Companies light up sales with Diwali games

Indian gaming companies are all set to light up this Diwali season with plenty of online games. Some games (called edu-games) are even creating eco-awareness by showing how the festival of lights can be enjoyed without using “dangerous” fireworks, even as they further popularise the “mythological” story of Diwali. The games are accompanied with a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds.

Hyderabad-based 7Seas Technologies Limited, for instance, is launching Diwali Dhamaka in English, Hindi and Telugu. The game comprises a combination of six levels including lighting at least 10 clay lamps in a random sequence besides a quiz based on safety precautions and measuring the accurate distance before lighting crackers.

Maruti Sanker, managing director of 7Seas Technologies, explains that the “broad idea behind launching this online Diwali game is to ignite our revenues and create more visibility for our gaming portal onlinerealgames.com in a short span through such topical themes. Being a free game, gamers in other countries too can play this game just to know more about the second biggest festival of India. We hope to garner over a million gameplays and revenues of Rs 5 lakh from this game in the next one week.”

The online gaming market is estimated to be around $10 billion and expected to go to $15 billion by 2012. The investment that gaming companies infuse in developing a Diwali game — targeted at audience between six and 30 years — would typically be Rs 4 to 6 lakh.

Games2Win has planned two games around Diwali with a total investment of Rs 12 lakh — one weaved around the history of Diwali and the other conveying a message that crackers are a nuisance both health and wealth reasons. “Last year, our Diwali games were played just under 1 million. This time, we are going for 2 million plays. Honestly, we will not recover money from these games. But it just becomes a new offering and hence enhances our overall visibility,” says Alok Kejriwal, co-founder and chief executive of Mumbai-based Games2Win.

After Diwali, however, gamers disappear from the websites, according to Kejriwal. “Hence, we adopt a ‘surround sales’ strategy. We sell the ‘environment’ of games and as integration we encourage brands to message the audience thematically (Happy Diwali) or tactically (buy a TV and get a DVD player) in these games,” he adds.

Reliance Big Entertainment’s online gaming arm, Zapak Digital, has launched two games for Diwali — Rocket Mania, a game that requires the user to connect the fuses to attach the fire to the rockets, and Blast Billiards, an adoption of a game on billiards where the dynamites on the table need to be potted before the time runs out and they explode.

“We are expecting kids and teenagers to enjoy these games on zapak.com. The age group we are targeting is from six to 25 years. We are expecting 2 to 3 million gameplays for these three games, and an average revenue of Rs 4 lakh from each of them,” reckons Rohit Sharma, chief operating officer of Zapak.