When GameGuru.in (GG) was invited for an exclusive tête-à-tête with Sudipto Majumdar(SM) , the Chief Technical Officer of Zapak, we were quiet excited. We met him at his office in Andheri, where the simple, down-to-earth executive spoke about Zapak and where it’s exactly heading in the near future. Read on to know more:
GG: Tell us something about Zapak? How did you come about it?
SM: Zapak is the first Indian portal that has gotten into gaming in a big way. Shareholders have put in a large amount of money. We are covering the entire spectrum of gaming. We are looking at casual games, MMOGs and skill based games, which are in between casual games and MMOGs. It’s the first Indian comprehensive gaming portal. Our shareholders, our president Mr. Rajesh Sawhney as well as our promoter Mr. Anil Ambani envisioned Zapak as they wanted to catch the youth of today. India is a young country, more than 50% of the population is below 25, so how do you get them? Obviously, you get them from the four screens you have, there is the Movie screen, the TV screen, the PC screen and the mobile screen. So on the PC screen, the strategy to catch the people is through games. So that’s how the idea of a gaming portal like Zapak came into being.
GG: Will Zapak venture into mobile gaming?
SM: We already have a mobile gaming arm promoted by Reliance called as Jump Games. So we are primarily in to the PC screen.
GG: Why only casual games? Why didn’t you choose normal PC games?
SM: We are slowly rolling out our MMOGs, we are also rolling out other games as well. Causal games were the first part in the strategy. In 2007, you see other games coming up. We are planning to go into closed beta in June to July, and hopefully if everything goes well, before the end of the year, we will go into open beta of our games. I can’t give you the titles because of the non-disclosure agreements.
GG: What about the technology? Why did Zapak opt for the open source technology?
SM: You should be asking the other way round! If somebody doesn’t use open source technology, you should ask him ‘Why didn’t you use open source?’. Anyway, we are an internet company and all major internet companies today with the exception of Microsoft and MSN, and for very obvious reasons, everybody else is using the open source technology. You look at Google, you look at Yahoo!, look at eBay, but eBay uses a lot of Microsoft technology, but if you leave it aside, everybody in India is using the open source technology because it makes sense. I mean I can go on and on for hours on that.
GG: What about gaming tournaments? Will Zapak come out with a casual tournament like the Reliance GameBox National Championships?
SM: We already have one casual gaming tournament going on right now. It is a net-only kind of a stuff, which will culminate in to an on-the-ground event. One event is the Chess, that is already going on and the other one will be for cricket. It will start next month, close to the World Cup. The finals will be held in Mumbai, but before that, all the 4 regions will have a semifinal being held out there.
GG: Tell us about your experiences at the 2007 Reliance GameBox National Championships. What did Zapak learn from the event?
SM: In the places that we went, we found that most people were hardcore gamers. While they are obviously one of our target audiences, but we are trying to take games to a much larger audience and that’s why we have started off with casual games. That does not mean we are not targeting the hardcore gamers, of course we are targeting them. But that is a small universe of hundred thousand people, probably half a million to the max, which we will target with our action games, MMOGs and stuff like that. But currently with the casual games, we are trying to target the 30 – 40 million people available, who play solitaire, who can play a simple game. That’s also a market. That’s also a universe. So if you try to look at what we tried to do in GameBox tournament, we tried to do the reverse. We were trying to inculcate little bit of causal gaming in the hearts of the hardcore gamers. It’s a reverse osmosis in someway.
GG: The MMOG by Zapak. Will it have an Indian theme? Can you elaborate on that?
SM: It will be world-class in terms of experience. I am deliberately not getting in to that as I don’t know how it will be interpreted. I can assure you that, just because we are launching something in India, it won’t be something of lower standard. It won’t be something that has already run through its life cycle, let’s say in some other countries. We are not naming names, there are few MMOGs available here which have run through their life cycles and now are being used in India as a… It won’t be that way. Whatever we get here, will also be the leading edge in US or Korea.
GG: Zapak TV. Will you launch a full-fledged TV channel or will it remain on the internet?
SM: No no, it will remain on the internet itself. It’s going to have many more variations encouraging users to come up with their reviews, user generated videos. We are not trying to compete with YouTube in that sense, both gaming and youth-oriented. But it is a net-only medium. We are very clear that we are an internet company. As I said, we are not getting in to mobile and we are clearly not getting in to the TV either.
GG: You recently came out with Zapak Girls. Can you give more details on it.
SM: Zapak Girls is a segmentation of our offering. We find that the very unknown statistic in most gaming circles is that, in most western countries, majority of the casual gamers are females and not males. In fact, there are females are 40 plus. The exact profile, which is never thought of as a gamer, are the person who is playing poker, who is playing mahjong, who is playing Max 3 and different, different types of games and stuff like that. So it is a very wrong stereotype that girls and games don’t go together. So what we tried to do was, we tried to think of ‘How do I highlight that lot of games that we have, which need to be segmented as and presented as, so that women come to know, that there is a place where they can come and play games. Games are not about blood and gore and action. That’s how the idea came. Then we followed through the execution called as Zapak girls. So it is a face of Zapak that is more targeted towards women.
GG: Will you be tying up with gaming cafes?
SM: Yes we will be. That’s part of the distribution plan. We will also tie up with cafes other than Reliance. India is a large country with a population that is more than 1.1 billion. For such a large country, no single company however big it may be, can cover the entire country. We will have to tie up with other people.
GG: What about consoles?
SM: Consoles are good for us because they expand the market. But we are not in console market. It is our belief that India is going to be like China, primarily a PC market when it comes to games. Not because consoles aren’t good. I love consoles but if you look at the economics of shared access, it doesn’t make sense. You may have those half a million, one million console users in India, but the eight million, ninety million people in the next five to ten years will not be on consoles, they will be on PCs.
GG: Zapak has a penchant for celebrities. Which celebrities are you currently working with? Are there any plans of bringing any international celebrity to work with Zapak?
SM: Without knowing for the future, with whom we are working with, I can tell you the reasons we work with celebrities, because that’s part of our larger game plan, which is, in India, there are two large things in the entertainment space, there is Cricket and there is Bollywood. Why us, any company which wants to associate themselves with celebrities will have ho to go cricket and Bollywood. And why celebrities, because they get you a kind of attraction, a kind of credibility, they give you the kind of youth excitement that you are looking for. Those things come because of celebrities. We are getting them by associating us with celebrities.
Gaming celebrities that are right now, are again, hardcore gamers. We will be targeting the hardcore gamers for our MMOGs, our action games. Gaming celebrities do not get you the mass. So our first step is to broaden the base rather than deepen the base. From that angle, I would rather have a person who appeals to the mass. For example, such few people in India know who Fatality is or how it is spelled. We will get into all this at a much later stage.
GG: Game Downloads. Virgin is planning to head into it. Will you also come out with a service like that?
SM: We already are, the pack and processing has been set up, like the payment gateway and the stuff like that. We will be launching downloads in the next one or two months. This is basically all the games that you get in the US. The USP that we have is, there are two pricing ranges that we have, majority of them are priced at $19.99 and some of them are $9.99. Basically $10 and $20 price range. We have been able to work with our vendors and get that to an India pricing that varies anything between $ 1.5 to $ 4.5. So that’s my contribution. I can bring down the prices to the India-pricing level. Someway, $4.5 is not India pricing level, but it is a lot cheaper than $20. We actually have the agreements inked and stuff like that. The DRM is already done; we are working on the payment gateway and all the other stuff that’s required on the backend.
GG: As for the Internet, online gaming requires a lot of bandwidth, and that is still being introduced in India. Won’t it affect Zapak’s growth?
SM: It is a classic chicken and egg situation. Let me tell you something about China, India is exactly where China was and has been trailing China by 4 – 5 years. Today it is 2007; in 2001 China faced the same classic problem. First of all, they didn’t have as many internet users as they have today, majority of them were on dial-up, very few had broadband. Shandou, which is now a multi-billion dollar company faced the same issues. Do I target the narrow band and look at poor experience, but I get more people. What about good experience on broadband. Our belief is that, if I look forward in three to four years time, there will be about 20 – 30 broadband users, why, because, if you see today, every new connection is a broadband connection. So whatever rate it’s growing, I know for certain, that this market will keep on growing. I am primarily targeting the broadband market. I am not investing for today, I am investing for the future. Yes, we are looking at the future rather than today.
GG: Anime is catching up fast in India. Will Zapak make any casual games on animes?
SM: Our strategy for content, when you are talking about anime, you are basically talking about a genre or a style of content. Animes could be in casual games, it could be in MMOGs and many other places. We are pretty agnostic to genre in the sense, if you see, most of our games are actually procured, we are like a publisher rather than a studio. In fact, we buy games from most of the publishers, not just in India, in fact very few are from India. Most of them are from abroad. If tomorrow, the market demands anime, we will buy anime, if it doesn’t demand, then we will not. So it doesn’t affect us in any way. That’s our strategy. Not just anime, it could be any new genre, which could be coming.
GG: What about the future? Tell us what Zapak is planning to introduce.
SM: We are right now only in casual games, we will next go in to downloadable games. We are also looking at MMOGs around the middle of this year as a closed beta and hopefully after that into open beta. And the last piece in the puzzle of gaming is the skill-based gaming. There are a lot of skill based games that are available. These are four things that are largely based on the online space. Everything else is offline, either in terms of consoles or in terms of PC. Again, from the same model that China has, basically the console market or the CD market doesn’t work for the publisher because in some cases the console is too expensive and in some cases, in CDs, piracy is rampant. So we are completely going to be on an online space. We have got our work cut out in the next one – one and a half years, to be in all those spaces and to be in it and to have it and to execute competently. This is my road map, once we have done it, then I don’t know after that. But I am sure, it’s going to take us one or two years to do that.
GG: Zapak apart, tell us something more about Sudipto Majumdar. Is he a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer. What are your favourite games? What do you prefer more, PC or consoles?
SM: Unfortunately, I am a hard core gamer. I used to not be even a MMOG player; I used to be a hardcore clan member. I have got converted little bit to MMOGs recently, I am a hardcore techie, so most techies get into some type of gaming, the solitary stuff you do. I enjoy teams; I enjoy going out for a drink with my team and stuff like that. I also enjoy playing guitar. I prefer PC games, this is a thing that offends the console gamers, while console games are done down the heels to certain extent. The kind of gaming experience you get in the PC, you don’t get that in consoles. Simply because, the mouse is a very intricate device, which your consoles can never give. One of the reasons you will not see successful first person shooters, with Halo being one of the exceptions, is because of that reason.
GG: That’s about it. Thank You.
SM: Thank You. Thank You!
We also have a video of the interview. We will upload it in some time. Keep watching GameGuru.in for the video interview.