Near-deaths, pivots, and an IPO: the evolution of India’s top gaming company

A few weeks ago, drum beats resounded in the lobby of a company based out of Mumbai. On center stage was Nitish Mittersain, who was matching his dance moves to the drum beats.

A saxophone player who does Krav Maga to stay fit, Mittersain is also a keeper of superhero figurines from the DC and Marvel universes and was once the official representative of the authorized online fanclub of Michael Jackson.

But more significantly, Mittersain is the founder and managing director of Nazara Technologies, the company that was celebrating a milestone that had been several years in the making: Nazara had just gone public.

Its 583 crore rupee (about USD$80 million) initial public offering (IPO) was oversubscribed 175.5x, and the company is now valued north of US$600 million (4,762.67 crore rupees).

This was the game publisher and distributor’s second attempt at a listing after it had aborted its first try in 2018 despite having the necessary approvals.

Nazara founder Nitish Mittersain / Photo courtesy: Nazara Technologies

Founded in 1999, when the word “startup” was still bright and shiny and Mittersain was still a 19-year-old college student, Nazara’s beginnings were prompted by two factors.

One was that its founder, an avid gamer since he was five, didn’t want to join his family’s textile business. Second, as Mittersain tells Tech in Asia, “everyone was setting up dotcoms [back then],” so he set up Nazara.com to develop Flash-based Indianized games like Housie (Bingo).

The young company was just beginning to find its footing when it got swept up in the dotcom crash of the late 1990s. Mittersain had hoped to raise a few million dollars then, but that dream popped alongside the dotcom bubble.

Since then, Nazara went through many twists before reaching this current point in history where it is the only gaming company in India that has its fingers in almost every sub-category of the gaming industry pie.

Its recent moves have drawn comparisons with Tencent Games’ playbook, with both companies using mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to get ahead, though the parallels end there.

While Tencent Games made a record number of 31 M&A deals last year alone, Nazara has acquired only five companies in the last five years.

Yet these deals have carved a fresh identity for the Indian firm as a holding company with diverse interests. Once known as a publisher and distributor of casual mobile games, Nazara now dabbles in edutainment, real-money games, and fantasy sports, among other verticals in the gaming industry.

It’s certainly been a long, winding road for a company that had to sell its computers following the dotcom crash just to pay the salaries of its 50-odd employees.

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