"We are here to stay and we want to be at the best position when the business really takes off. We don't wish to go into retail distribution as there are some companies who have been doing that for a long time and are doing it well. But pretty much every other space in the gaming industry is open to us."

What was the marketing campaign followed for GTA IV?
We did the marketing campaign across all kind of mediums. We used online like simple advertising on Google, buying whole sites and web pages or posting banners. We also did a WAP campaign, we designed sites which gave details as where to buy the game and give some freebies for downloading. Then we released ring tones, wallpapers and organized contests.

We worked closely the distributor with point of sales marketing and also put in place retail verification so the point of sales marketing was maintained in the shops because the distributors sometimes put up standees but it is difficult to ensure they stay in place long unless you visit every day. You might spend to build an attractive standee and to put up your standee in a good place but at the end of a couple of days it might have just gone. So being able to verify at what's going on at retail, being able to measure what's going on online and doing a full analysis on how that impacts the sales. We have also used networks like Clinck, through which we can advertise on gaming café computers desktops. We also do a lot of PR, contests and competitions around the release. Thanks to 'Dance Mela' we have a network of internet café who we talk to regularly so we are able to promote the game into those environments.

You are using your knowledge of the gaming market in India to leverage your marketing campaigns for other products.
For gaming we use the target market of gaming. If it's another product we use games and our understanding of how people react to interactive advertising because games are interactive products. We try to make the marketing adjustable all the time and to be able to focus on media that allows us to have a very precise feedback on how many people have been touched and what action they have taken, hence for example the WAP is very good for that.

Monitoring is very hard in India because the infrastructure in India is not always reliable, sales numbers from shops are often hard to get. You always need someone who will push because after your marketing effort, you'll only know after 2 months whether it's paid or not. We try look at weekly sales numbers in regards to the marketing activities and try out different models and verify which one is most efficient. Ideally you would need daily sales numbers. Because gaming is such a small market, most of the publishers that have done marketing in India for gaming could not spend that much time or could not interest partners to be so detailed in their approach. But for us it's like our blood and its easy for us to drive the product because we know the market.

People have started to use gaming increasingly for interactive advertising, so is it only in western countries or in India as well that gaming is used for advertising?
We now do games which create feedback and interaction between the company that releases the product and their actual end customer. Thanks to gaming you get very precise data on what actually the customer wants and because it's fully interactive you can use it to build a community around your product.

There are a lot of interest groups who have realized that instead of communicating only through traditionalmedia there is the game space that can be used as well. If you look at social networks people create groups about anything that they like these days but usually after you register for the group, there's not much value coming out of that membership after that. But if instead of that you create a mass multiplayer game, it is fun to visit regularly, it has rewards and objectives and has all the features and the tools of social networks like mail, chat, blogs and more.

How has the micro transaction model faired in India so far?
In case of 'Dance Mela' the volume is not that big because we don't have that many gamers but the behavior of the players in terms of the percentage that would convert from non paying users to paying users, in terms of the ARPU are very similar to what you'll see internationally.

We see the same level of conversion, we see between 5 and 12 percent of conversion depending on the quality of the game and ARPU again depending on the quality of the game may vary from 3 to 15 dollars. We don't have too much concerns about the online model as I am very confident that it will work in India. It is more about finding which game is really going to attract large numbers of players. To really make money you need to have 100,000+ players that means at the peak you will have 10,000 players. The latest studies point that Travian has the most players In India with over 1.4 million registered users. It's a browser based game and has the right access ease and strategy base game play suitable for a substantial part of the on-line population.

But now a days a lot of games on Facebook are getting very popular.
Only Zynga has really brought MMO on facebook. I think they have leveraged that very very well. It's global and they have a very straight forward formula and I hope it continues to work. They have so many products right now that people are getting a little lost and we look forward to see how they continue to innovate. The older games of Zynga were following the same model eg. Mafia wars and Battle of the Bands etc. but with the new releases thay have kept the innovation pace going. We have seen no public data on what Indians are willing to spend on these games, but there are no reason to think they are averse to spending.

Talking about 'Dance Mela' do you have any plans to update it or make any changes to it?
We have no such plans right now. We are going to let the game run and let the team handle it. We still think it's a good genre to break (Bollywood and dance games) to but we don't know if there are enough players yet for large client base MMO games in India. The reality is that most hardcore gamers in India are still boys aged 16 to 25 and a lot of them are still finding it a little too girly to go dancing. I guess it will take time to widen that base to other demographics, so we are keeping it on, to keep the community alive. When we feel that the market has evolved we might launch a 'Dance Mela' 2 or something similar but nothing is confirmed at this time.

What are the future plans for Kreeda?
We will keep growing our two businesses. Currently we are very strongly pushing in the service space. We will continue to develop the gaming market in India through on-line publishing. We are here to stay and we want to be at the best position when the business really takes off. We don't wish to go into retail distribution as there are some companies who have been doing that for a long time and are doing it well. But pretty much every other space in the gaming industry is open to us. We are positioning ourselves, building a solid team and partnering with the key players in the industry. We will just keep working the gaming market here with the other local players. There are many smart people going after this space and trying to innovate, which is exciting and challenging. It will probably take another 2 to 5 years to get the market to become really interesting for the large players. There is no reason why people in India should game less than anywhere else. We have to fine tune the business models that exist around the world and adapt it and make it palatable to the people here.

As a company what would be the next thing we can see coming from Kreeda?
Hopefully you will see some of our products next year. You can expect another MMO before the end of the first quarter next year. The MMO is not developed by us, we are just going to publish it in India. We will probably adapt or tweak it a bit for the Indian gamers and we will be operating it and marketing it. You might see some marketing campaigns by us and in the mean time we are focused on growing our service business and also doing some publishing activities in the next two years.

Anything else you would like to share with our readers
Developing a new market is always challenging but the passion that we see inhabit the developers, publishers, distributors, retailers and more importantly the joy that all the customers experience when gaming give us confidence for a great future for the gaming industry in India.

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