A recent Consumer Study by Western Digital brought to attention some pain-points of the growing Indian Gaming Community

Gaming grew. And how! While India hasn’t been new to gaming, a lot of games & gamers are new in India. With a population this vast, India’s market will always present new consumers. The PUBG wave is a great example of games finding players in every nook & cranny of our huge country. The pandemic & subsequent lockdowns saw a large part of this population convert from ‘casual gamers’ to ‘serious gamers’ & some even went on to become ‘pro gamers’.

Western Digital conducted a consumer study last year, titled “Next-Gen Gamers’ Research”. The study found out that casual gamers are upgrading to PC Gaming pretty quickly but face few challenges which the study pointed out & have been listed below,

• Excitement, fun, and challenge are the key motivators for PC gaming, however, more than half (57%) have cited slow storage as a key factor for poor game experience.
• A majority of gamers responding to the survey also highlighted slow game loading (51%) and bandwidth issues (51%) as main pain points.
• Slow storage remains the biggest bottleneck for fast game loading, gamers feel that RAM (52%), Graphics Card (43%), and Processor (41%) also have a role to play in the overall gaming experience.
• The survey also shows that 59% of gamers have identified slow loading times as a primary reason for impacting their gameplay.
• Two in every five gamers have made the unbearable decision of deleting their old titles due to running out of storage.
• The survey found that, every three in five gamers store their game libraries within their PCs and every 3 in 10 gamers store more than 10 titles in their PCs.
• Delving deeper into what qualifies as a great gaming experience, nearly 72% of serious gamers felt that quick load times were crucial.
• 44% of gamers enjoyed games that loaded seamlessly, and 54% of gamers look for good quality graphics that offer a realistic gaming experience.

Western Digital got this survey done specifically as part of their launch initiative for WD_BLACK, their latest portfolio of storage solutions, focused towards gaming. The product line includes the WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD, Western Digital’s first NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), which also comes in a Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Special Edition. The series also offers the WD_BLACK AN1500 NVMe SSD Add-in-Card. They also offer portable gaming drives including the WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive, which also has an Xbox compatible version and the P50 Game Drive SSD.