For six years from 1999, L. Maruti Shankar, with a B.E. and an MBA from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, was working at VisualSoft (sold to Megasoft later) in the product delivery and development team. While working there, he was visualising an enterprise of his own in the area of digital games, a fledgling area that was just catching the imagination of IT professionals. He quit the firm in 2006 and worked on the blueprint of his start-up for about six to eight months. Selling the idea to angel investors was, as expected, a tough task. "I believe in developing a pool of games and building a repository of intellectual property. I do not believe in developing a game to sell it once for all. I am here to play a long-term game," Maruti Shankar, now the Managing Director of 7Seas Entertainment, says. While betting his personal savings from his VisualSoft job, he went on to sell the idea. He raised ₹1 crore from an angel investor, with which he started his firm with 10 people, including five programmers. Other Consumers: The other consumers of games include e-learning sites, localised portals, and entertainment portals. "There are not many game developers who have a wide variety of games. The demand for our content will only grow in the years to come as more and more social networking, e-learning, and entertainment portals sprout," he says. His first game was 3D Sudoku for personal computers in 2007. A year later, the number rose to 100, and the firm started game portals called OnlineRealGames.com, Mobizill.com, and Neodelight.com. The last one is a German gaming development firm with a library of 33 games that the Hyderabad-based company acquired in 2008. The business model of the firm is giving non-exclusive permissions to websites and aggregators globally. "We have three business segments: creating gaming IP, game publishing, and game distribution. And our revenue model is game licensing, selling ad space in our portals and games, and selling mobile games. We are also developing film-based games. Whatever we do, we own the IP. There is no going back on this," he says. - Article