By A Correspondent
About a month ago, Rovio – creator of one of the most successful online game Angry Birds – made a significant announcement when it proclaimed its intention to touch the 1 billion download mark of the game by end of 2012. Not a difficult proposition, one may think, given the spurt in the online gaming market especially following the entry of supporting smartphones and operating systems. And so if a developer comes up with a game that’s unique and appeals to the masses, it would be a matter of a few days before the game races its way to being the most downloaded of the lot. This was the case with Parking Frenzy by Games2Win that made its way into the top 10 most downloaded games in the world, a few days ago.
Android Game ‘Parking Frenzy’ scaled its way to the No 7 position on the ‘Free Games’ section in the Android Market (USA) recently, making it probably the first game from India to have featured this high in the space. At last count, the game had witnessed 2,676,668 installs, led by the US which recorded 636,660 installs, Germany – 197,204, Britain – 138,182, Spain – 137,128, Korea – 122,665, France – 119,187, Russia – 93,916, Italy – 84,833, Holland – 62,468, and Israel with 56,747 installs. Acknowledging the success, Raj Menon, Director – Business, Games2win said, “To be honest we knew it was a good app and would do well. But we did not expect it to be such a big hit. The game started out as any of our other games – a slow steady creep in the number of people downloading the app and playing it. Installs started rocketing from week two, and the growth hasn’t stopped since.”
According to Mr Menon, the feat is unique as it is not every day that your app ranks higher than Twitter, Facebook Messenger and Angry Birds Rio. “So we are just soaking it in. But in reality, we are just concentrating on shipping – shipping the best games, apps and platforms that we hope our consumers will like.”
On how the gaming market in India is evolving, Mr Menon said, “Indians are now used to the best entertainment in the world thanks to the internet. But they want it with a local flavour – something that they relate to. They play games on the world’s best sites; so they are becoming increasingly demanding in terms of game play. We have more than matched their expectations – we have the largest library of cricket games in the world and Indians just can’t have enough,” he quips.
Asked why Indian online games have failed to make a mark on a global front, Mr Menon said, “There is no global ranking for individual online games like there is for mobile games on iTunes and the Android market. comScore ranks sites by traffic and Games2win is a top 20 gaming site in the world with an audience of over 15 million consumers. Our games are on the top gaming sites like Addicting games, the Spillgroup and Yahoo! So it would be unfair to say that Indian online games haven’t made the cut.”
In fact, Games2Win has carved out a roadmap for 2012 where it plans to grow its base from 15 million to 20 million users on the online front. On the mobile front too, it will be releasing an app a month. Affirms Mr Menon, “The biggest release we have is Appucino which is Leaderboards on Steroids. Appucino is basically a location based leaderboard where users can capture their favourite location on Google Maps with their scores. Other gamers can topple these owners by simply scoring better. This ping-pong amongst gamers, we believe, will do wonders for the life of an app.”
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For team balance he opened the batting though he was arguably India’s greatest number three ever. He kept wickets so that the team could accommodate another batsman. He shuffled himself in the batting order when he was captain when quicker runs were required. He never “whined to the press” when the BCCI dumped him from the captaincy. He was upset when he was recalled to the one day side a few years after being dropped and was constrained to announce his retirement. A lesser mortal might have felt used by Indian cricket and justifiably so. But the great gentleman and the wonderful cricketer he was, he took everything on his chin.
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