Online gaming
becoming big business worth Rs 100 crore
BANGALORE: Gaming is no longer what little children do to
while away their summer holidays. Online gaming, albeit rather small in
India, is big business today, worth an estimate Rs 100 crore in top line
revenue.
Alok Kejriwal, CEO and founder of Games2Win.com, an online
games company, says that the industry is growing at up to five times in a
year.
He said that gaming was entertainment and was a move away
from the television. "The third and fourth screens of computer and mobile
screens has become popular, leading to the growth in the gaming industry,"
he said. Kejriwal said that the main competition the industry faced was
from Bollywood, having to compete with real time entertainment like movies
and television.
Games2win.com's latest offering is The Great Indian
Arranged Marriage, an online game that takes the player through the
various levels of a typical Indian wedding, beginning with the phone
conversation between the boy and girl and culminating in the actual
wedding and the reception. Talking about the game, Kejriwal said that the
web portal was focusing on conceptualizing games that were relevant to the
Indian scenario.
"About 80 percent of the traffic is from abroad
for the game and the average time spent is seven minutes, as against five
to six minutes for other games," he said.
The popularity of the
game has led several communities to ask Kejriwal to design games around
their wedding customs. He said that Games2Win.com was considering games
around a Christian and a Malay wedding.
"With a strong focus on
India, games in the future will be designed with an Indian flavour,
without immersing the player totally into the culture," he
said.
Kejriwal further said that in the pipeline for the portal was
make-me-over games that will have sarees, salwar suits and bridal wear,
apart from the usual shooting games and car races. The games developer
will design Indianised games for a global audience, he
added.
Games2Win.com is also in the process of deploying some
popular Massive Multiplayer Online (MMOG) games for the Indian
marketplace. |
