Indiagames Ltd: Mobile Games and Beyond

The company developed games for touch screen kiosks, handheld gadgets, and the console games market. While the games were developed on game engines written by overseas developers, the interfaces were developed in-house. To target the Indian audience, it tried to create a distinct local flavor in some of its games. Gondal and his team also felt that games based on Indian themes could have a market in other countries because of their uniqueness. In early 2000, Indiagames launched 'Yoddha - The Warrior', India's first 3-D, PC-based, first person shooter (FPS) game. This game was sponsored by Pepsi. In the game, the central character, Yoddha, halts to drink Pepsi during a mission. Another game based on cricket was sponsored by ICICI Bank...

The company's revenues declined and it had to undertake several cost cutting measures. However, it survived this downturn owing to a strong offline games market and a committed core team. Moreover, it had not completely run out of capital. After the dotcom crash, Indiagames' investors wanted the company to focus on outsourced work in design and servicing of online games for foreign game companies. The fact that major game companies were looking to outsource their work in order to reduce their costs of production and development time meant that companies in low cost countries like India could expect to get a lot of work. But Gondal and his team preferred to create original content as they felt that there was not much of a future in doing outsourced work...