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| Playing Cupid and making money too |
| K Rajani Kanth / Hyderabad Feb 11, 2010, 00:07 IST |
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With Valentine’s Day round the corner, Indian gaming companies are ready with innovative ideas to woo lovers.
Anand, a 27-year-old working with a multinational, relied on conventional practices like gifting red roses and dark chocolates on Valentine’s Day untill last year. This year, he is planning to do things differently — sending high-tech greeting cards through mobiles and gifting e-flowers, playing a romantic online game and then participating in a special contest to win an innovative valentine gift for his beloved.
Anand is one of the increasing number of youngsters who are going all out to express their affection in a new way. And with V-Day round the corner, Indian gaming companies are ready with innovative ideas to woo these cupid-struck lovers.
Consider this. Nazara Technologies, a Mumbai-based mobile entertainment and online gaming company, is offering five Valentine’s Day games. Besides, the company is going to provide high-tech greeting cards, which are easily accessible through the mobile as well as multi messaging service (MMS).
“Love in the 21st century moves on the back of the digital world where mobile phones play an important role in relationships. Mobile greeting cards are fun to send and receive. As a result, m-cards have become a popular means of wishing loved ones,” reasons Nitish Mittersain, chief executive officer of Nazara.
“Various studies show that teens are one of the highest mobile generators of value-added service revenues. Value-added services hold a tremendous revenue-generating potential, which is about $500 million (approximately Rs 2,300 crore) in India. Teens are well-informed about mobile services and are ready to spend on mobile content. Hence, we have designed our mobile greeting cards and MMSes keeping in mind the demand coming from this particular segment of consumers,” he says.
Nazara Technologies invested Rs 5 lakh per game, targetted at young urbans, and the revenues that it expects from these games on Valentine’s Day is Rs 1 crore.
According to Alok Kejriwal, chief executive officer of Mumbai-based Games2Win, there is only one format that works on V-Day... and that’s romance!.
Games2Win has over 50 games in love, romance and teen category that will be re-packaged for this Valentine’s Day. “This is our biggest thrust area and we will go all out. We add around 20 new games each year to this category,” Kejriwal says, adding the company had spent Rs 1 crore in developing these games.
The global population of the web is 1.2 billion users. Around 30 per cent are teenagers. And a fair number, around 10 per cent, express their love through sending e-greetings, buying virtual gifts and playing games online. So, that’s 36 million unique users that are expected to play V-Day games worldwide.
“We expect to serve approximately 2 million unique users (we receive 700,000 uniques a day across all our sites and in-game advertisements) over three days — February 12, 13 and 14 — the weekend runup to V-Day. These 2 million uniques will generate over 100 million ads for us (50 ads per visit). With the global ad rates being at $2 cost per thousand (CPM), we will earn about Rs 45 lakh from this season,” Kejriwal adds.
While Hyderabad-based independent game developer 7Seas Technologies Limited is launching a special game Love Hearts for V-Day on its onlinerealgames.com at an investment of Rs 2 lakh, the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Entertainment’s gaming subsidiary Zapak is offering three games based on the theme of love — Love Ka Kabootar, Love in Vacuum and Love Line.
“Besides, we have launched a special contest for Valentine’s Day. To enter the contest, the user needs to play the game of the day selected for the contest and beat a pre-set secret score. The score will help fill up the user’s lover’s heart. Once the user succeeds in filling up the heart, he/she will get three discount coupons on their favourite Valentine gifts,” says Rohit Sharma, chief executive officer of Zapak.
Social networking sites, which are turning into breeding grounds for gaming, are also gearing up for Valentine’s Day. For instance, Ibibo.com is introducing in-game special gifts and has launched a singing game wherein users can sing from their mobiles and gift their dedications and earn points.
“Our strength is social gaming, where the players’ involvement and engagement is repetitive. On one of our popular games, Ibibo Farms, we are introducing e-flowers which friends can gift to each other and also build their points. Besides, we are also launching a large catalogue of e-gifts and e-cards that gamers can exchange amongst each other this Valentine’s Day,” says Rahul Razdan, vice-president (communications and gaming), Ibibo.com.
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