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The Udupi-based 99Games Online Pvt Ltd, which makes games for mobile phones and tablets, has now entered Hollywood.
In its association with Bollywood, the company had developed a mobile game for the blockbuster movie Dhoom: 3 .
Rohith Bhat, Chief Executive Officer of 99Games, said the company has developed a mobile game for Walt Disney Picture’s movie Million Dollar Arm .
It is a movie inspired by a story where sports agent JB Bernstein discovers India’s pro baseball players Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel who eventually end up signing contracts in the MLB (major league baseball).
Bhat said that the ‘Million Dollar Arm Game’ is scheduled to launch on May 6 across all platforms (Windows Phone, iOS, Android, BlackBerry). The movie is scheduled for release on May 16.
Anila Andrade, Producer at 99Games, said that the company got into this venture when Seven Figures Management (intellectual property owners of the Million Dollar Arm franchise) and Microsoft got ‘99Games’ onboard to design and develop games around this franchise.
Stating that one of the major issues in gaming is discoverability, Andrade said the company is trying to see how it can solve this problem by working with well-known intellectual property (IP) holders.
“This model worked for us in Dhoom: 3 The Game, which has already crossed over 11 million downloads across stores, and clocking in about 10,000 daily downloads even today,” she said.
Getting visibility When asked to explain about the role of IP in app discoverability, Andrade said there are two million apps in Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
Hence getting visibility on the stores is extremely difficult. An average user has 40 apps or games on his/her devices but only uses about 15. In such a situation, letting the user know about the awesomeness of the game that they must download and play plays a crucial role.
A strong IP normally tends to fill this void and helps in better discoverability.
In the case of ‘Dhoom:3 The Game’, the audience was already familiar with the Dhoom franchise. Hence when the game was out and people were searching for Dhoom they noticed that there was a mobile game created around the franchise, and they went ahead and downloaded it.
Stating that the company is trying to replicate this with the ‘Million Dollar Arm Game’, she said the movie based on this franchise is one of Walt Disney Picture’s most anticipated releases.
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