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| Gaming firms eye big bucks from elections | |
| K Rajani Kanth / Hyderabad March 25, 2009, 1:17 IST | |
Election
2009 is revitalising the Indian gaming companies’ interest in
developing games based on political and election themes for online and
mobile platforms. “It’s raining subscribers for us, especially youth,
and is a time to rake in more moolah,” they say, with most of them
putting the development of other genre of games on the back burner for
the time being.
“Every
gaming company in India is now after developing political games for the
reason being simple. It’s seasonal unlike other genre of casual online
games and brings back the returns within 2-3 months. The market is
going to be flooded with more such stuff”, said L Maruti Sanker,
managing director of 7Seas Technologies that launched the country’s
first political game recently at an investment of Rs 25 lakh. The
company’s gaming portal onlinerealgames.com is witnessing about 100,000
visitors a day, he adds.
Following suit, Mumbai-based Game2Win has released two games – Singh
is King and Stock Market Suicide – for the online market, which is
expected to touch $700 million in the next 3 years from the present
$300 million.
Echoing the sentiment, Alok Kejriwal, founder and chief executive
officer of Games2win says though it is difficult to project revenues
for such topical political games, the company expects these to add 1
per cent to its revenues.
“We are planning to launch two more special games – Mascot Chimpoo
and Poll – for these elections targeted at gamers in the 18-25 age
group on Orkut since it’s the largest community of young people and can
become very viral,” he adds.
Another Mumbai-based internet media company Insite Digital has
launched Politicking, the age-old game of snakes and ladders, now
adapted to the general elections. It is set to launch eight more
political games by mid-April, including The Indian Political League for
which the company has already registered the domain name, with a total
investment of Rs 1.25 crore.
“Our current focus is to attract youth through these games via
social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Orkut. We aspire to
have a million registered users for these games and expect to get the
return on investment in the next two months,” says Amit Tripathi,
managing director of Insite Digital.
The promising story of Indian political games doesn’t end here, as
mobile gaming companies too are gearing up to plunge into this arena.
Mumbai-based Nazara Technologies took to the concept of developing
political games after the US elections. “We believe that games based on
this concept do fairly well. Initially, we will be launching two
political games for mobile devices by the third week of April. Our
target audience will be the Indian youth,” says Nitish Mittersain,
chief executive of the Rs 35-crore company.
Nazara has tied up with mobile operators in India like Vodafone,
Airtel and Tata Indicom for distribution of its games. “Our current
subscriber base is 1 million. This will grow to 1.2 million with these
political games. Also, this will increase our revenues by Rs 50 lakh,”
Mittersain adds.
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