What would you say is the USP of your games?
The games are all about what you do or cannot do in real life, presented in a gamified manner! Example, young girls want to take care of small babies – hence the success of our #2 app in the world – Super Mom; Young men want to learn driving – hence the success of our #1 game in the world –
Parking Frenzy!
We make real life fantasies come alive via casual gaming.
Your games attract a lot of female players. Why do you think that is? Is it an untapped / ignored market?
The reason behind it is partially based on the fact that girls prefer to play simple, casual, snacky games. Most of them do not spend hours playing console games and have simpler gaming devices – like iPods, iPhones and Tablets at their disposal!
Apart from creativity, what would you say is the #1 contributor to your games’ success?
Creativity is 50 per cent of the business. The rest is sheer perseverance and analytics, analytics and analytics! We measure everything that moves in a game and keep iterating on it to make it better and better.
As a developer what different tools do you use to develop games? Why them specifically?
We love Adobe flash to make simple, easy, browser and mobile games (Adobe Air). Many of our complex games are now being built on Unity. We use many third party analytic tools such as Flurry to keep track of various things in our games. We deploy many ad networks inside our games for monetization, served via mopub.
As a traditional web, browser-based games developer, how did you transition to developing mobile apps? Tell us about this journey?
This was a very tough journey! I remember a very particular incident in my house that triggered this shift in my outlook. One day, my wife was looking for a laptop and my elder daughter said, “Mom, ask Mala where it is” (Mala is our house help). That’s the day I realized that my kids who would fight for the laptop in the house had forgotten about it – they were so involved in their iPhones and tabs!
We approached the shift with lots of caution and applied a very simple logic –the consumer was the same, only the form factor was changing (desktop, laptop to Phone). So, the same consumer would like to play our most popular games that they liked on our websites, on their mobile phones too!
From our 700+ flash games library, we chose the top 10 games and transitioned them to mobile, using Adobe Air and other such tools!
You’re a big proponent of Adobe Gaming Solutions. Why is it so? What makes it so different from other development platforms?
Adobe’s “Flash” is Godsend. It’s simple, and easy to use. Lots of talent in India knows flash. The best part of Flash is that it allows us to ‘export’ our games to mobile, using Adobe Air and saves us the headache of building the game all over again!
What can you tell us about your future game development endeavors? Any games that we should look forward to? Any particular focus area?
We are heavily concentrating on two gaming genres that we understand – Car Racing (Parking) and Dress up. We want to delight India with a special focus on Indian games and you will see the Indianized versions of our best performing games being released soon!
Any advice to budding game or mobile app developers?
Mobile games and apps is a long, tedious and punishing business. It is a hits and misses business and while you may think that ‘your idea is the best in the world’, there is no guarantee that you will have a hit on your side.
Having said that, the glory of making an Angry Birds or Candy Crush is overwhelming and that’s the dream worth fighting for!
