Reliance Entertainment recently had a major change at the top end of the management with former CEO Manish Agarwal leaving the company to join Nazara Technologies, the conglomerate appointed Amit Khanduja as the new CEO and AnimationXpress got chatting with him on his new role and what are his plans for the company; his views on the Indian gaming ecosystem and how it is different from the other global players.
Excerpts:-
A little about your previous role and what’s on your plate now?
I have been associated with Reliance Games as an EVP for the global business previously where my biggest focus was the business components. I managed the overall business in West, which meant building and fostering relationships with all the leading production houses which we have and managing the commercial as well as strategic partnership with our OEM partners along with the app stores, also with maintaining the revenue flow and the live operation business in the marketing. This is what I was managing for a while.
We have really grown as an organization in last three years, where we’ve adapted from being just a developer to being a publisher – and that is a huge change for us in the global market. This was because the requirements for addressing Western markets are different from the game requirements and game genres in India. For the last three years, we focused to address these issues and the team has done a great job to adapt and be successful in those markets. Now we will look at building on those best practices to work towards replicating that success in the Indian market as well.
What’s your viewpoint on the game genres that are a hit with the Indian audience?
We have seen what the market went through when it was transitioning in US or West. If you go back to see what happened in China also, the market transitions with the gamers initially – who are in the mid-core category – and then you get to the mass category (who come under the casual component). If you want to address the market – the early adopters will be the mid-core audience and the later adopters will then be the second-tier cities beyond the metropolitan.
We are going to start seeing a lot more casual audience in India. The association with Bollywood movies, cricket games and other casual and racing genres will be the main components that will drive the gaming ecosystem. We recently launched one of the big games – T20 CPL 15 – which was a combination of being a cricket game with match three mechanics. This is the first time that we haven’t gone in and marketed like our other games in India because it is a first for us. We are trying to understand the consumer but we believe that if we take a match three concept and cricket together, India is the right market.
I honestly believe that within the next 24 months India is going to be the top 5 markets from downloads perspective and there is no doubt in my mind or in the global industry which is now taking notice of the country on which they need to focus on. So, the market expands and when you have a hockey stick like a growth curve, you’ll see multiple genres coming in. Some are going to be hits and some are going to stick around for long like Clash of Clans – which has been on top of the charts for around two years and nobody has been able to change that. But few games come along the way to disrupt the top 10 and that is what we will see in India too.
Give us some insights on how India can catch up with the world on the gaming front?
The global market is expanding quite exponentially. A lot of new users and also big studios are coming in globally on mobile platforms. One of the major changes is that the mobile, the console and the online platforms are coming together. For eg: Mortal Kombat X was released across multi-platforms and leveraged it very beautifully of how it worked on the console, how it worked on mobile and that is what we will see the big IPs, games and properties expand into going ahead. If you look at what big companies are doing – we haven’t had a change in the grossing chart in the global market for almost 18-24 months.
It is not that lesser people are engaging with the game. Download numbers might have come down but people are still engaging with the game and the reason they continue to do well which wasn’t the case earlier because now the game is a service. We better understand who the consumer is and whether we are answering their demands. Previously, what would happen with the video games is that one would just play the waiting game for someone to succeed and follow the trend. Even during the Java era, when we launched the game, we had no chance of knowing if it would be successful or not and the same thing would happen with console games. But today, both console and mobile games have become service and that is why longevity of these games is much longer. When you see Clash of Clans when it was launched and where it is today, there is a huge difference; even Simpsons when it was launched and where it is now.
If you take the example of Real Steel – when we launched it, it was only with 8 robots and today we have 40 robots in there. We launched with a single game play mode and today we have 7 modes to play with. The market has expanded quite extensively and we are two years shy of games being looked at as a service and not a commodity.
In India consumers are looking for more byte sized content; where we are trying to get the content in under 20-30mb category, this leaves less of a window of opportunity to update and add more content to the game. Thus, we need to cater to the byte sized content demands of the Indian consumers, while we don’t settle for the quality of the game art of game play. Also, consumers are going to have trial component, i.e. if they like something they’ll continue to play with it but they also want to see what else is in the market. So byte scale consumption will continue to be a detrimental factor in the Indian market.
To know more on what Amit Khanduja has planned for Reliance Games going ahead, watch the entire interview below.