When you speak of mobile games, the first company that comes to your mind is Gameloft. Though earlier it did not have presence in India, the mobile company has set up shop here two years ago. GameGuru.in (GG) met with Ravi Kumar (RK), the country manager of Gameloft India. Here is the whole interview:
GG: Can you tell us something about yourself?
RK: First my name is Ravi. I work for Gameloft as a general manager. I graduated from IIT Delhi 1999, then I went to France to work for company as software engineer, then I did my MBA in France in Toulouse. After completion of MBA I did a small stint with ATR in the aircraft manufacturing industry for the marketing project and then I joined this company Gameloft.
I take care of the business development in India and our company is, business office is just two people strong but the development team is 300 people strong and the developers are in Hyderabad, the business office is in Delhi. We started working in Delhi since September 2005, the business operations as well as the studio operations, which means the development of the games or support for the development studios across the world.
GG: Can you tell us something about operations of Gameloft India?
RK: The current operations of Gameloft in India, we are currently tied up with 6 partners, Vodafone, Airtel, Spice, Indiatimes, Star and Dialog. And we give our games directly to Vodafone, Airtel, to Spice, there is no third party like in many mobile game publishing companies, they offer content via an intermediate like a Mauj or IMI mobile but we have direct agreements with all these people.
GG: Where exactly is Gameloft developing games in India?
RK: Our studio is in Hyderabad and it’s a big team. 300 people is a very big team and so they take care of supporting the development studios of Gameloft across the world as well as they have all people the testers, the programmers, the graphic artists, the game designers, the game producers, so it’s a full fledged studio.
GG: Are games that Gameloft develops in India are for India or for all over the world?
RK: We have not built a game just meant for the Indian market, tailored absolutely for the Indian market, no. We did launch a game called Kevin Pietersen Cricket Pro 2007 in March 2007 and that was a game which really wanted to tap the Indian market but a cricket game is not only played in India, its played in Pakistan, its played in Australia, its played in England.
So it was a limited market game but still it was pretty broad it was not localized I would say, it was not focused on the Indian market alone. So we have not I mean Hyderabad team is not doing a game which is only to do with Indian market.
GG: So Gameloft India is developing games for the International market?
RK: Yes. I mean the Hyderabad team is involved in the process, in the production pipeline for international quality games that will launch every month.
GG: You are in sync with the other studios, where are the other studios?
RK: Tokyo, then we have in Montreal, Argentina, Mexico, Romania we have in France, of course, because we have headquarters there, we have in China. So we have six main ones, one in China, that’s in Beijing, the other one is in Tokyo, one is Romania, France, Montreal, Buenos Aires in Argentina.
GG: You said you haven’t developed any games for India. But any plans for making any India-specific games for the subcontinent basically?
RK: That’s a very tough question, I mean this discussion has been going around for like one year now and we may, we may not, we are not sure. We came pretty close to finalizing something on Indian market, a game specific in Indian market but as an international company with international reputation, each game that we launch has to cater to a broader audience and not just limited to Indian audience.
We definitely look for a global appeal. Even if the basic content is Indian we try to universalize it and each game design or game plan that has come up has not really fit target, that expectation, that strategy, completely.
GG: No games based on Indian mythology…
RK: Games based on Indian mythology, maybe Mahabharata, but I won’t commit anything maybe…
GG: How enthusiastic is Gameloft in India?
RK: Gameloft has very ambitious plans on India and it is beginning to get bigger because initially Gameloft thought that India is a small market. In 2005, and as numbers of subscribers keep growing and GPRS connections keep growing, the thing that the mobile game business is going to get bigger and bigger in India, if not with the operators directly, maybe with the manufacturers working with Nokia, working for Sony Ericsson, working for Motorola to embed the games on that headset.
And that’s a huge number because for example, three mobile phones are sold in India every second, this is a huge number! Every second there are three mobile phone games being sold and Gameloft sells three mobile games per second across the globe, so if you look at the numbers, three mobile games Gameloft per second across the globe, three mobile phones in India, just India and so if you make a connection between Nokia and Gameloft and we already have a partnership with Nokia for N-Gage for other games which were pre-installed in Nokia handsets.
So a big partnership with Nokia or a local manufacturer means a huge number for us and that number can drive the entire market, the entire business of Gameloft forward. So we are pretty ambitious, because the numbers are so big here. If we get the right partnerships which we are trying to and we sign with local manufacturers I’m sure we will grow leaps and bounds.
GG: And what genre does well in India you know puzzles, racing, shooting, and do you have any numbers to share out?
RK: Numbers I wont share, but racing does well, action does well, movie licenses do pretty well, sports also does well. When we started operations in India, I think the movie licenses did best, action second, racing third and any other thing like sports, tennis or cricket or football or midnight pool was fourth but things are changing, the taste are also changing.
That’s what I see from the statistics to the download report each month and now personally I see the action genre is getting, it is not showing very good numbers for us and sports genre is improving day by day. The movie licenses continue to do well and racing is also not doing great now. So racing and action which were initially the top favorites are sliding somewhere in the chart.
GG: What’s going up?
RK: What’s going up is sports and anything casual! So sports and casual are going up and racing and action are coming down. Now there is a more balanced market. We initially used to push the racing games, action games because that’s what sold. Now we are seeing all kinds of people have entered the market and I see lots of people who want to play Solitaire or a Sudoku and these are very I mean lots of people now want to play quiz and puzzle on the mobile phones so the market is getting fragmented or diversified and we cant really focus on just a racing game or just an action game and by the way Gameloft is a very diverse portfolio of games across all genres.
GG: Gameloft has also develop games for Nintendo DS, are they developed in the Hyderabad branch?
RK: Not in Hyderabad.
GG: And Nintendo DS has not been launched in India, but it is readily available in the grey market. Will you officially sell DS games in India?
RK: Yes we will. Once it is launched, everything is official we’ll sell.
GG: And when will Gameloft make games for the PlayStation Portable?
RK: Maybe, maybe not.
GG: There is a chance of Gameloft is working on a PSP game…
RK: Maybe, maybe not. I can’t give a sure comment on this question because lots of things are being discussed and it would be too premature on my side to give a definitive comment. No question on this.
GG: One of the hottest things around is the iPhone and iPod. What is Gameloft working not only for India but all over the world? What are your plans for iPod and iPhone patch?
RK: Ok so we are already developing games for iPhone and iPod and we will launch ten titles for each. Some are already live like Lost, Block Breaker Deluxe, a couple of other games you know Bubblebash they are already live and iPhone will be launched in India I think by Airtel and Vodaphone some time around September-October this year so we really expect this to heat up the market, to improve the mobile gaming experience for everyone who has an iPhone.
The iPhone is priced at Rs 30,000 – Rs 35000, so it will be like a Nokia E90 something like that so we definitely hope the Apple iPhone to do a lot of good business for us in India and we have big plans for them and we are currently working with them and we already have titles for them. So it is a big partnership for everyone in the mobile gaming industry. We definitely want to work with Apple and these new innovative devices which offer a better experience for gamers for example with Touchscreen devices you can play its more intuitive. You don’t have to so may small screens, so it’s much better.
GG: Can you elaborate on the details, will it be different for iPhone, and will it be different for iPod Touch?
RK: It depends on the pricing that the operators want, so that’s one and two at what price iPhone or iPod is being sold in India. You know for example today we sell games at Rs 99 or at Rs.50 across various operators and that’s because operators ask us to do so. Operators have price points which they get from governments like Rs 30, Rs 50, Rs 99 or Rs 75 and they ask us to choose a price point at which we want to sell our particular game. At Rs 30 we don’t sell games normally unless we make a price promotion you know like we offer many games at discounted price.
Normally we sell games at Rs. 50 or Rs. 99 and so it depends on what the operators and at what price the iPhone is being sold. But I think it is mostly operators who decide it. The operators you know they have a lot of directions from the government, the TRAI or the bodies from which they get licenses that ok these are the price points at which you can sell games. So we don’t really have a lot of a say in what price points we should be fixing on.
GG: Again coming to prices does piracy affect you and what are you guys doing to?
RK: Piracy does affect us. And I have heard of shops in Karol Bagh, New Delhi where games can be transferred via the data cable from computer to your mobile phone. And some Gameloft games are present in that computer in Karol Bagh, New Delhi. But the problem is, it is very difficult to wipe out piracy in India.
Because if somebody gets a game file, god knows how and it passes on to the grey market, you can sell to anyone you want at a discounted price of Rs. 20 or Rs. 15 and I don’t think we need to tackle this issue very strongly at this point because we are not like Microsoft, we don’t have such a big business that’s one and two we cant really transfer a mobile game from one mobile phone to another its not so simple because we integrate a technology called DRM technology and that prevents transfer of that from one handset to another, so we of course take actions to stop piracy but at a global level not India specific.
GG: What plans does Gameloft have for the N-Gage Platform? They are going to launch a new phone as well as a new platform, so what plans does Gameloft have?
RK: For Nokia’s N-Gage we have a partnership, so they were launching 17 games on Nokia’s N-Gage all preinstalled. Out of these 17, 6 are from Gameloft. That’s a big number because no other mobile game publisher has managed to have so many games on N-Gage platform. Its Gameloft with 6, the other publishers are like 3 games or 2 games or 1 game so when you say what plans do we have for the N-Gage, we are working in collaboration with Nokia’s N-Gage platform.
We want to give a really better experience for the gamer because its more state of the art and the graphics are so much better, more cool. So I would say we are working hand in hand with Nokia to push the whole experience, to push the envelope further so that gamers can have a good experience.
Gameloft has always wanted that no gamer has a bad experience on the mobile phone and we have always wanted to elaborate that experience because in the end it opens up the market for more and more people to enter. For example, we have always said 2 operators that each time a person wants to download a mobile game, the links should not fail the connections should not fail you know and he should not be wrongly charged for example if he tries to download a game and he fails and he is being charged that’s a bad experience.
So these are important measures that Gameloft has always taken to ensure that no gamer or no end user has bad experience at buying the mobile game no matter which genre. Each game that Gameloft has produced or what we call published has a certain benchmark in terms of quality and recently there was a big survey from Pocket Gamer, who rated Gameloft as number one publisher worldwide in terms of quality. There was a quality check like they took 40 games from each publisher and they found that Gameloft games consistently have a certain quality. So if you look at the average overall in quality, I’m seeing Gameloft is really the world leader today.
GG: How different is it from the old platform? Old as in which were only for the N-Gage mobile set but now it’s being transferred to other models of Nokia also. What has been your experience as such because some models would be different than others, so what has been your experience developing them? You got to face some challenges right?
RK: Developing them. This project was delayed many number of times and in the end it was launched and the results are not terrific. But there is a good platform and it has lot more features but I would not rate the results as terrific in fact in my opinion the Apple’s iPhone is more of a revolutionary gaming experience than the Nokia N-Gage and with your question what development challenges, I am not the most competent person to answer it because I have never managed the development cycle.
I have been in business, I don’t want to come in the development challenges. I’m sure there were many because it took a long time there were many, many delays so there must have been bugs which kept disturbing the whole process or delaying the whole launch date and the bugs must have come from the Nokia’s N-Gage team.