"The more love you put into making a game, the more the audience will appreciate it"

What's the latest with Dhruva?
This quarter we are going to release 2-3 mobile games in our games for India segment. Some of the movies that we had signed up were delayed. The movies are Hera Pheri, Phir Hera Pheri and Deewane Hue Pagal. All 3 are comdies. We like the comedy segment.

How come comedy movies?
Because spoofs and comedy movies lend themselves quite well to the mobile gaming experience.

Dhruva's quality philosophy is...
The more love you put into making a game, the more the audience will appreciate it. We invest a lot of passion and thought in the game design. We look at things from a consumer view point; we ask a lot of hard questions...we try our best to ensure that the end-user experience is memorable and fun.
Also when it comes to the mobile, one has to note that different types of games are suited for different times of the day. During the day there could be short spurts of 5 – 7 minutes gaming while traveling, waiting for a bus or at a coffee break. Then there are longer gaming experiences at home in the evening… Hence there are opportunities to make mobile games for the different time segments and game play and design have to be specific to each.

One of the most challenging things about making games is balancing difficulty and balancing interest levels. If the game is too easy or predictable, people lose interest. If the levels are too tough to crack, people give up… Gaming may be a business, but it is also an art. It’s the quality of the experience that will endear games to people.

Please comment on the current Indian mobile gaming scenario?
We (the gaming industry) are significantly challenged by the fact that we are introducing the masses to gaming. It’s a great opportunity but also tough as we have no past data to go with, except for the trends and patterns in the other forms of entertainment. So in terms of the genres and games that we create, we have to keep the funnel as wide open as possible at this early stage, try and address as wide an audience as possible.... A gaming portfolio needs variety and a good long tail.

One thing that needs plenty of attention is how to grow the ‘enabled’ subscriber base. As I was preparing for my talk I realized that while the number of mobile phones in India is 60+million and growing rapidly and so on, these numbers do not reflect the addressable market for Mobile gaming. In India since consumers buy their phones from the open market, the phones are not pre-configured with the GPRS settings and hence not “enabled” meaning ready to download games and other content from their mobile operator WAP portals.

The number of ‘enabled’ consumers in India is actually quite a small percentage of the entire mobile population. Consider this: In a 10 million GSM subscriber base, roughly about 600,000 subscribers are “enabled” and in this pool only around 100,000 can be considered as active ‘game’ consumers, downloading at the rate of 1 game a month. So we are really looking at just 0.01 percent of the overall mobile subscriber base being active ‘game’ consumers right now… this really has to change if gaming has to become a mass market phenomena. Getting more subscribers ‘enabled’ and providing exciting content to ‘enabled’ subscribers go hand in hand to get more people to becoming active consumers.

What else is happening at Dhruva?
Well we are looking at setting up an internal training division. We still need a lot of new people and are looking at hiring the right kind of talent. A lot of our work is in the console and PC game development space. It is far easier to scale up in the mobile gaming, porting and testing segments than in console and PC games. In the mobile gaming space, creative talent is an area where we need to scale up.

Today there are 200 devices on which to port and test. At Dhruva, we dont want to waste our creative talent on rote production activity. We rarely do any porting or testing work, we outsource most of it. For Maria Sharapova Tennis we did the reference builds and outsourced the rest of the work.

So do you outsource porting work in India?
The decision on outsourcing of porting is usually left to our international partners. Funnily enough some of the games that we develop are sent to our international partners and could land up being tested in India itself. We would love to outsource porting here, provided our IP would be secure.