CLICK HERE FOR - Interview with Games2win CEO Alok Kejriwal - (Part I)

Established in 2006, Games2win.com today has presence in 23 countries across the globe and has a reach of 5 million unique users every week. In an exclusive interview with GamingXpress' Chaitra Shetty & Rohit Shirke, Games2win CEO Alok Kejriwal shares his insights on the serious business of casual games.

What is the current reach of Games2win?
We have 5 million users weekly on our portal from across the world. These are ComScore reported numbers from July 2009, but the biggest shocker is what we have achieved through piracy and this is a very important story. About a year and half back, we noticed that all our games were stolen and nothing could be done about it. So my partner and I invented a technology called Inviziads, where we put invisible ads in our games, they become visible on the pirate site. The more you steal from us, the better our reach becomes.

ComScore has started to measure that also and this July the number was 20 million users per month. Now, we are in the top 20 sites in the world as per a news release by ComScore because of our pirated games and our own games. I call it moving with the times. A lot of gaming companies are moving in denial. China and India will always be a pirated market, you cannot stop it.

Casual games make a lot of money, if they get popular to begin with and if you understand the philosophy behind a casual game. The point is to make people have fun. To pay you for having fun and for brands to pay you to meet these people.

Do you look for a specific advertiser for a particular game that you have created?
We don’t do advergames. Contests2win does advergames. Games2win builds games for consumers' enjoyment. Then we say this game is going to become popular and invite brands to advertise on those games. We don’t sell by category also as then it becomes very difficult to micro sell. You are watching sports today but I can bet that you want to watch romance tomorrow. We all are human beings and we need to market everything.

What is the kind of user group that you have in terms of age group and according to that what are the brands that advertise on Games2win?
The user group or the target group changes wildly across countries. In India its mainly the Indian internet audience consisting of 75% males and 25% females under which 15 to 18 years is initial and 18 to 31 years is the core target group and it gets smaller as we go 35 and above. In a market like U.S we have 85% girls less than 13 years, so it’s very diverse. In China the ratio is 50:50 for boys and girls, whereas in Brazil the boys playing games are a lot more than girls.

The kinds of brands that come on board Games2win are mostly FMCG companies, who try to connect with people. In America children under 13 are usually under parental supervision and therefore a lot of brands reach out to their mothers through Games2win.

If you watch cartoon channels there would be ads for dalda or other products which mothers would be interested in, as kids that age don’t generally watch TV alone. Similarly in gaming, therefore we involve a very important house maker. If you go to see, the American or the Indian women actually sit on the spending seat of the house. She spends the most amount of money in the house, so she is the most important person anyway and we thankfully have them through games. So FMCGs, telecom companies, lots of travel companies, lots of car companies in the U.S choose to save money by internet advertising instead of TV ads.

In India, we have had huge success with media companies like Zee and advertisers like Nokia coming on board very often. We also sell a lot of inventory on Orkut, so brands get exposure on Orkut through our games. Tata Sky, Intel and the FMCG companies are the main advertisers.

Games2win is present in 23 other countries right now, so how does the business development work on that side?
In the U.S we now have a physical office and a physical guy who is managing proceedings and in the rest of the market we are doing ad network sales. We are talking to Google on a one on one basis and getting a deeper relationship going with them rather than putting an ad tag somewhere. We have a lot of independent ad network companies in these countries by our business development teams who talk to them. So it’s pretty much done on the air, through the wire.

How many games are released per month and in terms of development, how much of it is done by you and how much of it is acquired?
Right now we develop 3 games a week, so we are releasing 12 games per month; our target is to reach 20 games a month by December. Each and every game is made within the studios of Games2win, no outsourcing. We have had a few developers here and there but conceptually it’s all moving in-house. We have a 40 man team of developers and around 3 or 4 people work on a game at any given time.

We have four creative guys here who just sit and come up with ideas, so creative directors, copywriters, art director, art illustrator, art designers, web designers, technical heads, programmers, business developers and web masters are the basically what that team is constituted of.

Overall we have about 55 people here. Apart from India there is an office in the U.S which is the business development office and there are offices in Delhi and Bangalore which are the sales offices, as all our brand owners are in Delhi and Bangalore.

How much of manpower or investment does a casual game call for?
It typically consumes about 100 hours of development and I would say that it would roughly cost about INR 1.5 lacs to make a casual game.

There are different language options available on Games2win, so in terms of localization, is it also done in house or have you outsourced it?
Everything is done in house. We have a lot of internet tools that we use to figure out various languages and keep improving our feature. We keep throwing it to consumers, we keep getting them beta tested. Everything is done in house.