A few years back, the online gaming business in India got a shot in the arm with the launch of Reliance ADAG’s Zapak.com.
The company launched a massive advertising and promotional spree during the launch, which saw the masses getting hooked to the genre.
Popularity of online gaming has grown manifold among Indian users since then, but the website still nowhere ranks amongst the global biggies.
So when Alok Kejriwal, co-founder and CEO of Games2win.com, launched his own online gaming portal in December 2006, he wanted to make sure that his model worked internationally as well.
“You cannot get a significant position in the list of global sites if you’re just a gaming site targeted at India. We discovered this very early into the business,” he says.
Kejriwal’s site is now the 40th most popular online gaming destinations in the world, as per comScore. Its strongest contender from India, Zapak.com, doesn’t even figure in the top 200.
The global user base of gamers is likely to increase, what with search engines like Game Curry making it even easier for users to search for games of their choice online.
The popularity of these games inevitably led to piracy. Kejriwal says games are stolen within minutes of going live. To counter this, his firm has developed a software, Invizi Ads, which embeds invisible ads into a game that the pirate doesn’t notice.
“This means, the more people rob it, the richer we become. We’ve already got about 150 billion ad impressions since its launch in March,” Kejriwal adds.
To generate revenues, Games2win’s next focus area is social gaming applications. “We can now take brands to Orkut and other social network platforms. All this, keeping in mind the hygiene factors. Typically, consumers don’t like to send branded messages to their friends. There is a resistance,” he says.
About the future of online games, Kejriwal says money would come from in-game sales.
“For example, in our game London Bus, if you want to park your vehicles, you can actually pay a pound and make people do it for you. In the future of gaming, you’ll do stuff that you do in real life,” he adds.
