24/11/2010
7Seas Entertainment will invest Rs. 30 crores in two years on infrastructure and people to focus on mobile games. The company might go for fundraising for the expansion.
“Mobile gaming is going to drive growth in the game development industry. With over 60 crore mobile connections and the advent of 3G telephony, there is going to be a huge demand for mobile games. After developing a library of 400 online games, we now will focus on mobile games and develop IP in this segment,” Mr. L. Maruti Shankar, Managing Director of 7Seas Entertainment Ltd, told Business Line.
Globally too, mobile gaming showed good promise. Quoting research firm Gartner, he said mobile gaming revenue would surpass Rs. 28,000 crores ($5.6 billion) in 2010, a growth of 19 percent over Rs. 23,500 crores registered in 2009. Gartner estimated that 70-80 percent of all mobile consumer applications downloaded were mobile games. Moreover, 60-70 percent of these downloaded games were free. This trend was expected to continue for the next two to three years, he said.
“Nasscom estimates that the Indian gaming industry is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 49 percent to reach Rs. 4,150 crores by 2012,” he said. “Despite projections for demand for games, there was a dearth of content. In the first two quarters of 2010-11, we added 23 new games,” he said. Several gaming, social networking, and entertainment companies hosted games developed by the Hyderabad-based firm on their Web sites. “We are supplying them through licensing model on a non-exclusive basis both within the country and abroad. We have our own free gaming portal too,” he said. It acquired the German game portal called neodelight.com two years ago.
Web Links: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-info-tech/article1010214.ece
