“We don’t do small experimental games. Only Flappy Bird can do that and get away with it.” An interview with 99games

99games is a lot of things. For one, it’s a fully owned subsidiary of Robosoft, one of India‘s oldest, if not the absolute oldest, gaming companies. It was established following its parent company’s early success on iOS. While the focus is on pushing out top quality original intellectual property (IP), 99games has seen early critical and commercial acclaim with its games based on the Bollywood film, Dhoom:3.

Its first game in the series, Dhoom:3 The Game, not only won the second best arcade and action game at the Bestappever Awards, but garnered over 12 million downloads too. The sequel, Dhoom:3 Jet Speed, saw over a million downloads in 25 days.

(See: Indian mobile game Circulets wins third Best Casual Game at Bestappever Awards)

I spoke to CEO Rohith Bhat on the early days of smartphone development, what makes 99games tick, what it’s up to next, and where the industry is headed.

Why mobile?

Prior to founding 99games, Bhat’s efforts were squarely Mac-focused. His company, Robosoft, is known for its Mac ports of Bioshock, Tomb Raider, and TOCA Race Driver. It is one of the rare studios with an extensive portfolio on Apple’s desktop hardware. This had its advantages:

We got access to the pre-release SDK (software development kit) of the first iPhone from Apple because we were one of their close partners. When the App Store launched, out of 200 hundred products on the store, five were from Robosoft.

For Bhat, mobile was the logical extension given that his team was steeped in technical and gaming know-how. The fact that there were similarities between iOS and Mac development made things easier.

But the attention to mobile wasn’t always clear-cut. He tells us of the company’s attempts on Nintendo portables:

We were desperate to get onto the Nintendo DS. We chased Nintendo for eight to nine months and we could not get into the program. The whole App Store phenomenon came around and the entire process was democratised. Plus, we were getting 70 percent revenue, that was unheard of at the time.

Original IP versus Bollywood