People associate Udupi with ‘Udupi hotels’, or to be precise with its cuisine. Now a made-in-Udupi mobile game is taking the global cuisines to the screens of iOS users across the world.

In a span of 15 months after its launch in August 2014, ‘Star Chef’ — an iOS app with a rating of 4.7 on the App Store — has crossed $5 million in revenue.

The Udupi-based gaming studio 99Games Online Pvt Ltd (a subsidiary of Robosoft Technologies Pvt Ltd), which developed this app, is now targeting revenue of $100 million in next four years.

Theme Anila Andrade, Associate Vice-President (Operations) of 99Games, told BusinessLine that people resonate very well with food, and ‘Star Chef’ game is based on this universal theme. This casual game offers American, French, Korean, Italian and Asian cuisines with over 100 recipes to unlock as the game evolves. The gamers can even ‘grow’ onions, cabbages, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, mushrooms, apple, strawberries and grapes in the backyard; and can change the ‘ambience’ of their restaurant suitably, she said.

Culture Andrade said that a considerable time is being spent in research for the game, including the kind of recipes and their look and feel, and the look of kitchen appliances. 

The relationship of a cuisine with a particular culture also plays an important role in such games.

Referring to a change that had to be brought-in for one of the cuisines in a certain geographical area, she said the feedback from the gamers helped them to do this. The original presentation on the game had conveyed a different meaning in that culture. To a query on why the company focused on iOS, she said the developers wanted to make sure that they had a game that was not only well polished and well received, but also had the potential to monetise before going to Android (the company will launch the Android version of the game next month.) The iOS platform was used to validate monetisation and scalability, she said.

A major portion of monetisation is being done through in-app purchases. A user can spend a minimum of $0.99 and a maximum of $99.99 for in-app purchases. North America and Asia Pacific regions put together contribute 70 per cent to the total revenue. Europe contributes the rest, she said.

It took around six months to reach the first $500,000 in revenue from this game. The $5 million-mark was crossed nine months after that. 

“The game is growing between 20 per cent and 25 per cent month-on-month in revenue. We are looking at grossing over $100 million in the next four years and also expanding the game to markets such as China, Japan and Latin America,” Andrade said. 

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