A recent report suggests the overall gaming revenue in India to be somewhere around 167 million dollars. How much of it do you think comes from casual games?
I'll be honest with you as I think 90% of it comes from casual games because mobile games are casual games as the format of casual games. If your question is how much of it comes from online games I would say very little. I seriously doubt the methodology of generating these numbers. I think a lot of it is exported work development and that is not consumer market. You could be an animation studio, working for five years on a gaming project and if you record the revenue as animation and gaming then that's a very different story. They should break down those 167 million dollars into consumer revenue and trade revenue, which they have not done. From a console point of view I think the numbers are horrible and if you include the number of PS2's and PS3's being sold in India, I think the numbers are just declining.

Only 2% of people who play any console game ever know how to complete it, 98% abandon it at some point of the game or play the game for five years without going beyond a certain level because the level of difficulty becomes too high. So if the game costs USD 20 million to make, there is USD 10 or 12 million of content that very few human eyes are ever going to see. That's a complete waste of effort, time and money.

At GDC this year the Sony online representatives went on stage and said, "We don't think we will ever make another Play Station". It's almost facing extinction. The consoles are becoming the Fiats and the Ambassadors of the gaming business except the magical console called the Wii. The guys at Nintendo said, "Was the content on the console bad or was the console bad". They figured out, everybody likes to play. Suppose I am not a gamer, I am a businessman, I don't have the time to play a game, I want to play Call of Duty but I don't have 80 hours to understand the game and then start playing it. My epiphany of what was wrong when games came when I was trying to play flight simulator. I have documented this, it took me 14 hours to just get a Jumbo Jet off the runway and that thing crashed within three minutes and I said, "Look, there is something phenomenally wrong in this business".

So the Wii comes along and says we will be the anti thesis of content on the console, we will not say no to the console. They created a console that is so casual and so down to earth and easy to play that the content won the hearts of millions and of course the innovation of the design. But what if the console today also plays very casual games, would that work? Probably it would, the console guys got so stuck up in extremely good games that they just alienated 99% of the market. So here's a data point for you, only 2% of people who play any console game ever know how to complete it, 98% abandon it at some point of the game or play the game for five years without going beyond a certain level because the level of difficulty becomes too high. So if the game costs USD 20 million to make, there is USD 10 or 12 million of content that very few human eyes are ever going to see. That's a complete waste of effort, time and money.

There are very few people in this world that could make transformers, so easy casual ready to go and ready to forget formats capture millions and cost thousands.

Talking about monetizing casual games, what are the various verticals that you have tapped?
The obvious, the lowest hanging fruit has been advertising inventory in and around games, so a pre role, mid role and a post role are essential. A standard industry ad 300 x 250 works like a charm. It's because it's in the content literally in front of your eyes, people can't avoid it or in other words, people see it. If they find it interesting enough, they click on it. So the advertisers are happy because the CTR's (Click through Rates) are extremely high. The volume is extremely high so between two or three sites you can buy millions of users. The destination site receives traffic and communication is a part of the overall communication. If Nokia is doing a TV ad, this 300 x 250 window can even become a video ad to put inside the game so the format is compatible with what the agency thought of.

The next branch is adver gaming. Brands like it, investment is higher, reach gets sacrificed as you don't know how many people can play that game but the involvement and engagement is extremely high. So brands tend to play a dual game, they buy the media and also create an adver game. So we have mastered these, the advertising and the brand gaming. The threat is that, how long can you depend on brands to pay your salary? When will that ever stop?

So what iTunes did for the world at large, it taught teens and tweens that something can be bought digitally for 99 cents and that's a song. You can buy a song through an iTunes account or an iTunes card, store 10 dollars in your account and buy 10 songs as and when you go along. So nibble at digital cookies and buy as you walk. That led to the explosion of consumer revenue for gaming which is what Zynga has been able to capture really well and what we are planning to capture very shortly. So we are now going to branch out on making games that the consumers will play for the fun of themselves buy virtual goods, exchange and trade. I think virtual goods are a huge market and people like Zynga have done really well in that space. Even we are chasing that space like any good gaming company and it will also free us from the chains of being tied up to advertisers.

It's actually going to be, either you buy items that cost money or you buy a subscription which allows you to buy a list of items within your subscription period. Something like a buffet where you pay one time and eat all you can or pay only for what you want. We are going to work both models but whatever you buy is content. The content is all linked to one word that I love and that is vanity. People like to be vain people like to show off and become more clothed then others, accessories more than others so you invest be it in real life or online.

Let me give you a perspective, the most valuable commodity in this world today is the eye ball. The eye ball is not cheap, we don't think of our eyes as dearly as much as we should. For example on Games2win we get 5 million unique users per week, these are ComScore figures and according to them Zapak is now less than a million and ComScore records are time spend for 31 or 41 million minutes.

Now I want to ask people, "Where do you buy 41 million minutes from?" Internet expands time! So what happens is a spot on AXN at 7:33 PM cannot change, it cannot go to the third domain or it cannot go into a black hole. If you and I log on to AXN we will see the same advertisement. It will not change for anyone watching it, whereas if at 7:33 PM if you and I log on to Games2win we will see two different ads because time is expanding, the site is infinite. If 10 million people login to Games2win at 7:33 PM, I am serving 10 million different ads to 10 million people whereas on the television I am only serving one ad. Newspaper or a magazine is frozen time so is television or a hoarding, but the internet is infinite or you can call it a black hole. So therefore it infinitely expands revenue.

chaitra.shetty@animationxpress.com