Reliance Games to create action-based mobile game studio

Reliance Games is betting big on action-based games for mobiles and tablets. With the success of its Real Steel game series, the company is planning to create a studio for action-based games, said Reliance Entertainment Digital CEO Manish Agarwal.

The company, which has launched a sequel of Real Steel game – Real Steel World Robot Boxing for iOS and Android on October 17, is expecting more than five million downloads over the next 45 days.

Within the first three days of release, the game was downloaded one million times. The original Real Steel game has already raked in more than 10 million downloads globally.

Agarwal said that the new game took about 13 months to develop, and the company had spent more than $1 million to develop the new game. The company expects return on investment of more than 500% on this game. The first Real Steel mobile game has already earned more then $5 million. “The game was developed completely in Pune. The cost would have been three to four times more had this been done outside India,” he added.

The first Real Steel game was launched as an extension of DreamWorks' 2011 action movie Real Steel. While the movie failed to be a huge success at the box office, the game was one of the hits that year, he said.

“We were not under any deadline pressure as there was no movie release to time the game launch with. However, we will keep on updating the game over the next 18 months,” Agarwal said.

While most of downloads happen on iOS platform, the company expects that downloads on Android would pick up soon. “This will enhance options for monetization,” he added.

The game has ranked among the top 10 games on the Apple App store in over 100 countries within the first week. The new game ranked No. 1 on iPads in five countries and is among the top five games in iPhone ranking across 27 countries during the first week.

Over the past one year, Reliance Games has invested $8 million to develop 8 new titles for the international market.