Games2win & Indiagames Founders talk about online gaming and its future!
In two separate interviews Alok Kejriwal the founder and CEO of Games2win.com and Vishal Gondal the Founder of Indiagames.com talk about gaming piracy, online gaming, its huge potential, their companies and their strategies towards becoming the leading player. We have done a mashup like web 2.0 of the two interviews and presented them below.. If you want to read the entire interviews you can read it here and here.
Thoughts by Vishal and Alok on game piracy
Vishal -"The problem in India is not that people don’t game. The problem is that people buy pirated games. Nobody was paying for legal games. Indiagames is trying to build an eco system where price points are such that the consumer does not want to pirate anymore."
Alok – "Unfortunately, in India, there are also piracy problems. PC games are not popular because the minute a PC game is launched, it gets pirated. Online gaming, where there’s no piracy and no question of IP (intellectual property) getting stolen, is to me a very big frontier. Exploiting that is going to be a really interesting story."
What is their Companies Strategy?
Vishal – "We started off as an online games company. We did free flash games where money came from advertising. However, we found that it was not scalable and limited. So we took a call to move out of online gaming and into the services business."
Then we saw the opportunities in mobile gaming and so we became a developer and then a publisher of mobile games. Last year we returned to online gaming with a new strategy games on demand. We have a subscription based gaming service. Users can play unlimited games for a flat fee. We are about to launch a Godzilla game. We are about to release a cricket Twenty20 game. Right now we are leading in the mobile space. Five years from now I see Indiagames leading in all gaming spaces.
Alok – "Games2win is making games which have Indian themes, which are topical and have our culture and vibrancy. You can go and play a Bush whacking game, but you don’t really care about that. Today, if I make a Laloo game, you will feel more funny about it. I think our job is to create the right content. Having said so, there are 30 million Indians on the Internet, and they better be interested! That’s where we see the numbers coming in. All the assumptions that we had for the Indian market have been almost turned on their head. The Indian consumer is not that crazy about Indian content. He likes a touch of Indianness, but it’s not like everything has to be dipped in Indian oil. (Hence) universal game ideas with an Indian touch (is what we plan to do), so that our identity is preserved."
How are Indians taking to online gaming?
Vishal – "Globally gaming is bigger than film. In the US, it is bigger than Hollywood. The same thing will happen in India eventually. In every mature market where it has spread it has done that – like Korea, China. India has a lot of young people who do not watch ‘Saas Bahu soaps.
They are not as much into current television, which is dominated by the housewives. I am not saying that this segment is bad. However going forward more people will get into interactive entertainment. Gaming is part of this, along with activities like Second Life. More and more people will take to the virtual world."
Alok – "I think it’s very low on the radar right now. A lot of people think it’s only for kids. We are seeing a lot of armchair gamers. People are sitting in their offices in lunch breaks and playing a quick 20-minute casual game. We are also seeing some women coming on board because the games are interesting. For a cyber user, it’s still very low on priority, but it’s going to shoot up very high."
What about Tie ups?
Vishal – "The UTV deal (UTV bought a majority stake in Indiagmes) allows us to be a part of the bigger picture. Bindass is UTV’s effort tap into the youth. The youth want gaming and so we will work with Bindass to see how we can integrate gaming with their offerings.
UTV also has a stake in Ignition, which is a console game publisher. Between Ignition and us we have capabilities across all platforms. We will be looking at how we can exploit IP into the console space and vice versa. UTV will also create IP in the form of movies and TV shows. So we can adapt some of these into games, which we then market."
Alok – "We tied up with Zee for the ‘Prince of Kurukshetra’ game. Lots of FMCGs are running on to the Internet. Game sites are an ideal advertising platform because their content is very suited for a young audience and it’s Indian. Rather than doing specific tie-ups that are very onerous and difficult to manage, we want to just make sure that our game pipeline comes out without a problem, and then sell the site to advertisers."
In his interview Alok also talks about In Game advertising and how it still has time to take off in India. He also give his views on competition like Zapak.com by Reliance. All in all both interviews are worth reading to get an insight on how online gaming entrepreneurs are looking at the market.
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