A gaming case study was organised at the 16th FICCI FRAMES, with a very relevant subject that has been a concern for most of the game developers and start-ups in the country – how to make it big? Case studies about two gaming companies were at the centre of this session and companies in question – Rovio (Finland) and Octro (India) – have seen early success and insane download numbers that will make you dizzy.
Moderated by Reliance Entertainment – Digital CEO Manish Agarwal, the session had Rovio, country head India, Antii Ohrling and Octro president and CEO, Saurabh Aggarwal sharing valuable insights as to how to get into the next big industry in the country and be successful too.
Wearing a red Angry Birds sweatshirt Antii started off with how the brand achieved insane amount of users (50 million) in just thirty five days of the game launch which was otherwise achieved by telephone in seventy five years and the social phenomena Facebook in three and a half years. Apart from the reach of the game he mentioned that the franchise has grown to number of games over the years and tied up with a number of other brands be it Star Wars, Transformers or made its own with Angry Birds theme like Space, Epic and Go to name a few. Not leaving the opposite gender behind, Antti mentioned Angry Birds Stella and the recently launched Angry Birds Stella Pop have done amazingly well for the company making it one of the most downloaded games of all times. The company has also done a spin-off game from Angry Birds, called Bad Piggies.
“Let me just throw some numbers that will boggle your mind and leave you scratching your head. There have been more than 2.5 billion downloads of Angry Birds games which include all the 12 games that have been released to date. Over 600 billion birds have been flung which is almost 75 times the world population and players earning close to 150 billion stars which surpasses the number of stars in our galaxy achieving a play time which is equivalent to 1 million years. And all these numbers achieved in just five years,” he said.
The Angry Birds brand has already entered the film business and the first theatrical will be out next year with a stunning voice cast with names like Jason Sudeikis (Red), Peter Dinklage (Mighty Eagle), Josh Gad (Bomb), Maya Rudolph (Maltida) and Bill Hader (will head the pork side). Backed by Sony Pictures this one will be something every Angry Birds fan would be waiting for.
The company has not stopped there; the brand already has theme parks, consumer products, kids’ playgrounds, music events to name just a few of the varied offerings it has ventured into.
Back home, if not matching the success of Rovio but being one of the companies to achieve the title of being the most played games in the country with successful games like Teen Patti, Rummy and the recently launched Tambola, Octro Inc. started out as a telecom start-up a decade ago but ventured into gaming only two years ago with Teen Patti. Today, the company can boast of being the market leader when it comes to card based games in the country and take a big chunk of the overall market as well. Saurabh mentions that at any given time the game has more than 100,000 players playing the game across the country.
Saurabh too rambled some numbers, sharing data of how mobiles and tablets have the highest number of daily engagement in terms of minutes against any other media device. Making India, number three in Google Play Store in terms of number of downloads. As per the data, up till December 2013, the country had 11 million downloads from the top hundred games, but the number doubled to 22 million in just one year. Coming to Octro, he had some amazing stats to compare and to show how much impact his games have on daily lives of Indians and how big the brand has gone onto become. Too start of Octro games has seen 23 billion minutes of engagement activity in one year as against approximate numbers of 13 billion minutes by Bigg Boss or 20 billion by the slam bam version of the gentleman’s game Pepsi IPL.
Saurabh attributes this success to his company’s robust proprietary platform which was designed for growth and backed by strong analytics which helped the company know as to what the user wants, how the in-game engagement is and what changes need to be made to make it more effective. From testing the titles across different devices from the cheapest ones to the costliest ones and how the game plays the same in each, makes the company a winner and pull off numbers like that in the market of 200 million smartphones. Making his platform available to help Indian Indies Saurabh, mentioned how the company was open to share the successful technological techniques and help them grow to become what the company has achieved in the country.
