A look at Rediff Games

By Ekalavya B • May 15, 2007

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We mentioned that India’s largest portal had joined the Rs 21 crore online gaming bandwagon last week.

So what is Rediff Games all about?
Currently they are in closed beta.

Click here to get a beta invitation.
(You’ll require a Rediff / Rediffmail iD by the way)

It does get a little tedious after that - so we’ll recommend reading this post before checking it out yourself.

Firstly you’ll have to download a 1.5 Mb setup file followed by a 57 Mb file.

Then you might have some problems while logging on the server. But once done you’ll be in:

Currently there are 4 games: Swordfish, Ironsides, Space Dhoom and Jewel Connect. Ironsides and Swordfish require further downloads of 13 Mb and 25 Mb respectively. These are both multi-player games.

This move directly kills off a huge chunk of cyber café gamers. No one would want to download approximately 100 Mb of stuff, just to get started up on a daily basis.

I tried playing Jewel Connect and Space Dhoom. Jewel Connect seemed quite absurd, while Space Dhoom limited me to the tutorial room.

Coins are the currency in their gaming world. One advantage of registering now is that you can demand for a lot of free coins, which might not be possible later.

Yet another warning is that, the 57 Mb bundle includes auto-installation of Rediff’s chat client – Rediff Bol. Perhaps a move to encourage users to give it a shot. ‘Chatting’ is an in-built gaming feature, so this might actually force users to use Rediff Bol for future chat purposes (Unless of course they swap Y!IM or GTalk ids).

Rediff would have a lot of tweaking to do before they bring their Games out of the ‘Closed Beta’ stage.

What’s going elsewhere in the Indian Online gaming scene?

Zapak has started selling downloadable games. These are priced at Rs 49+.

They actually have a game (Ancient Tripeaks) priced at Rs 399!

Zapak claims that within the first week of launch of another highly popular online game Zuma, the game got an average of 1,40,000 page views a day and 10,000 users are downloading the free-trial on a daily basis. (I’ll be delighted to know if even 100 have paid for it!?)

Zapak had an initial spend of approximately $ 2 million in marketing etc.
That would equate to approximately 20 Lakh people buying their Cricket game – which definitely seems to be their most popular game.

And similar to the Rediff move, when IAMAI says Rs 21 crore is the Online Gaming market – I hope it doesn’t simply include downloading a game from the net and playing it offline.

I’d really like to see download stats for games at Zapak. They should have waited a little more before selling games. Zapak Gaming Ads have almost disappeared and the concentration seems to have shifted to ZapakMail, where they are clearly taking on Rediffmail.

But online gaming is becoming popular to some extent.

Hyderabad-based 7Seas Technologies have also joined the race and have launched OnlineRealGames.com. Desi themes galore (Cock fighting game!) – and they are also offering Email, Chat, Wallpapers etc etc.

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