crackers in Delhi during Diwali was also evident by the fact that the numbers of mobile game users increased by 7.13% as compared to a decrease of 0.08% during the regular days in the time interval of 8:00 to 10:00 P.M with card games being the game players choice.

Top 25 Cell phones among Mobile Game fanatics

Moving forward, we also studied the influence of sales which was launched by a number of e-commerce giants before the Diwali week. According to the data collected, the percentage of latest mobile phone users came out to be 26.4% of the daily mobile game players being active during the week.

Also, the top 25 trending mobile phones was visualised and Redmi 5A was seen to be the favourite amongst the users and Xiaomi phones occupying 40% of the top 25 favourite phone list.

The story in a nut shell..

Overall, the data suggests, that Diwali still holds its importance amongst the Indian population, which was suggested by a dip in the mobile game users and ad traffic during the pooja time.

The government decision of banning crackers in Delhi was seen to be followed by the state population, by the increase in the percentage of daily active users in mobile games during the “cracker burning” time, with “card games” being the preferred choice and an evidence that people still like playing cards on Diwali.

Lastly, Redmi 5A was found to be the top favourite amongst the gaming population, followed by Samsung Galaxy J2 SM J200G and Redmi Note 4.