Play Games24x7, an online and mobile gaming platform is leveraging on technology to make playing Indian card games, like Teen Patti and Matka, a better, immersive experience. Backed by a strong technical support team, seamless payment gateways and engaging user interface, Play Games24x7 launched Laila777 on mobile and web, which has seen over 3.2+million registrations, clearly indicating the role technology has played in transforming the experience of playing card games. In a candid conversation with CXO Today, Bhavin Pandya, Founder and CEO - Play Games24x7 Pvt. Ltd shared the future prospect of the gaming industry along with security concerns in the gaming industry. Excerpts.
Please tell us about the current online gaming market in India and what are its future prospects?
As per industry experts, India will continue to be one of the fastest growing gaming markets in the world, due to various factors such as the easy access to budget smartphones, increased mobile internet usage, increase in usage of tablets, and of course, growing number of traditional gaming apps.
FICCI-KPMG report predicts a 27 per cent growth in gaming industry revenues. In fact, we at Play Games24x7, have been seeing a 100 per cent growth year on year for past 5 years, and we see that in 2016 too, our player adoption and growth is on a fantastic growth path.
Our approach is embedded in our belief that people like playing games they grew up playing. Localization is the key to success in India and user trends have confirmed the same. We are focusing heavily on the localization of games and technologies with a user-friendly interface. It, therefore, becomes easy to relate to the game and as a result, makes it easier for players to at least try the game once. If the game quality and experience is good, they continue to play more. In fact, Indian gaming players are dominating the gaming segment with their local offerings.
There are three key trends that I foresee in the coming years:
1) Indian Game Studios Competing with International Giants - As more and more funds are flowing into game studios in India, studios are all set to innovate and disrupt the mobile games market. Tiger Global and Sequoia have invested in a number of Indian game companies. Tiger Global funded Play Games24x7, which is the market leader in Mobile games in India. Play Games24x7 launched their first social game under the banner of Ultimate Games and their first indigenously developed Ultimate Teen Patti, India's top 5 grossing game.
2) Newer Indian Flavour Mobile Games - India is a market where brands localize their content whether it is food from McDonalds or shoes from Bata. Same is the case for games. The games that become really popular in India have a local flavour. For example, if you see Matka on Laila777, it performs substantially better than the top 5 grossing games on the Google Play Store in India. We launched our first game called Ultimate Teen Patti and after seeing a massive up-take, we launched Ultimate Matka and Ultimate Poker.
3) Augmented Reality - Proliferation of smart-phones has become a significant motivator for mobile game developers to start building games that bridge the gap between real life and virtual world through augmented reality games. Such games can be used for driving real change in consumer behaviour. And we expect some early stage action to happen in this space in 2016.
The advent of AR and VR could lead us down very different paths in entertainment, gaming and communication industry. With new advances in gaming technology, gaming companies will make full use of virtual reality. This will hopefully lead to new types of games which will push the boundaries as well as generate new experiences. We believe both AR and VR will succeed in the future.
Indian games industry has come of age. Earlier, most game developers developed games for the US and European markets and later brought them to India. It no longer works that way! Traditional Indian games are now redefining the digital games industry in India. With Laila777, we have developed a strong connect with Indian players as people like playing games that grew up playing. Laila777 offers the simplest online multiplayer matka game in popular formats for free, and cash. From being restricted to the living room, Laila777.com is played at a competitive level (tournaments), improving the skill-set of gamers. It is currently the India's No. 1 real money game.
Technology is at the heart of everything we do to provide safe, simple and hassle free consumer experience supported with offline assistance. For all our games, we provide high-end technology interface, robust payment gateway, and user-friendly mobile app. Standard tools like A/B testing and statistical analysis are rigorously applied.
From the security point of view, while we at Play Games24x7 have taken various initiatives, including a quarterly audit of all our systems to ensure that there aren't any loopholes, we have not faced any security issues.
We believe in prevention is better than cure and hence will continue ensuring our systems are extremely secure and that we are able to fend off any misuse.
We run two different business models - one for Laila777, our skill games business, and another for Ultimate Games, our freemium mobile games business. On Laila777.com, players can choose to play for real money, and we collect a small percentage of the amount that is played for as our service charge. In our freemium mobile games, players start out with some free virtual currency which is required to play, and we top up their accounts every few hours.
