| Is there any particular
genre of games that works best in India? Or does it vary from region to region?
Actually very much, India is very hot
on Cricket and car parking games. The sense is similar in the U.K funnily enough.
It’s absolutely the reverse in the U.S, here dress up, cooking and romance
are big time hits. When I talk about the romance it’s the soft delicate school
girl sweet heart romance and nothing beyond that. It’s a very delicate balance
that you have to touch. There is nothing that is indecent or over the top, but
it makes a 13 year old girl feel comfortable about the other sex. We get a lot
of research done in the U.S, a lot of teenage girls don’t know what it is
to kiss a boy. They don’t know what happens when they kiss a boy. So they
do a kissing game on Games2win and the guy’s eyes go crazy and they feel
very happy as that’s the effect they are going to have on a boy. This
is something that we have come to know after a lot of behavioral studies. Dress
up is a huge genre and so is cooking. A lot of young girls want to emulate their
mothers. They want to be like their mothers but they don’t want the hard
work that their mom does. So they don’t necessarily have to be committed
to the game as the moms have to be committed to their jobs. They can just run
away whenever they want. There is a game called Super Mom which is like taking
care of babies. There are really cute babies but they are really annoying. So
if one gets fed up of taking care of the babies one can just shut down the P.C
and run away. You can’t do that to real babies. How
do you market your site and tap the new audience?
The
world’s biggest sites have been built without marketing. There’s only
one word for marketing in our dictionary and that is content. Content is our marketing.
The minute we make bad content, people will stop coming to our site no matter
what we do. The minute you have good content on your site, you start getting people.
You keep wondering where they came from. So the beauty about the internet is that
the right content and the right service attract people virally. If you look at
Miniclip, have they advertised ever? Unfortunately people who are advertising
are stuck somewhere either in their content or in their service. They are convincing
people to visit a site which otherwise would not be visited. So I actually say
that if you are advertising an internet property, something is wrong with you. But
incase if you are trying to tap a new market, how do you go about introducing
your site then?
Take an example of
Naukri and Rediff. They will tell you that they have grown the market over the
years virally until they reached a stage where nobody in India was remaining to
be tapped. Now they are growing the category, which means if you and I are on
Rediff they are telling the Peon outside to log on to Rediff and look for a girl
to get married to. When you grow to a stage where you have used up the category,
then to grow the category you have to advertise in traditional media but not till
then. Games2win and Zapak together
hold one third of the traffic of Miniclip in India from Indians. Why? Miniclip
never advertised in India at all. But 3 times the Games2win and Zapak users from
India go to Miniclip. So I don’t believe I need to advertise, as Miniclip
is telling me that in your own house I have got x million gamers who are coming
to me and not to you my friend and I don’t advertise, I make do on good content.
I don’t have shockwave, I don’t have the class that they have so what
on earth am I going to advertise about? So read between the lines and those who
need to advertise are in deep trouble. How
is you latest quiz game feature doing?
It’s
suffering; I think it’s a bad section, its not working. We are trying to
push it. The reason we have done it, is that there are a lot of mothers who don’t
like to play these silly games they like to play a slightly more intellectual
format of games. So it’s aimed at the companion of the gamer, it’s not
for the gamer. On the same lines
are you planning to come up with something like e learning for kids?
We
are thinking, the deal is that it has to be fun, we don’t want to make it
school. We want kids to run away from school and play our site. So I have to make
it fun something like "you teach the teacher" or something on those
lines How much of development are
you doing for social networking sites?
We
have zeroed in on two networks namely Orkut and Facebook, we have tried our hand
and failed. If you look at Orkut, Slapster is our application and so is ICL. We
are trying our hand very hard on Facebook but it’s really tough in terms
of penetration. It’s like fighting a dinosaur but we are trying our level
best. The reason why we are even attempting to fight this dinosaur is that we
have this bazooka that nobody else has and that bazooka is the 20 million users
that we control, users that are also on Facebook. It’s the same group of
people who go from Games2win to Facebook. We just want people to know that a Games2win
game is also on Facebook, so play it on Facebook. It’s an extension rather
than a new category build up. We currently
have 23 applications on Facebook already. They are doing pretty ok but I won’t
boast about it because I don’t have any traction compared to the big boys. Do
you have M.M.O.G’s?
We don’t
have M.M.O.Gs but we have a blend of S.M.O.Gs (Social multiplayer online games).
Its social and its multiplayer, it’s online and it’s a game, it’s
like a Farmville, you would call it a S.M.O.G. On
a concluding note, do casual games actually make money?
Yes,
they do. They 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.
A lot of people who make casual games don’t know how to make money. A lot
of game companies are so hell bent on making the game, being artistic, being whacked
out, that they don’t think about the commerce part correctly. Entrepreneurs
get diverted from the money making focus. Games always make money. People don’t
know how to make money out of games. | 
