Nazara Technologies today acquired a majority stake in Chennai based NextWave Multimedia.
NextWave multimedia is a mobile gaming company that predominately focuses on developing casual and multi-player mobile games in sports genre with over 100 million downloads in the last seven years. NextWave owns the IP of the most popular mobile cricket game in India – World Cricket Championship (WCC)
With acquisition of NextWave, Nazara, strengthens its portfolio of offerings in the virtual interactive sports genre in India and other emerging markets. The NextWave acquisition comes after Nazara’s investments in MasterMind Sports, Moong Labs and more recently HalaPlay.
Commenting on the new partnership Nazara Games CEO Manish Agarwal said, “Nazara has been on the lookout for gaming companies which have established strong leadership in the sports genre. NextWave offers a strong promise of dominating the space globally with its massive large fan base of over approx. 15 million monthly active users and very strong product offering.”
Massive popularity of WCC franchise offers Nazara an ideal platform for ushering in VR Arcades (virtual reality) and launching m sports around cricket in India. Nazara ‘s partnership with cricket IPs like Virat Kohli and Royal Challengers Bangalore will further help NextWave augment the brand WCC among Indians worldwide.
According to Nextwave CEO P.R. Rajendran “The complementary skill sets of NextWave and Nazara and the synergy in between is sure to accelerate growth of Nextwave in coming years.”
He further adds, “Nazara’s expertise in creating scalable and profitable business models around consumer transactions globally will give us the needed impetus to grow along with them.”
Nextwave’s World Cricket Championship has been built over many years. The game engine is proven and has huge feature sets which will form a strong base for building future versions of the game currently under development
Industry data by AppAnnie report lists World Cricket Championship 2 among the top 10 games in India in terms of time spent playing the game and number of monthly active users alongside the top global titles
In 2017, WCC2 made it to Google Play’s ‘Editor’s Choice’. The game also made it to the best games and apps for the year listing consecutively for 2015, 2016 and 2017 on Google play. WCC franchise with its twin game offering has over approx. 15 million monthly active users as of Nov 2017.