Ekalavya Bhattacharya

A couple of days back I tweeted ‘Mobile gaming is so fkd in our country’. Someone asked me why?

Here are some reasons:

• Tata and Reliance charge you 2.5 Lakhs / month to host a game on their networks.
• Vodafone and Airtel won’t host a free game on-deck so you have to take the off-deck route.
• Now imagine you take the off-deck route and have a very successful cricket game and its out for free, Airtel or Vodafone will block access  to your site. Why? Because they earn Rs. 99 per download on their shitty cricket game and your game is causing them a loss of prospective revenues.
• Now if you host a game on on-deck, say on Vodafone Live or Airtel Live and its priced at Rs 49 or 99 per download. You’ll make peanuts as the operators will keep the major chunk of profits.
• Airtel and Vodafone will rarely push an advergame on-deck unless you pay them a huge amount. And you can’t really charge a user for downloading a branded advergaming - because why should I as a user pay Pepsi for a Football game? The user doesn’t know that the operator is charging this money…he’ll think that he’s paying Pepsi to download the game.
• TRAI regulations ensure that I get no information on whose playing my game even if its on-deck. So I can’t find out which cities, which phone models or which age group is playing my game.
• Developing a decent mobile game for a brand will cost a decent amount of money mainly because one has to make sure it works on multiple platforms and multiple handsets. This pushes up the cost and since one can’t guarantee game downloads - the brand/client doesn’t usually see ROI in Mobile Advergaming.

Well there are lots more reasons…these were some I could think off the top of my head. We really need the iPhone to gain momentum in our country for gaming to go anywhere.