The Hindu Business Line : Games companies play

November 24: The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) organises a special event on Digital Entertainment: Animation, Gaming and Visual Events, on the sidelines of the International Film Festival of India in Goa

November 28: The first ever Indian Gaming Summit is held in Mumbai, organised by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and the nation’s biggest online games portal, Zapak

November 28: Tata Elxsi’s Visual Computing Labs forays into the gaming space, sets up teams in Pune and Bangalore

November 29: Vishal Gondal, founder-CEO of IndiaGames, is listed by BusinessWeek magazine among the ‘Top 25 Entrepreneurs in Asia’ for the current year.

December 6: Hyderabad and US-based GamesShastra makes it to the ‘Red Herring Global 100’ list of companies for 2007, and is cited for ‘outstanding achievement in games development, games art .. and games testing services.’

December 14: Entertainment conglomerate UTV acquires controlling stake in IndiaGames

Like a cyber-era ‘samudra manthan,’ the churning has begun — in a niche of the creative technology business that, till recently, tended to be rudely brushed aside in the rush to anoint and salute the winners in the Information Technology arena. Mergers and acquisitions; global and peer recognition; collective navel-gazing and industry introspection…. The scenario is almost boringly familiar to anyone who has been monitoring the way the mainstream IT industry has been functioning — but there is a palpable difference.

Anand Parthasarathy

Desi touch: Indian games developers have created special products for the domestic market.

This is what the Americans call a different ball game — and the players seem to be so much younger, making the graying hairs and convex waistlines at the top of computers and communication seem almost geriatric by comparison.

The bulk of India’s gamers are said to be in the age group of 17 to 28. And so it seems, are those who create, develop and market the games. To serve the young, you have to think young …. easier if you are young.

Vishal Gondal was only 23 when he founded Indiagames in 1999 with a team of five. By 2004, a Chinese Internet company, Tom Online, pumped in nearly $18 million. When the Mumbai-based entertainment group UTV acquired a controlling stake in it recently, Indiagames had offices abroad in London, Beijing and Los Angeles and its staff of 300 had created a respected niche for itself in the online and mobile gaming business.

“The UTV deal allows us to be a part of the bigger picture. The youth want gaming and so we will be working with Bindass (UTV’s channel for youth) by integrating gaming with their offerings,” Gondal told eWorld. “Our game developers are addressing the global market in a small way but we are learning and growing very fast.”

He is right: The Nasscom report on the ‘Animation and Gaming Industry in India 2007,’ estimates the size of the Indian gaming industry by 2008 at $161 million — a sharp rise from $48 million in 2006. With a galloping compounded annual growth (CAGR) of over 70 per cent this is seen to hit $424 million by 2010. Yet even this will still represent only 2 per cent of the global opportunity.

Why is it this way? The business logic of creating software for global gaming consumption is as compelling as in the IT outsourcing arena: creating a mainstream game typically costs $1 million equivalent in India, against $3-4 million in the US, Europe or Japan. But what the industry lacks is the huge ‘catchment’ of trained or trainable human resources that the IT sectors can exploit.

But the half empty glass is also half full: the burgeoning, upwardly mobile middle-class in India is a formidable domestic market: a recent study by Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB) sponsored by Zapak finds there are 2.8 million online gamers in India, almost all of them in the metros, three out of four of them males, most of them in their teens and twenties. To cater to this cash-rich, fancy-free youthful customer base is business aplenty for many Indian gaming players — for now.

Zapak Digital Entertainment, which was started by Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group soon after the split in the parent company, has quickly escalated its presence to become the number one online gaming portal in India, with over 500 games on offer. Having just expanded to its own gaming studio in Pune, Zapak, already present in its own Gamesplexes in 10 cities, hopes to expand to a hundred more in 2008-09.

“We can truly say that 2007 has been the year of gaming in India,” says Zapak’s Chief Operating Officer, Rohit Sharma. “In a short span of a year, we have acquired 4 million registered users and 100 million page views and have been rated as one of the top searched portals by the Google Zeitgeist report. ComScore rated Zapak as the top gaming company in the country for many consecutive months.”

Zapak saw, early on, that to succeed in India, one had to feed local tastes and cultures. It is a lesson others have learned as well: The IMRB report, ‘Evolution of Gaming in India’, sees localisation as a key business development factor.

Focussing sharply on the 150 million mobile phone users in India, the Mumbai-based Nazara had the agility to create a Dhoni Zone within days of the young cricketer’s anointment as captain, with three games, including Dhoni Tappebaaz, a quintessentially desi ‘time pass’ where one taps the ball with the bat as long as possible.

Another Mumbai enterprise, Games2Win, runs a huge games portal and claims the honour of being India’s first online gaming site. In November, it launched what might well be its flagship offering, ‘The Great Indian Arranged Marriage’, a diabolically complicated piece of wish fulfilment where one can go through the full gamut of operations associated with a full blown desi ‘shaadi’.

Vishal Gondal

Kreeda, which calls itself India’s first Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) portal, was founded just one year ago by three avowed ‘mavericks’, Ramesh Anumukonda, Quentin Staes-Polet, and Robin Alter. Funded by IDG and Softbank, Kreeda has unleashed its own take on dance for a generation hooked on TV reality shows such as ‘Nach Baliye’ — called Dance Mela.

The convergence of TV and PC has seen computer and console-based games transferring seamlessly from one medium to the other.

On December 17, DishTV announced the creation of special games channel for pre-school children called Minikids TV, fuelled by creations from Visiware.

Zapak has moved from bricks to clicks and back: it has just completed hosting Gamesplex championships across six cities, in three games: FIFA 07, Flatout2 and Counterstrike, with prizes ranging from Rs 3,000 to Rs 10,000 in each city. And very recently, other Indian metros played host to the World GameMaster Tournament supported by graphics board leader Asus, where the games on play included Call of Duty, F.E.A.R and Dota All Stars. To the uninitiated, these names may not mean anything — but to hardcore gamers, they represent the pinnacle of gaming challenge.

No less a challenge than what confronts India’s creative games makers as they cut their teeth on desi offerings before they take on the world. It’s a Game that is Set to Match the best of what India’s Industry has achieved — and it looks like a lot more fun.

The Bollywood connection

The world’s largest cinema industry is an irresistible magnet for India’s game developers who are just discovering the seamless synergies between the two industries.

When UTV acquired IndiaGames, the latter was already contracted to create games based on UTV’s latest film offering ‘Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal’ and, in turn, had tied up with FIFA to create ‘Goal’— FIFA online games.

Bipasha Basu, who co-stars with John Abraham in that football-frenzied film set amongst the Indian diaspora in Britain, has a gamey ‘life’ of her own: Zapak has just released on its portal a game featuring the Bollywood star where you get to pursue her (on her roller skates) across a succession of beaches, from Calangute, Goa, to Miami, refreshing yourself with as much iced tea as you can drink. After two months, the highest scorer gets Bipasha’s autographed outfit as worn in the game — tee shirt, shorts, running shoes and all. Run, Bipasha, run!

Films such as ‘Don’ and ‘Kris’ are already popular. Hungama is hoping to create games for a number of upcoming Hindi movies and according to ‘Screen’ weekly is talking to Aamir Khan to create a game from his directorial debut film, ‘Tare Zameen Par’.

Indian snapshot

There are four vertical sectors within gaming: Mobile/Wireless; Console; Online and PC. Console games are dominated by Sony’s PlayStation 2 and 3; Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii. Being fairly pricey products in India, they command about 27 per cent of the market here.

PC-based games are a shrinking business world wide and have a market share of 10-11 per cent. Online gaming is big business abroad — but poor broadband connectivity in India has restricted this business to around 12 per cent.

The lion’s share is taken up by mobile gaming that has a half share (49 per cent) of the market today but can expect to shrink to 45 per cent by 2010, as console and online improve their share (Nasscom estimates).

An interesting segmentation also exists between Casual and Serious gamers. Casual gamers, who form over 90 per cent in India, go for Chess, Poker, Sudoku as well as puzzles, arcade and action games with strong seasonal preference for sporty games such as Cricket (IMRB).

Serious or hardcore gamers make up just 2-3 per cent and spend 4-6 hours a week at play — or does that sound like a lot of work?

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