BlackBerry to turn game box to woo youth

Canada-based Research in Motion (RIM) is getting ready to spruce up its BlackBerry smartphones from being just an e-mail and chat phone to a gaming platform. RIM claims that it started shedding its 'corporate-only' image about two years ago to woo younger consumers. Now, the company is encouraging game app (short for mobile applications) developers to come onboard and develop games for the BlackBerry OS.

"There has been a big uptake in the last one year. Also, our new range of devices in the touch series and 7.0 devices render themselves to gaming better because the 'responsiveness' is good," claimed Annie Mathew, head of alliances and developer relations at RIM.

The company is eager to get gaming applications onto its platform as it has announced its plans for a new platform called BlackBerry 10, which it claims would be a paradise for gamers. BlackBerry Appworld has around 51,000 apps in total. Of this, nearly 40-50 per cent are games and entertainment apps. "The proportion of gaming apps is only set to grow as we move to a newer platform," said Mathew.

Developers like Ashwin Kandoi, director of Winjit Technologies, agreed that it was hard for him to imagine a gaming ecosystem on BlackBerry when he bought his BlackBerry smartphone five years back. Today, Kandoi creates entertainment and content based applications on the platform. Developers like Winjit emphasised that a large number of BlackBerry users were willing to pay for apps.

"Android operating system has a lot of users who have shifted to it from non-smartphones while BlackBerry has always been used by those who want to stay connected. This creates a huge difference in users' download patterns," said Kandoi.

Ranjit Singh, CEO of Manthan Studio, recently designed a multi-player game called 'Battle' for the BlackBerry platform. The game can be played on the challenger mode remotely, and it has been integrated with the BlackBerry messenger (BBM).

"After the game has been integrated with BBM, I have noticed the number of downloads through the recommendation route has gone up," said Singh.

Integration with BBM will be the theme for more applications, both gaming and otherwise, said Mathew. "We always had this game called Cricket. But after we integrated with BBM, downloads of this game went up by 80 per cent," Mathew said.

The company already has 138 applications which are integrated with various BlackBerry native applications. One such example is the company's Travel application that scans through e-mail for airline tickets and shows up as alarm on its calendar.

Even as the number of applications offered by Apple and Google's Android runs into lakhs, RIM is undeterred. "The number of apps which are coming onboard now are way higher. But we should know where to place the numbers, as we are looking at quality apps," said Mathew. The company claims to screen applications and put them through a quality test to avoid duplication seen in other platforms.

The Canadian company is also increasing the proportion of application developers from India. Five years back, the company had less than 5,000 developers from India. Now, the number has swelled to 26,000. And so has the focus on local content. "We have applications for Bharatmatrimony and Indiaproperties.com," said Mathew.