7Seas Article on Business India Magazine
30/09/2012 Playing games is serious business for Shankar "This is the only industry where the boss also plays games at work," says L. Maruti Shankar, managing director of the Hyderabad-based 7Seas Entertainment Ltd. "I need to know if a game will be a hit!" explains Shankar, who founded his company, originally called 7Seas Technologies, in 2006. Beginning with an angel funding of just ₹1 crore, he has built his company into a 90-people organisation with a 2011-12 revenue of ₹23 crore, on which it showed a net profit of ₹3.17 crore. Along the way, it has bagged a clutch of awards, from Intel's 'India Innovate' contest in 2010 to two FICCI-BAF (Best of Animation Frames) awards in 2012 for its 'Killer Instinct' online game in the 'Best Online Game' category and 'Alexia The Great' as 'Best Mobile Game'. Says Shankar, 38, who is an engineer and a gold-medal MBA from Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University: "Our focus is on casual games, which you can play in your leisure time, not hardcore ones that become an obsession and take up all your time." Played mostly on the web, this genre is picking up worldwide, especially in India. With mobile gaming on the rise, 7Seas has now launched games on feature-based smartphones, on the same model. "The future is in Android-based devices," he says. "These games account for 41 percent of the market today, and are growing rapidly." Sticking to Shankar's original aim of developing intellectual property-based games, his company boasts the position of India's first ISO-certified, independent, IP-based, casual gaming company, traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The company's own portal is like a 'showcase', he says – from which customers select games and license them. With localised, Indian-language content in great demand, this is a big opportunity: the same game can be converted to any language, for any portal, he explains. And this translation is something that only the IP owner can do. "Desi games are very popular," agrees Shivankar Jay, editor at Sify Games, which has partnered with 7Seas since 2008 featuring the latter's games on its gaming portal Antzill.com. "They have been developing popular games that do well on our site. One of the games that gets a lot of gameplays is 'Desi Cricket League', which 7Seas developed during the IPL season." That's why Sify decided to go with an Indian company, he says: "For local games content that our users can relate to." With 150 copyrights and trademarks for its games, 7Seas has 500 IP-based casual games in its kitty—one of the largest collections in the country with 17 mobile 3D games and six CD packs of PC games available in the market. "We offer our customers a unique model of game licensing," Shankar says. "And we make sure there is new content every day—otherwise people won't come to play our games, even for free!" Dung Tran is chief executive officer of the Copenhagen-based TwoCitizens, which he describes as "a team of crazy idea creators, design gurus, nerdy techies, and precise project planners." 7Seas shares this mindset. A client since 2009, TwoCitizens was helped by the Indian company in setting up a casual gaming platform, including over 60 games for one of its clients. "I have had the opportunity to work with Indian engineers and I've had very positive experiences. Also, one of my very good friends from my time at the Technical University of Denmark is from India. So it was obvious that we wanted to look for a partner in India," Tran says. "We chose 7Seas because of the variety and quality of their games." With Gartner estimating the global gaming market at $74 billion and set to reach $112 billion by 2015, the Indian gaming market too will go up from the current ₹100 crore to ₹380 crore by 2015, Shankar says. "It is a big gaming opportunity," he adds. - article