The trend of third party app stores has been around for quite sometime now but the Indian telecom operators have recently made peace with the gaming industry in the country and have developed their own. First in line was Idea which along with its 4G services down south announced that it was launching gaming portal, Idea Games Club in February 2016 and now Bharti Airtel have followed the suit.
Bharti Airtel announced the beta launch of its gaming platform Wynk Games which will offer 2,000 games. The telecom operator already has Wynk Music and Wynk Movies which provides curated content for free viewing or listening but charges a certain amount through its Plus services if you want to download the content.
Wynk Games is a mobile app based gaming platform which will offer catalogue of local and global games across genres such as cricket, sports, racing, adventure, cards, kids and puzzles. The app is available for download on Wynk website with a free subscription for Airtel users and at Rs 29 for other customers in the current beta phase.
“By subscribing to Wynk Games, customers can enjoy a host of games at no additional cost – this includes many games that are typically found as ‘paid’ elsewhere. Also, though customers download various games for free, they often can only play a few levels of the game before hitting locked levels and getting prompted to make coin purchases to continue. Wynk Games does away with all these challenges and allows customers to enjoy complete games,” announced Wynk – Bharti Airtel, CEO, Kartik Sheth at the launch of the app.
One of the most consumed category today, ‘games’ have become part of our daily lives and Airtel wants to tap in to this category with Wynk Games. Along with the launch, Airtel announced its tie-up with social gaming network Playphone, a GungHo subsidiary and Softbank group company. It has previously partnered with worldwide carriers to provide gaming solution which power app stores.
Sheth says that this alliance presents an exciting opportunity for Indian developers to reach wider audience. “With our partnership, Indian developers on Wynk Games will also automatically get published in countries where Playphone is present – thus giving them opportunities to expand their reach across other global as well as emerging markets. Developers require only about 10 lines of code to adapt their app to the subscription platform for Wynk Games and can register online at Playphone’s website,” said Sheth.
“This partnership is important, as it brings together our technology and the digital skills of Wynk. Together with Bharti Airtel we are bundling Wynk Games with data packs. This will create the ultimate gaming destination for all mobile users in India. New games will be added daily from global developers, keeping Wynk Games always fresh and exciting for its users,” said Playphone , chief executive, Ron Czerny.
The current catalogue includes games from about 150 developers including global developers like Square Enix, Zeptolab, Thumbstar, Tresensa, Bulkypix and more.
Wynk Music which was launched last year in September was the first of the Wynk apps from Airtel and claims to have over 15 million downloads, of which only one third are from Airtel users. The app, Airtel said has 8 million songs played each day, a jump from 1 million songs in April this year.
Akin to Wynk Music and Wynk Movies, customers using Wynk Games can download games and play them offline. Wynk Games is also an ad-free application, thus delivering the best experience for avid gamers.