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's your view of the market for casual games in India, in terms of size, the number of users and the revenue potential?
I think overall India has never been a gaming market so far, so we are not talking about seeing structural changes or seasonal shifts or long term changes happening. I mean there was nothing to make any changes happen. The good news is that gaming is beginning to catch up in this country today. So if you quickly have a look at it historically all that gaming has been so far is Counter-Strike. I think there are around 5000 gaming cafe's in India, so 5000 cyber cafes X 10 gives us around 50,000 gamers. These are LAN café's or wi-fi café's. You can't call a country of a billion in which 50,000 people playing Counter Strike a country of gamers.

What's happening in my view just to answer your question is that the browser is now in front of everybody's face, not just for an hour a day but for 12 hours a day. The browser has to come into the workplace as well as home, home because of education and workplace because it is a tool to work. The browser is the window to the world today and a lot of people in India are experiencing their first bout of gaming through casual games thanks to the browser. So I would bet there are as many people playing 'Farmville' and 'Texas holdem' poker in India as many there are playing Counter Strike or maybe even more. This means that casual gaming even after arriving around six months or a year ago has taken the country by storm.

I am talking about share ware here. If you are sharing, you are touching people. If you are touching people then brands get interested because brands want more and more people. They don't really care how those people got contacted as long as you contacted them.

The second fundamental in terms of revenue is, India has never been a market that respects or pays premium for entertainment, you pay for entertainment but you never pay premium. One of the reasons is that, we release three movies a day. So if there is a market where three movies get released a day then you don't care, you can watch anything you want anytime. Another reason is piracy, and I'll be honest with you. Over a period of time I have started saying that is it really piracy or what? No one really knows because even that definition is blurring so if no one is going to pay for original content and people are going to enjoy shared content, I may rephrase IP v/s piracy then what's the business model?

I am talking about share ware here. If you are sharing, you are touching people. If you are touching people then brands get interested because brands want more and more people. They don't really care how those people got contacted as long as you contacted them. That's why a brand would put money on a hoarding at a railway station or in a football field or anywhere else because it touches people, so if freeware or shareware is the model where games are being played, brands are coming behind that. So my belief is that brands and advertising in India is the nirvana for gaming because brands have the pockets to sustain the spending for consumers, the consumers like free stuff and games is the golden thread that stitches these two together. So consumers love games and brands love consumers and that's the golden cycle.

What about Console games?
I am very bearish because I think the console business in India will die eventually, forget surviving but it will die as the hardware is too expensive. Hardware cost is alright to a certain extent but again I would argue that parents in the same household would rather get their child a P.C. A console on the other hand puts gaming in the face of parents and that is what they hate. Indian kids are policed by their parents till they die. That's our culture and in our D.N.A so we have got to love it and that's the beauty about India, so they will listen to their parents and anything that looks negative, anti studies or anti career or anti social will be a strict NO NO. So the console essentially belongs to the big American family room where the parents are at work or divorced and the kids are lying with the console, tummy upwards on their large carpet and nobody cares what's going on. But in a cramped household in an Indian city a console is a strict no, so that's a very big reason.

Adver games essentially are very boring. Consumers don't like adver games beyond a point. They don't want to play with brands. Content that is free and consumer centric but funded by a brand or ads supports gaming and not adver gaming.

The most important reason being the expensive cost of development. Let's take the example of the Moserbaer effect on content. Moserbaer is saying, "Don't even think of buying a pirated piece of junk, just buy the original good quality cheap content". They are pricing their goods at such low rates that if the same youth or teen is getting a movie for approximately 80 bucks or 60 bucks with which he is getting a whole lot of songs for free how will he ever pay Rs.1500 for a cartridge for a game? So you have to bring the price to his horizon, you cant expect him to travel to America to buy it, and Rs.80 for a console game in India would work if there where 10 million bases sold which is also not there that is why I am very bearish on the large format gaming market which is P.C and console.

It's like brands and games go together and brands want to touch the consumers, don't you think that kind of adver gaming would work for consoles if tried?
That's a great point and I am happy to clarify. I never meant adver games. Adver games essentially are very boring. Consumers don't like adver games beyond a point. Consumers don't want to play with brands. I meant games for the sake of gaming with ads in between them to fund the free game so it's essentially a Games2win model or a Zapak model. I didn't mean adver games. Adver games are fine. Khatron Ka Khiladi is the format; it's the content that matters. It could be sponsored by one or two people. You can have a Hero Honda bike in it but it cannot be about a brand. So that's what I meant. Content that is free and consumer centric but funded by a brand or ads supports gaming and not adver gaming.