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.