Jump Games to invest $8 mn to create games for intl market

The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group-promoted Reliance Entertainment Digital’s Jump Games, a publisher and developer of mobile games, will be creating eight high-end Hollywood film-based and Formula One games for the global market this year, each with an investment of between $500,000 and $1 million.

“We believe that mobile gaming is going to explode big time because it is snacky and snappy. Our focus areas, clearly, are gaming and movie-on-demand service (Bigflix),” Manish Agarwal, chief executive officer of Reliance Entertainment-Digital, told Business Standard.

Jump Games, which holds all of Turner’s intellectual property (IP), including Ben-10, Chhota Bheem, Krishna Balaram and Kans Krishna, and IP rights from the International Cricket Council and Formula One, has a catalog of 350 games, of which 200-odd have been developed in-house and the rest aggregated.

Stating that the mobile gaming market is $5 billion outside of India and around Rs 600 crore in the country, Agarwal said the company’s focus for India in gaming was to create localised content. Jump Games ruffles at around 30 million game downloads a month from India.

“Every year, we create roughly 35 games on the Java Symbian platform for the Indian market. We have started developing games for Android this year for the domestic market. While we have 43 Android games now, we will create around 20 games this year. Each game should involve an investment of Rs 10-12 lakh,” he added.

While declining to share the revenues of Jump Games, which is the second largest mobile game developer next to UTV's Indiagames, Agarwal said, the company would be profitable and self-funding in the next 12 to 18 months.

BigFlix to add 150 Telugu titles
Reliance Entertainment Digital's BigFlix, which closed down its DVD rental stores business in December 2011 and moved to on-demand movie streaming service in January this year, is planning to add 150 Telugu film titles to its 350-strong catalog in then next three to four months.

“Though we have started focusing predominantly on Hindi, we worked to be pan-India and added Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam movies to our catalog. We will will focus on Andhra Pradesh as it has the biggest movie-crazy population, which is tech-savvy too,” Agarwal said.

BigfFlix's on-demand service is available for Rs 249 per month in India and$4.99 overseas and is accessible through PCs, iPad, iPhone an Android devices.

BigFlix, which currently has 2,000 titles across Indian languages, will be introducing 1,000 more in the next four to five months. The company has 20,000 active subscribers and is looking at adding 1,500-2,000 to its user base every month on the back of its proposed foray into the US, Canada and UK markets from September 15.

It will be investing around $5 million, primarily to fuel its overseas foray and for consumer acquisition, which typically costs Rs 1,500-2,000 each.

Stating that the company was ‘evangelising’ the video-as-a-service concept to production houses as well as consumers, he said BigFlix will remain in the investment mode till it reaches a subscriber base of one million, which depends on the adoption of 3G and 4G services in the country. “This service will take another one year to reach the break even point,” Agarwal said.