MxMIndia

Tag: Manish Agarwal

  • India cannot afford to be complacent in the digital era, concluded panelists at FICCI-Frames

    #Frames2013: ‘For digital to excel, freemium has to make way for pay’

    By A Correspondent

     

    The past two years have seen the digital ecosystem in India take off in a big way. Whether for the medium of mobile or web, the fast-paced growth sweeping this medium is making other developing economies around the world sit up and take notice.

     

    The session on ‘Digital content consumption: developing a robust paid ecosystem’ on day 2 at FICCI Frames saw panelists discuss the advantages, opportunities and challenges facing the medium. The panelists comprised, Neeraj Roy of Hungama Digital Media, Devraj Sanyal of Universal Music, Manish Agarwal of Reliance Entertainment – Digital, Sidhartha Roy of Hungama Digital and Boaz Ben Yaacov of Catch Media Inc.

     

     

    Neeraj Roy

    Neeraj Roy, CEO, Hungama Digital Media Enterprise started off by presenting a positive picture of the medium. He said, “India is today the third largest internet market in the world and is likely to be the second largest market with 600 million internet users in the next 3-4 years. The industry is adding about 5-6 million users every month and most of this is largely from the mobile device, especially smartphones that saw about 60 million new users this year. India will also be one of the rare nations that will transition from 2G to 4G this year. In India there was a single ecosystem that was created around the mobile which had got to do with micro-transactions. Unfortunately there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that are impeding the rapid growth of the sector. We are now at the cusp of moving away from voice to data consumption. What the industry needs to do is contemplate ways to develop an ecosystem that will bring in robust growth and provide an impetus for the industry to move forward swiftly.”

     

    Devraj Sanyal, MD, Universal Music said that it was exciting to see three ecosystems in digital co-existing well with each other. “It rarely can be seen in other parts of the world. For me, the death of voice is the beginning of a much bigger phenomenon – data. The entire future will ride on data. In a country as diverse as India there are two kinds of consumers – the first being pay consumers who are very few in number and the other kind of consumers being those who will pay for nothing and want everything free. As a content creator, I want to see a lot of this ecosystem thriving on the pay model. For me, having 1 million paid viewers is much more valuable than having 500 million viewers who are fence-sitters/pirates. The future will be pay along with value-added services.”

     

    Manish Agarwal

    Manish Agarwal, CEO, Reliance Digital said, “There’s no doubt on the huge impact that mobile will have on our lives. It is a device of the future and will be accessed for a host of things including content, gaming, etc. The market is very appealing and has just about taken off. I travel a lot around the world and have often heard things like if there are 20 million mobile users in Japan and if that economy is where it is today on that medium, imagine what potential the Indian market has which has more than 600 million mobile users and counting. While there is no doubt on the loyalty on behalf of the customer, we have to see how the medium will benefit the business across the formats that they will operate in.”

     

    According to Boaz Yaacov, CTO & Co-founder of Catch Media Inc, “The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we are still living in a world where a customer pays a dollar for a song when there are others who get it from Bit-torrent or even a youtube for free. If we are to sustain the technology or content we need to find practical solutions. We all know how the business of credit cards started about three decades ago and how they charged micropayments to give convenience and access to our money. Today one such player – Visa, is worth about $ 250 billion but the point is that we consumers do not know of these payments.” Adding further Boaz said, “What we are trying to do is build technologies to give people very convenient and mobile way to access their content. If we are able to deliver content to consumers where they are and at their convenience they won’t mind paying for it.”

     

    The panel went on to discuss the challenges confronting the medium and also how ‘pay’ would be a preferred model in the future compared to the model of ‘freemium’ that is currently what the players are taking a preference to.

     

  • Manish Agarwal, CEO of Reliance Entertainment Digital, and speaks on gamification and a variety of issues around digital entertainment and gaming in particular

    Jaldi 5 with Manish Agarwal: Gamification is next big thing

    Reliance Entertainment Digital, the digital arm of Reliance Entertainment is a cluster of leading multi-brand consumer digital company in India. Today, the company’s business encompasses digital entertainment – that’s gaming, VOD and e-commerce across all prominent platforms such as online and mobile its portfolio comprises dynamic brands and companies like Zapak Digital Entertainment, which operates three verticals: Zapak Solutions, Zapak Online & WAP Portal and the newly christened Zapak Mobile (earlier known as Jump Games), Big Adda and BigFlicks Pvt Ltd. Cumulatively, the Reliance Digital business has over 20 million satisfied consumers across all digital platforms.

     

    MxMIndia interviewed Manish Agarwal, CEO of Reliance Entertainment Digital, and spoke to him on a variety of issues around digital entertainment and gaming in particular.

     

    01. In many ways the fact that the Reliance group had invested in Zapak in 2005 had indicated to the world that there is much potential in the gaming business. As you look back seven years, would you say, the investments have been worth it? Is there enough RoI?

    Reliance Group remains committed towards its belief that gaming would be a great driver for entertainment for millions of Indians in high-speed-always-connected-broadband era. The group invested in creating India’s first gaming brand and today Zapak is synonymous with gaming. Zapak had segmented market as casual gamers and hard-core gamers and had provided different offerings to both segments. Zapak is the largest casual gaming destination in India in terms of users as well as revenues. However, Zapak had expected the gaming to grow exponentially via MMORPGs among hard-core gamers as was (and is) the case in Korea, Japan and China and had invested heavily in building gaming cafes to enable hard-core gamers to become part of game cult existing in east Asian countries. However, owing to missing link of high speed always-connected-broadband infra in India, hard-core PC-based paid gaming culture has not taken off and Zapak had to re-caliberate its strategy and thinking that MMORPGs will drive the gaming in India. However, the brand name, learnings and highly skilled set of the ONLY team which has the experience of developing, distributing and monetizing casual as well as high-end games puts Zapak in an unique position to exploit exploding mobile gaming market not only in India but compete globally. The recent success of F1 2011, Real Steel, Ben 10 and ICC WT20 games in India and abroad give us confidence that Zapak would be one of the most successful company from India in gaming space worldwide.

     

    02. We are a country of over a billion people. Sale of digital devices is growing exponentially. Why do you think has the domestic consumption of gaming not grown much in India?

    If one looks at past growth of gaming culture and gaming business worldwide, it has either happened on consoles or on high-end PCs. Consoles and high-end PC would cost more than Rs 50k which is either beyond the purchasing power of Indian or falls in the space of “indulgence”. The high cost of the devices coupled with poor broadband and lack of good devices has resulted in the generation of 30-plus Indians being essentially of non-gamers. However, things are changing very rapidly with the proliferation of smarter hand held devices at an affordable price, generation of Indians between 3-25 years is busy in playing variety of games on their hand held devices.

     

    This explosion in lead by “snacky and snappy” nature of gaming, making it the best entertainment option for ‘timepass on the go’. 100 million mobile internet and with forecast of mobile internet users growing to 300 million by 2015 offer a great opportunity for players like Zapak to innovate and deliver good quality games to the Indians and also experiment with localization as there is a high probability of creating a scalable & profitable business model on mobile gaming in India.

     

    03. In terms of production of games for the overseas market, where is the growth coming from? And what are your projections?

    North America is a 5 billion USD market for mobile gaming followed by Japan which is 2 bn USD, China which is 1.2 bn USD and Korea is a 0.9 bn USD market. The mobile gaming market has been growing at a rapid pace across all these markets and market has witnessed true democratization of mobile gaming distribution resulting in new studios emerging with winner every day. The potential revenue per good quality AAA game is upwards of 100 million USD. However, the market is ultra-competitive with ‘winner take it all’ being the reality.

     

    Given this scenario, it is imperative for a game development studio like us to employ the best of the global talent and create processes and systems which reduce probability of failure. We have consciously adopted strategy of partnering with large Hollywood studios and known IPs like F1 to avoid risk of being lost in 250k games on iTunes store and 800 games getting uploaded every day. Our strategy of having known IP coupled with good quality game has been a demonstrated success with Real Steel and F1. We are looking to augment our slate for next year by partnering with developers worldwide and have very strong lineup of 8-10 large IP-based games for next year. We are confident of hitting double digit million USD revenue with this slate and would like to keep fingers crossed for a massive hit which one cannot predict.

     

    04. We’ve seen some restructuring at Reliance Digital with Jump Games being rechristened Zapak Mobile. What are your plans for the next year?

    Zapak is synonymous with gaming in India and Jump Games is relatively unknown brand outside India and is a B2B brand in India. As we are looking at aggressive growth in next 2-3 years for the market and for ourselves, we would like to build brand familiarity for one single brand across consumers and stakeholder so that we are able to stand out among the huge clutter of gaming companies already existing outside India and would happen in India. Choice was to build Jump or Zapak outside India and given that Zapak is already synonymous with gaming in India, we decided to consolidate the gaming business under Zapak. Zapak is the only company which offers gaming experience to consumers on all touch points and offers advertisers solutions across all touch points. Zapak aims to become largest gaming company in India by revenues, consumers and IPs if it is not already.

     

    There has been some quiet on the Big Adda front?

    Big Adda is a horizontal e commerce platform and since e commerce in India is still gross margin negative business, we have taken a conscious call to say no to invest in consumer acquisition and wait for e-commerce to mature in this country before we re-start the investment. We are running a full fledged e-commerce service and maintaining its scale as and when we see an opportunity to create profitable business.

     

    And with Big Flicks – are broadband speeds the stumbling block for its growth?

    Big Flicks is the first subscription-based on-demand movie streaming service and we have over 2000 movies across languages with distribution reach across all hand held platforms, pc and smart TVs. We believe that there is huge latent demand for movies on demand service at home as well as on-the-go. However, internet speeds are the only thing which inhibits the subscriber base in India to outshine the Netflix subscriber base in US. We believe that high-speed always-connected broadband is closer to reality now than in past and Big Flix is uniquely poised to exploit the inflexion point in broadband growth.

     

    05. Any trends that you could forecast for us – in terms of what we should look forward to in the next year?

    Micro-transactions via mobile carrier billing coupled with change in revenue sharing by telco in favour of developers and service providers would change the shape of VAS industry in this country. It would result in innovations in content, give a fillip to players who understand pull-based direct-to-consumer services and would lead to growth in data driven marketing thinking.

     

    Gamification would be the next big thing in digital across enterprise and consumer digital marketing as consumers would like to have fun rather than follow regimentation. Zapak has created advergaming in India five years back and we have evangelizing Gamification to Indian advertisers as this has already caught fancy of advertisers in west and as per Pew research report, gamification is going to be biggest trend in advertising by 2015.

     

    How is the digital entertainment business doing in terms of talent? Are you getting the right kind of people to join in?

    Talent remains biggest concern on the game development front. The lack of good quality game designers, art directors and producers make it extremely difficult to compete in ultra-competitive mobile gaming space outside India. Likewise, finding talent which can think beyond performance and think of highly engaging 360-degree digital solutions remains a challenge. A business savvy ‘digital baby’ is tough to get hampering the growth of companies like Zapak which thrive on offering cutting edge gaming solutions to advertisers.

     

  • Reliance Entertainment Digital has created a unified brand identity for its gaming operations with three verticals: Zapak Solutions, Zapak Online and WAP portal and Zapak Mobile

    Reliance Ent consolidates gaming biz under ‘Zapak’

    By A Correspondent

     

    Reliance Entertainment Digital, which has two gaming brands under its portfolio – Jump Games and Zapak Digital Entertainment, has announced the consolidation of its gaming business under the brand name ‘Zapak’. With this initiative, Jump Games, a leading International developer and publisher of Mobile games, Apps and Content will be rebranded and rechristened as Zapak Mobile Games Pvt. Ltd The integrated brand ‘Zapak’ will now reach out to over 20 million gamers across the globe who would be able to access nearly 2000 games on the Mobile and Web, a communique adds.

     

    This move is part of the company’s growth strategy, while leveraging Zapak’s existing brand popularity and recall. Post the restructure, Zapak Digital Entertainment will operate three business verticals:

     

    1. Zapak Solutions, which will specialize in providing cutting-edge Advergaming and Gamification solutions to brands across Mobile and Online platforms worldwide.

     

    2. Zapak Online & WAP Portal, which will offer free & freemium casual games on web & mobile via its platforms – zapak.com & m.zapak.com.

     

    3. Zapak Mobile, which will continue to develop and publish cutting edge games across platforms for its Indian and global audiences.

     

    Manish Agarwal

    Speaking on the business development, Manish Agarwal, CEO, Reliance Entertainment Digital said, “This move is aimed at exploiting huge gaming potential on mobile and leveraging gaming synergies existing within the group to focus on ‘Mobile First’, while leveraging on the Zapak brand name that is synonymous with gaming over the years. We stay committed to offering consumers and advertisers, the world-over, best-in-class options through highly engaging mobile games, easy to play and discover casual gaming destination and innovations in consumer engagement through Advergaming and Gamification solutions across all consumer touch points.”

     

  • Reliance Entertainment (Digital) COO Manish Agarwal tells MxM India why the cloud can benefit everyone, and how.

    @FF12: No alternative to the cloud: Manish Agarwal

    By Rishi Vora

     

    Manish Agarwal, COO, Reliance Entertainment (Digital) spoke to MxM India on the sidelines of a session called “Digital Entertainment with Connected Devices and Cloud Based Services”, in which the panel consisted of Umang Bedi of Adobe Systems, Richard Craig McFeely of Tata Communications, Sameer Pitawala of UTV Interactive, Manish Agarwal, and Ravindra Velhal of Intel.

     

    Takeaway points from the session

    Cloud technology is all about providing an experience to the consumer. That’s one thing. The second thing is, there is no alternative for any service providers to not to go to the cloud. There is no choice to anyone; everybody has to go to the cloud. The question is the benefit of the cloud and the extent of monetization that can happen on the cloud will be limited to the extent of infrastructure investments. So, the key message is that the cloud is a reality – everybody has to work around it, be it the producer or a retailer like Big Flix or a content aggregator…

     

    The question is when can you really monetize and how can you provide the best consumer experience.

     

    [youtube width=”400″ height=”250″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSJUNAh1X8E[/youtube]

    Video By Shruti Pushkarna

    How does Reliance use cloud technology for the services it offers?

    If you look at Big Flix, all the content user information is on the cloud. And we’re already kind of using that piece. That is the only way we can provide a seamless experience across devices – across desktop, laptop, smartphones, in your office, your home. All this is not possible without the cloud. So we’re using it extensively for Big Flix. We also use the same technology when we publish mobile games, so if you want to play a game, you can play on any platform using the cloud service.

     

    What it means to the consumer

    For the consumer it is very simple. Keeping aside the technical mumbo-jumbo, I can watch a video whenever I want on whichever device I want from the point I left – I can restart. So it gives me a complete seamless video-watching experience across devices and locations.

     

  • Zapak gives you a chance to own a customized cricket team on Facebook through Cricville, a social cricket game based on the IPL pattern by Zapak

    Cricket gets even more interesting with Zapak’s Cricville

    By A Correspondent

     

    Zapak.com, India’s leading gaming portal, announced on Tuesday the official launch of Cricville, a social cricket game on Facebook. This is Zapak’s second initiative in the social gaming, first one being Zapak Tambola. Before the official launch, the game was launched in the open Beta testing phase and got rave reviews.

     

    http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2012/02/06/social-cricket-game-cricville-aims-to-hit-a-six-on-facebook/

     

    Cricville broadly follows the IPL-pattern gameplay where the user can own a cricket club and work towards making it bigger and better. The user can work as a club manager, and build the club’s city and stadium. S/he can also hire a coach to train and upgrade the players’ overall performance.

     

    Users can choose from an array of exciting modes to play. These include Challenges, where the users can throw challenges to their friends on Facebook; Tournaments which will help increase the user’s rankings and in turn help the user’s chances of winning Gold, Silver & Bronze trophies. The users can also play practice matches to improve their overall skills. The game also allows them to upgrade their players by improving their batting, bowling and fitness to score over their friends.

     

    Speaking on the launch of Cricville, Manish Agarwal, Chief Operating Officer – Reliance Entertainment – Digital Business, said: “Cricket is not just a game but a complete religion by itself in India. With IPL just round the corner, this is the perfect time to launch Cricville, which follows an easy and competitive gameplay that will appeal not only to cricket fans but also to other gaming enthusiasts on Facebook. Zapak wants to tap the Indian-themed games segment which offer universal appeal on Facebook and what better way to spearhead that other than Cricket.”

     

    Zapak Digital Entertainment Ltd. is India’s largest gaming company that addresses the complete value chain of digital gaming. With currently 8 million registered gamers, Zapak.com is not only the largest casual gaming sites in the country but amongst the top casual gaming sites in the world. As per a recent survey on an average a user spends about 21 minutes on Zapak.com, which is way higher than the average time one spends on any gaming website.