Reliance Entertainment Digital CEO Shares Blockbuster Tips for Startups Wanting to Expand to Indian Gaming Market

India has huge gaming market potential, and the questions enveloping the mind of entrepreneurs would definitely be about how they can tap into that market. To help answer that, we spoke with Manish Agarwal (pictured right), the CEO of Reliance Entertainment Digital (parent company of global gaming brand Reliance Games and the Indian gaming brand Zapak) to hear his tips for startups who wish to expand to the Indian market.

Reliance Games itself is one of the biggest game developers and publishers in India right now. The company has crossed 100 million game downloads over its 350 games in the last 12 months, with 20 million games getting downloaded per month. It is definitely a great feat considering that Reliance Games recorded a mere 50,000 downloads just 14 months earlier. Besides India, Reliance Games has gaming studios in Japan and Korea. The company is definitely doing something right.

Manish starts off by explaining about the Indian tech market as a whole. The country is a big feature phone market, and the signs indicate that the trend is moving towards the Android platform being the king there. There are about 550 million mobile phones in India, with 120 million of them subscribing to data plans, and around 10 to 12 million active 3G users. There are about 20 million Android phones in India currently and in the next 12 months this number is likely to increase to 50 million phones. 50 percent of new phones being sold right now are Android phones.

No manga, please!

If you want your game to appeal to Indian customers, Manish believes that you don’t need to localize the game that much as English is widely understood by consumers. One of the secret recipes to getting a huge audience is developing a game around well known intellectual property (IP), such as characters or celebrities. Manish says that two IP types work well in India; IPs based on movies or very popular TV characters, and the nation’s favorite sport: cricket.

Games with western art styles, he says, seem to work better with Indian customers rather than Asian-style games; that’s because east Asian games are very localized to the local culture – think of Japanese manga, for example – and Indians can’t associate so well with them. “Western culture is more acceptable,” says Manish.

And do take note of the game’s need for an internet connection too. India has poor internet infrastructure, so if your game needs a good internet connection to be played, then it won’t get that much traction in India. The games’ size needs to be below 20 to 25 MB for consumers to be able to download it with ease. The smaller the game size, the higher the number of downloads for mobile games in India.

Marketing and monetizing your game

So how do startups market their games to the Indian market? Manish believes that there are two problems faced by any startup who’s looking to expand to India. First is making their app available to as large an Indian audience as possible. Android’s Google Play only accounts for half the OS app downloads in the country, with the other half spread across in numerous third-party app stores. So while the market is huge, approaching these homegrown app stores is a necessary challenge.

The second problem is monetizing the game. Because Indians tend not to use credit cards, startups would need to cooperate with local carriers to ease the payment hassle. But the carriers themselves don’t want to have too many partners for games, so if you approach them, the carriers will just direct you to cooperate with their local partners, such as publishers, instead. Telcos usually give 60 to 70 percent revenue share to their larger publishing partners.

Manish believes that one thing you have to invest in when venturing into India is having your own local sales team, with building relationships with local telcos on the top of your agenda. So while having to travel back and forth to India every few months can work well when it comes to a development team, Manish urges that in terms of sales, startups should find local partners to help deal with the inevitable marketing hassles.

Manish points out that Reliance Entertainment Digital is one of several such companies that can help startups expand to the promising Indian gaming market.

(Edited by Steven Millward)