Smartphone gaming: India story begins...

A new generation of entrepreneurs who have grown up playing Super Mario Brothers and God of War are making the most of low-entry barriers to create startups focusing on mobile games. They are making a mark in the international market even as they cater to India's growing smartphone user base.
Last week, Udupi-based Robosoft raised Rs 74 crore from Ascent Capital and Kalaari.Part of that money will be invested in developing new games, as well as accelerating the growth of Star Chef, the flagship title of Robosoft subsidiary and mobile game-maker 99games.
Star Chef is a restaurant-themed building game. Released in August last year for the iOS, the game has seen more than 1.2 million downloads, with an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 across more than 35,000 reviews, says Anila Andrade, a producer at 99games. "Nearly 4.5% of our users are paying users -- with one user having spent as much as $4,800 so far," she says.
"Monetization rates in the mobile gaming industry average 1-2 %," says Amit Khanduja, EVP of Reliance Gaming. In that context, Andrade's pride is justified. But low monetization levels are not deterring entrepreneurs, or investments in mobile gaming. Earlier this year, Moonfrog Labs raised $15 million as Series A funding from Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital. Before that, Sequoia had invested in Delhi-based Octro. Both Moonfrog and Octro make mobile versions of Teen Patti, our own variant of poker. And just over a year ago, GSN Games, the US social casino games maker, bought Bengaluru-based Bash Gaming for around $165 million.
New games, new faces
The new generation of India's entrepreneurs are people who grew up playing games -- whether it was on old Nintendo Game and Watch devices, mobile-sized devices with controls on either side, with titles like Octopus and Parachute, or on later consoles like the PlayStation.
For them, games are a labour of love, and they have the confidence of youth. It's not surprising that the mobile game development industry is taking off in India, in a way that PC game development or console game development never did. The entry barriers are much lower, for one. The Unity 5 game engine, one of the most popular development platforms for games, is available for free.
The game makers include the usual suspects, engineering students with a desire to do their own thing, but there are others as well. Raoul Nanavathi is a 27-year-old graduate of economics and political science who runs Mumbai-based BYOF Studios. He worked for WOI, a company that specialized in making in-flight games for airline companies, before striking out on his own. BYOF's Discover-O, a deceptively simple game that involves colour matching, made it to the top five games of Pocket Gamer Connects, the mobile games conference held in Bengaluru last week.
Nalin Savara is a garrulous 30-something whose conversation swings easily from Jung and Freud to the use of stereotypes in story telling. Savara quit his job at Escosoft, started a gaming company called Darksun Tech, and is now working on BlokStok, a fighting game where recognizably Indian characters battle it out in front of recognizably Indian backgrounds.
Himanshu Manwani quit his job and moved in with his parents in Bhopal. The 25-year-old wanted to make a game that would recapture the experience of playing Super Mario Brothers or Super Meat Boy. Manwani built Super Nano Jumpers solo. Design, art, coding, testing -- the works. It was a difficult time for Manwani. Despite his parents' support, there were always people who felt that he should be working, and not pursuing a fool's dream. All that changed last week, when Super Nano Jumpers won the first prize -- Rs 10 lakh -- at the Big Indie Pitch, the culmination of Reliance Gaming's Game Hacks held around the country over the course of last year.
Now, Manwani has used his prize money to get himself an iPhone and will be hiring people to help him with his next project.
7 seconds, 7 days
Mobile gaming is a cut-throat business. Games make up 21.45% of 1.4 million plus apps on Apple Store, by far the largest chunk. The next highest category, business apps, make up just 10%. And a good mobile game has to hold the downloader's interest if it is to survive. You could call it the "seven second churn." If the game doesn't hook the user in its first seven seconds, it's unlikely that it will be a success. And if the interval between the first and second time the user plays a mobile game is greater than seven days, that user is probably lost.