Day one: games studios in Mumbai

Friday, October 30, 2009 - 14:51 by Clare

Indian Games

First day of meetings and after an impressive breakfast we head out with our guide Tas to meet a couple of games companies. Despite a new bridge linking two sides of the city, traffic in Mumbai is terrible and it takes an hour and a half to get to each.

I hadn't really thought much about flash games (which both today's companies started with) before but Chris, Paul and Aneesh all make them in some shape or another (edit - as Chris' article below says "Today Flash games are amongst the most commonly consumed online media, achieving phenomenal success at low entry cost"). They may be considered by some to be "the easiest to make, easiest to play and easiest to forget" but 250 unique users play flash games online a month...

First we meet Alok Kerijiwal, founder of Games2Win. Having started off his working career in his father's sock business, he is now a serial entrepreneur and a charismatic business man. His business began with Contests2Win, which worked with all the Fortune 500 companies to create online competitions (which are very popular in the developing world). He also co-founded interactive agency Media2Win and sold Mobile2win, a China-based company, to Disney.

Games2Win is a global top 20 business with 25m unique users a month. It is VC funded and they publish 15 new games a month. He sees his business model not as internet hits based however, but as creating a channel where people drop in for specified periods of time (like MTV). His channel currently focuses on the teen and tween game market, with the Indian equivalent of Mills&Boon flash games, but they are developing a boys gaming channel currently too. Each game they make has a global target so stories are quite genericised and translated into 25 languages.

His business advice: don't do anything that costs money but doesn't create value. Don't experiment with your own IP. Don't spend money marketing your content. Ask and ye shall find.

I asked him why a man so focused on business wanted to meet with our delegation and it came down very much to the same things that motivate us to participate in networks in the UK - he likes Taz and has a good relationship with The British Council, he enjoys meeting new minds with difference perspectives and of course, there are potential sales opportunities.

In the afternoon we went to India Games, a company which started making flash advergames in the dot com boom and received its first round of finance in 2000. In 2002 it moved into mobile gaming and used its early entry in the market to create a dominant position, acquiring the rights to for the worldwide distribution of Spiderman mobile games as a stepping stone to building a reputation internationally.

The company does much more than flash games now, working with Universal, New Line, Warners, and acts as a complete service provider for the majority of India's mobile operators for entertainment content. They also have Games On Demand, a subscription site designed to address piracy through its pay as you go download service for PC games.

Both companies share a drive to move away from India as a place for outsourcing and have done this by creating and exploiting their own IP. They see huge amounts of untapped potential in the local market but have a global vision for their companies, seeing moving up the value chain as a mechanism for growth. Both were incredibly generous with their time (though am not sure what they made of iShed or The Pervasive Media Studio).

We capped off the day (after some great Indian food - my Ghee baby is developing nicely thank you) with a visit to a multiplex to see the opening night of London Dreams, a big Bollywood production that Aneesh has been doing some of the social media marketing for. Hugely enjoyable, despite it being almost entirely in Hindi.

Comments

All the points you raise

by Clare on Sat, 31/10/2009 - 3:05am

All the points you raise came directly from things Alok said in our meeting, I left them hesitant as i thought you might pick up on them... Very informative article too. Thank you.

Hi Clare, it's Chris

by Guest on Fri, 30/10/2009 - 10:29pm

Hi Clare, it's Chris Kempt!

Well done for getting a write up done so quickly and on a good job. With your permission, I'd like to explore a couple of points:
I’m not sure where you got your quote that Flash games are "the easiest to make, easiest to play and easiest to forget"... I'm not sure who said that but this is an interesting point that deserves to be expanded on. In my opinion Flash games *can* be fairly disposable experiences in the same way that a chocolate bar is fairly disposable however let’s remember that vast numbers of people enjoy consuming chocolate bars on a regular basis, it doesn't mean that they're valueless which is a different thing entirely.

With regard to games not appealing to major entertainment companies, I'm a bit confused as to where that came from? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the point your trying to make but I think there's actually been significant investment from all over the entertainment industry. The movie, music and TV industries all use them extensively both as a form of marketing and content in its own right. Viacom for example have invested hugely in flash games based properties such as Addicting Games, Shockwave.com, NeoPets and more.

Finally... just to be a complete pedant :O) "250 (million?) unique users play flash games online a month.." actually it's almost certainly considerably more than that, after all the top ten to fifteen portals alone make up that kind of figure and to date we’re aware of over 1000. The problem is it's a tricky audience to measure due to the unusually fragmented nature of the content ecosystem. If you're interested I recently wrote an article for contagious about this very point which you can find here: http://www.kempt.co.uk/articles/Contagious_Sept_09_Advergames.pdf

Anyway... sorry to soap-box a bit but we want to make people think we were paying attention right? :O)

pervasive media studio