As you can see, we at GameGuru.in (GG) are on a run and have been taking a lot of interviews. This time we went and spoke to Neeraj Roy (NR), Managing Director and CEO of Hungama. We spoke at length about gaming, especially Gaming Hungama and the state of gaming in India. This is how the whole interview went:
GG: Can you tell us something about yourself and your company?
NR: I come from Allahabad and moved to Bombay in 1988 to do my business studies. I graduated from Sydenham College and since then I have worked with two organizations. I started my career with Taj Group of Hotels and was the marketing manager of South Asia. Then I worked for four and a half years with a local investment banking firm, Prime Securities till I started with Hungama in mid-1999.
Coming to the sites, Gaminghungama.com is a site which has been recently started about a few months ago. As a company within hungama.com itself, we had done over 350 games, largely casual games. We started seeing the advent of gaming culture emerge in India. So Gaming Hungama was introduced as the first multiplayer gaming portal into the country. Primarily driven by a set of games that is what developers, gamers did and since then we are now in the process of building the community in that portal and it will engage and morph into a lot more beyond basic casual gaming, which is prevalent currently on the site.
GG: What are the technologies you use to develop your games?
NR: The gaming business is a $28 million dollar global business and has been around the digital business for around thirty years now. Gaming itself can be from casual gaming to PC based gaming to MMOGs to console gaming and now mobile gaming. We as a company are in some parts of it. Actually we are doing nothing as far as console gaming right now. We started of as a casual gaming company and that’s one of the biggest trends as far as we are concerned. There we have developed games largely in flash and shockwave, some amount of games in Java and then we kind of morphed in to the opportunity of mobile game and have done game development in Java, BREW and some amount of gaming in flash too. So that’s what we have been exposed to as a company.
GG: Can you elaborate on the N-Gage Championships?
NR: The N-Gage Championships, I think to a great extent was a fantastic concept, perhaps a little ahead of its time at least in this market. When Nokia approached us in 2004, they were about to launch N-Gage QD, which was the revised version of their N-Gage phone and they wanted to do something interesting and we came up with the concept of starting a mobile gaming championships across the country which at that time ran across 47 cities. We took a bus and stripped the bus from inside and put ten gaming consoles inside bus. We put GPS trackers inside the bus and had three such buses which in 45 days covered 55, 000 kms touching 600, 000 actual gamers and 18 million people who were exposed to this entire thing. I think it was a fantastic experience in terms of trying to populate the concept of gaming.
GG: What do you have to say about gaming tournaments?
NR: You have to understand and appreciate that gaming as is understood in the rest of the world largely in Europe and Americas or Japan which has very mature markets, Korea, is not necessarily the case in South Asia and certainly not in India at least, not now. Gaming in most parts of the world is a fairly matured adult entertainment where the average age is not necessarily 12 and 13 or whatever is a significantly higher figure than that. In the Indian market, it is still seen as a fairly teeny-boperish kind of concept, at least right now. Over the last few months, of course, numerous main stream gaming companies have gained traction here and that will sort of hopefully see this scaling up. I think there is a lot that needs to be done to introduce gaming in the right manner into this country and gaming championships at the end of the day are one of the numerous things that can be done.
Intrinsically, the game is all about competing and competing against the machine and against the environment without the players and you are filling in scores and high scores and things like that. When you take that entire experience in the physical world and convert that into a championship, you convert it into an opportunity which can result in more communities and that’s really what we had conceptualized when we did that N-Gage QD mobile gaming challenge, where across 47 cities the idea was to make heroes out of each of these people in their small towns of Rohtak and Surat and whatever. And over a period of time, for a company like Nokia to be able to take that forward and literally convert that into a searing program for themselves. Unfortunately it hasn’t necessarily panned out in that particular manner. Perhaps as a company they have their own set of agenda. But I see a tremendous opportunity of to have more of such programs, but rest assured there will be not necessarily just by us but by numerous companies in the market since the market is large enough to cater to that.
GG: Gaming companies mostly concentrate on the casual genre. Can we see something in the MMOG sphere or the hardcore PC games sphere?
NR: Absolutely, I think you are right when you say this and there is a reason and a logic for it. Casual gaming is the easiest form of gaming and mobile gaming as well to get people to try and understand the gaming concept and make that into an active habit forming feature such that they can kill time or make that in to a pastime. In the MMOG space, one of the intrinsic things that are required is to have a quality network as far the broadband connectivity is concerned for it to actually have a real life sort of an experience. Barring the last six months where there has been a fair amount of traction as far as broadband penetration is concerned. When I mean traction, I mean traction outside cyber cafes and office environments in to homes. Companies like BSNL, MTNL were all largely promoting their broad band services and this is the first sort of sign for more of such requirements. There have been companies which have been making attempts in this, not very successful, not for reasons, in terms of lack of attempt but I would largely attribute those as reasons wherein the market itself is not mature enough. It is similar to us doing a mobile gaming championship in 2004 when there were around eighteen twenty thousand games being done that were in the market. Today there will be hundred thousand games in the market and therefore it is far more conducive for a championship of that nature to nurse. MMORPG is another space which I think will happen.
We tend to look into the experience in Korea and Japan and China and Philippines and get very excited about that. I don’t believe that is necessarily true. We have to find our own niche as far as that is concerned, but fundamentally as broadband connectivity and speed and access is becoming cheaper, I think, the youngsters are going to take to more formats and the casual gamers will hopefully graduate to more MMOGs which will graduate more towards PC and console based gaming space, which is obviously the most expensive but the most hardcore as far as experience is concerned.
GG: So do you think console gaming will overtake PC gaming?
NR: Oh for sure. If you look back two years ago the PC used to cost sixty thousand rupees and now you can get yourself a PC now for fifteen – eighteen thousand and can also get yourself a laptop for twenty five twenty eight thousand rupees. I think Microsoft launched the Xbox (360) for nineteen thousand I think and they now have a scheme which is some kind of an exchange scheme, at twelve thousand or eighteen thousand. So of course it will come down. And the Indian market will find its own way of creating a market.
Take my example; we had a PS2 which is kind of gone into my daughter’s room. We now have the Xbox 360 in our room. Somewhere down the line, we probably want to get rid of the PS2. That will be the same churn of what you find in the TV business. You will see the same experience happening as far as the console games are concerned. You will also see price points on mobile gaming.
GG: What are your views on mobile gaming?
NR: Mobile gaming is an interesting opportunity. The biggest challenge in mobile gaming is the quality of games and that is in a way resulting in a lesser adoption. One is the price point as far as mobile gaming is still at the threshold which is not creating inflation. Certainly not for the quality of the games that are being provided by most of the companies. I think you will see this culture evolve and it’s not for nothing we are the youngest nation of the world growing at nine and a half percent GDP within kind of infrastructure, which could easily add two and a half percent to the GDP. It is technically twelve percent GDP growth. Tremendous amount of energy of the youth. The age groups 15 – 35 are all going to be prospects for new formats of entertainment.
Also, I think one of the big things that is going to lead to an adoption of more gaming in to India is going to be the fact that conventional formats of gaming which is television, movies etc. are going to now start bringing in an interactive experience which is gaming centric into their programming and that itself will see a larger amount of gaming content. So it is not going to be, ‘I am Microsoft, I am Sony, I am Nintendo, here is my product (xyz) buy as it is’ and of course doing localized content thing will help. There is lot being talked about, a game on the Mahabharata etc. I don’t think that is what we need because we consume content in different ways. Today we are consuming Spider-Man in Bhojpuri in an interesting way.
It is about making, preparing a certain consumer in to a certain form of communication and our media and entertainment industry far too smart to miss out on this opportunity and you know they will adapt to it. So don’t be surprised if our soaps as well as they mature in to making themselves more current and contemporary, you start seeing gaming culture coming into that and rivalry being driven by that and that resulting in a higher adoption and I think that’s when it will have far more significant role to play than some Microsoft and Nintendo going for localized games. I don’t think that genre is necessarily connected in to that kind of… even see what happened with Gandhiji and Munnabhai and the way it was packaged and the impact it had.
GG: Where do you think Indian gaming stands in the international arena?
NR: Is it in the international arena today? I don’t think so. Let us look at the numbers and unfortunately there isn’t any sort of quality research to prove this but by virtue of us being in the market, I can share some insights. The PC based gaming from my own experience with retailers, organized retailers like Planet M and stores of that nature I had spoken to, is estimated that the total market is not upwards of fifteen eighteen million dollars. So it is like a seventy eighty crore market as such, at tops. The mobile gaming business is again in that same eight to hundred crore sort of range at end consumer price.
A majority of that, anything from that ranging from as high as ninety percent and yes I say ninety percent in some carriers, some carriers retain ninety percent. To the game developers and companies and actual IPR owners is very, very little that is coming back still. I think the biggest chunk will be made up of the Nintendos and the Xboxes and the PlayStations as such, which has only come into the market in the last few months. But there is enough research which is talking about this business, going to two thousand -three thousand crores in the next few years. Right now, I would put ourselves, probably number forty fifty in the global market place as far as a market but in a potential perspective, I would consider ourselves in the top 10 markets in the world in the next two three years.
GG: Anything special that Indian gamers can expect from Hungama or Gaming Hungama in 2007?
NR: Sure, we have given in the last six months in our own small way an interesting experience. We gave multiplayer gaming to this country, Bollywood and gaming a huge fillip. Starting with the first Bollywood based multiplayer game in Don and extending that further. I think what we will see is new formats of gaming in terms of touching your experience across multiple platforms and that is something which we are working towards and giving experience at the same time, more to reward them as far as gaming is concerned.
Gamers are being referred as the athletes of the 21st and 22nd century. We need to give them some recognition as well. There is far too much recognition for the conventional sporting athletes and cricketers and whatever. But look around the world and you will find tremendous amount of recognition being given to actual gamers and we would like to do something with that. Hopefully the partners etc. can take that forward.
GG: Would you be sponsoring any gaming clans?
NR: Again difficult for me to respond to a specific question like that. We will examine it. We have had reason as the gaming space is gaining traction so is the peripheral industry centered around that. So the other day, we got a proposal from a leading financial paper wanting to do a four page supplement on gaming and wanting us to sponsor something in that and which we said no to very politely. Because I don’t believe our gamers are centered around Dalal Street for the moment. Gaming may be making interesting reading and maybe creating value as businesses etc and hence there is affinity centered around that. But it is certainly not being driven by community centered around the financial services right now. So we have to balance it and see if anything interesting happens. We have seen this on the internet and on the mobile too. Whenever there is an exciting thing that is gaining momentum. You have to weed out the good as well as the bad as it were. And there is always some bad, some junk as we like to call it. Opportunities have to be examined in that manner and we take up things as they come along.
GG: Do you think the government can play any important role in promoting the gamers?
NR: The government can always play a responsible role and always do that. I have been a part of some initiatives with forums such as CII and FICCI, whom I am associated with in different capacities. Some of my fellow colleagues from the gaming industry have tried to create consortiums and associations and things like that. Unfortunately, nothing conclusive has come out of it. That does not mean it cannot. We do believe that there are certain things which you know can be done to facilitate certain things. And I certainly think there is an area wherein we need to read out the negatives. I think the role we need to play is, we need to sort of educate the various stakeholders in within that the government is one of them. Schools, colleges, parents, adult community, retailers are the other. That is a serious initiative. Like anything else, it is a business. Like anything it has its positives and negatives as it were.
To answer your question, do you think the government can play a role? Sure it can! Have we articulated that? We have made some attempts. It is on its own way playing a role. It is playing a catalytic role as broadband prices and access keeps coming down and cost of importing duty coming down. Today I am able to bring a laptop in without any duty when I am coming back from overseas. It is facilitating in its own way. You know, the digital revolution is a component of that. So I don’t think there is a need for necessary, ok, just for gaming we do this. If we look at the larger picture, the market will pick up what they want to use. Understand one thing; gaming is consumed through certain medium. It is consumed through certain handsets and if handsets prices come down, it fuels that. If it is consumed through a box, which could be a PC or a laptop or a IPTV environment or whatever as prices of that come down, you could facilitate more things than that. So I think the government is already playing a role, if you ask me.
GG: Are you a gamer? What types of video games do you play?
NR: Of course I am a gamer. Not the types who will sit on his desk and play a game. Yes, I have a PS2 at home. I was recently gifted an Xbox by the Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft, Kevin Turner and Ravi Venkatesh, the Chairman of Microsoft, very kind and you know. Kevin was making a trip to India and he wanted to meet up few people, both from the internet and the mobile world.
That’s the kind of meetings I always like to do. At the end of the meeting he gifted me an Xbox 360, which I have just got used to playing car racing game on that. I also have a PSP on which I suck. My wife is very good at it. She plays Grand Theft Auto on that and has just advised me to not go past level two because we have a two year old daughter and you know some of the terms are fairly abusive over there. So I play games but my gaming experience is driven more by, when I really need stress buster kind of a thing as supposed to be addictive. Thankfully, because that’s the only thing that is getting my company going otherwise.
GG: Thank you for your time. Wishing you and your company all the best for the future:
NR: Thank you.