Zapak ties up for gaming content

Zapak Digital Entertainment, a Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group venture company, has entered into tie-ups with 30 gaming studios across the world to create content for online games.

The company has entered into exclusive tie-ups with the US-based PopCap Games, Playfirst, and Russian game developer and distributor, Alawar, to provide content for casual (not the high-end ones) games.

The company is also working with six to eight Indian studios towards this end. These games are further being localised to suit Indian users. Once the content is in place, "we will be looking at both online and offline marketing strategies. Creating gameplexes will be a strong focus," says Rohit Sharma, chief operating officer, Zapak Digital Entertainment.

Last year, the company had announced its plan to open 600 gaming cafes over the next 2-3 years in 10-15 cities.

Zapak, which earlier announced a little over Rs 400 crore (Rs 4 billion) investment over the next three years, will also soon be launching Disney's downloadable games on Zapak in association with Boonty -- developer and distributor of online casual games -- at Rs 249.

These games include those based on popular Disney series' and movies such as Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Lion King and Kim Possible. The company is also reported to be in talks for getting the content of games based on Harry Potter. Zapak already has tie-ups with Adidas, Thums-Up, Ponds and a few other players for creating advergames.

Incidentally, the company is also changing the rules of Indian online gaming scenario by slashing the prices of its downloadable games to half. Downloadable casual games are full version deluxe games which have many levels and high-end graphics as compared to web games.

All the downloadable games from Zapak will be available in the range of Rs 49-249 whereas the same games are available for $20 (around Rs 800) or more in the international market. The company, on an average, has been launching three games every week.

Sharma says: "In the paid download segment, we have registered over 10,000 hits already. The online gaming segment has not grown because of lack of right content.

Whatever games are available today do not have any repeat value, no involvement, and artwork. Hence the user does not have any experience to return for more." By next year, the company is expecting a million users in this segment. The company has also introduced a 60-minute trial period before buying the game.

This format is used by almost all the major international players like MSN, Yahoo, BigFish and PopCap. Zapak is also providing all the payment options like, credit card, itz cash cards, netbanking, vouchers and will shortly launch Zapak cards too.

Over the period 2006-2010, the online gaming development market is expected to witness a compound annual growth rate of 82 per cent and is estimated to reach Rs 260 crore (Rs 2.6 billion), says a report by Ficci and PwC.

Online gaming accounted for 11 per cent of the overall gaming development market in India in 2006 and this share is expected to increase to 14 per cent by 2010.