Kreeda Games released Dance Mela, an interactive dancing game, about 2 years ago in India. The game is a free-to-play online dance game which lets people from all over India and the world, join in and dance to the various Bollywood songs available. GameGuru (GG) had a few words with Quentin Staes-Polet (QS), the CEO and co-founder of Kreeda Games about Dance Mela, multiplayer online games and a variety of other things. Hit the jump for the whole interview.
GG: You are an online multiplayer games company or something to that effect. Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
QS: Initially our first area was multiplayer games. But now we’ve diversified across different platforms.
GG: How is Dance Mela doing?
QS: Dance Mela is still ok. It’s not taking off where it needs to go. But we still have a good community of players and we still have people playing regularly. It’s doing decently.
GG: So what’s the user base of Dance Mela?
QS: We have about 85,000 registered users today.
GG: And on any given day, how many users are playing online?
QS: Anywhere in the hundreds. Not much more. It doesn’t cross thousands.
GG: Are you planning to upgrade it? Are you planning to add more features?
QS: We put in new features every week in Dance Mela. There are new songs, new clothes. There are new things coming every other week or every week.
GG: Do you plan on holding any more gaming tournaments that features games like Counter-Strike?
QS: We are looking at a few options. Nothing I can really put forward right now. But playing together is our motto as you say, so we’re always looking at tournaments. We’re looking at multiple options as long as it makes sense business wise.
GG: Do you have plans to introduce any massively multiplayer online games in India?
QS: Yes we do. But I can’t tell you anything. It’s too early for this at the moment.
GG: What kind of game is it going to be? Is it an adventure game or a shooter game?
QS: We’re looking mainly in the area of adventure and sports. That’s really what seems to be working in India so far.
GG: So will it be a cricket game then?
QS: I really can’t say.
GG: Would the games you bring to India be strictly multiplayer or single player as well?
QS: Usually we try multiplayers. It is a much better platform to monetize here in India to have multiplayer. With single player games, unless you can do like Rockstar and put really heavy security and DRM you will find your game pirated really, really fast. So multiplayer is more a service than a game. Fundamentally you provide access to a server, you provide different services within the game, so it’s different.
GG: How has the gaming industry in India changed since you started in 2006?
QS: Well, I think obviously all the platforms have risen. Penetration of big gaming consoles has been a little bit disappointing, while the PS2 is doing very well. But that’s no good for publishers because the piracy is so high on the PS2 that nobody can really make a lot of money on that. The problem with the PS3 and the Xbox 360 is their very high pricing for this market. So that’s not pushed as much as we want. The issue with online games is that we need the bandwidth. And hopefully with Wi-Max now just kicking in at very good prices, this will change dramatically. Because the last mile is mainly the issue. So hopefully that will make the base of users large enough to start really doing some business on the mass multiplayer space.
GG: What are the challenges faced by the gaming industry in India, and according to you how can they be solved?
QS: Well, it depends on which one. Piracy is a big challenge for anything that is packaged goods. Bandwidth is the main challenge for online games, and PC specs are more the challenge for large games rather than small ones. And then for games which don’t depend on user generated revenue and depend on advertising, the issue is basically the very low CPC and CPM rates that you have in India which means that you have to generate a lot of traffic just to be able to generate decent money. So it’s good, things are moving in the right direction. The console penetration is growing less fast than we would like, but it’s still growing. And I think PCs and bandwidth are growing affordable and more accessible. So I think there’s no question that it will take off. It’s just taking different ways and paths as India always does.
GG: You implemented micro-transactions in Dance Mela. So how successful was it?
QS: Obviously the base in the community is not as large as in other markets like China, Korea, the US or Europe. But the proportion of people paying, compared to the population users is similar. So in the mass multiplayer space, depending on the game, it’s anywhere between 5 and 12 percent of users that will be transacting. And we get the same ratios here. The revenues, depending on the game, can go anywhere from 1 dollar to 15 dollars and we have got revenues between that range for users here as well. Users seem to react similarly with the introduction of new items, re-pricing, all of those things. So I think fundamentally that this next model is working. There are enough payment methods in place now, with all the prepaid cards, ITZ Cash and all those things for that business to work. The problem is more related to distributing and running the games, given that infrastructure and the very fragmented market we are in. There’s no such thing as one market in India. It’s many, many different regional markets, different demographic markets and also different access markets. You don’t have the same access to the internet and PCs in some towns that you have in metros, and that impacts the spread of gaming as a whole.
GG: Are you planning to get Dance Mela to consoles?
QS: No. That’s not in our plan. It’s very different technology. It requires different type of control and connectivity. So we have no plans to do that at this point.
GG: Content wise, you have signed up with Saroj Khan Show for Dance Mela, did it help you bring the non-gaming crowd to gaming?
QS: Yes, we had actually a very high ratio of non-gamers who were exposed for the first time and guided by Saroj Khan to explore that, so it brought quite a lot of people who had very little experience in gaming, it was very interesting to see how people moved. But there are obviously many factors that need to be together, marketing is only one of them, again bandwidth access to the game. If you have to go online, downloading games, if you have little experience as a gamer then some of those things might be a bit challenging so we offered the game for free also, then posted it to people. Just try to make it easy and I think those cumulative efforts and what my competitors have done in the market in the last couple of years means that at least the demand for gaming, the awareness of gaming across families, the access to the product in the shops and install base has been growing steadily, not as fast as we all hope but definitely growing strongly.
GG: Any console games?
QS: Not so far. Consoles, to be clear, are very, very large and long-term projects and so we do bits and pieces for other parties that build big games but we do not take on full console even on other projects so far. Not to say we won’t do it but so far that is not an area we have explored extensively.
GG: So Kreeda is making Apps for the iPhone?
QS: We are not making Apps for iPhone at this moment but this is an area we are keen to explore. It’s a space that’s moving fast. It’s still a bit small in India but I hope it will take off and what I was commenting more is about how exciting the platform is to do things. It is a major challenge across the world and especially in India to get content on the mobile because the telcos are taking such a share of the revenue, but with the Apple model, you go online to get your stuff. There’s no telco. You pay with your credit card or your pre-paid card and move. So it bypasses that issue and suddenly your margins are double or triple on whatever IP you create for that space and so either it’s the quality of the platform the graphics are very good. I was recently part of the Frames jury for the games section at FICCI Frames and I saw quite a few games across platforms on mobile and definitely the iPhone brings it to the next level and the business model makes it a lot more attractive for people who create an IP.