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Roby John(SuperGaming) on how the gaming business actually makes money
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Most people still think gaming is entertainment, not an industry bigger than movies and music combined. This conversation is a rare look at building a gaming studio in India that reaches 200 million players, told by the founder actually doing it.
Roby John was one of India's first iPhone developers, and after his edtech startup TapToLearn collapsed, he spent two years in the dark before building SuperGaming into a studio played by over 200 million people. SuperGaming makes free-to-play mobile games like Indus Battle Royale and licenses its own engine to global giants, even running the official mobile Pac-Man for Bandai Namco.
Across this conversation with host Akshay Datt, Roby explains why gaming now commands a bigger wallet share than movies and music, why he launches in India where under 1% of players pay but monetizes in Brazil where 6 to 12% do, and why he is grateful for the app store tax most founders resent. With India's gaming market crossing 5 billion dollars and a new online gaming law reshaping the sector, this mobile game development story could not be more timely.
👉How SuperGaming grew a free-to-play portfolio to more than 200 million lifetime players across titles like MaskGun, Indus, and Silly Royale
👉Why Roby John treats India as a fast, free feedback lab and monetizes in Brazil, where in-app purchase conversion runs 6 to 12% versus under 1% at home
👉How the studio de-risks a hit-driven business by licensing its Indus Engine and SuperPlatform, including running the official mobile Pac-Man for Bandai Namco
👉What "ossification" means and why roughly 70% of app store game revenue still goes to titles made before 2020
👉Why Roby believes AI can cut the cost of a world-class game from 50 million dollars to 3 to 5 million, and why India is 5 to 7 years from its own billion dollar breakout
Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/] for daily insights.
00:00 - Inside India's Global Gaming Studio Bet
07:39 - How the Gaming Industry Actually Works
12:45 - Why Gaming Beats Movies and Music
29:52 - The Failed Startup Before SuperGaming
33:27 - Building Indus, the Wakanda of India
42:15 - How to De-Risk a AAA Game
50:22 - Extraction Shooters, Mobile Gaming's Next Genre
57:15 - India vs Brazil Monetization Gap
01:08:40 - The Truth About App Store Tax
01:16:43 - Can AI Build Cheaper Games
#SuperGaming #RobyJohn #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #IndianGamingStartup #MobileGameDevelopment #IndusBattleRoyale #IndianGameStudio #BattleRoyaleIndia #FreeToPlayGames #GameDevelopmentIndia #HowToBuildAGameStudio #IndianStartups #GamingIndustryIndia #Web3Gaming #ExtractionShooters #AppStoreTax #StartupPodcast #FounderInterview #aiingaming
Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel
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Transcript
The Gaming Industry vs. Film Industry
00:00:00
Speaker
India has some midcore games. What does this term midcore mean?
00:00:11
Speaker
The Battle Royale mobile market is maybe 5x bigger than the Battle Royale PC market. There are only two great gaming companies. There is Valve and there is Epic Games. The gaming industry is bigger than movies, films put together. Fortnite is fighting a legal case against Apple to remove that tax.
Fortnite's Legal Battle with Apple
00:00:28
Speaker
What's your take on that? They were very inspired by this movie called Black Panther. So when people looked at our initial art style, they kind of said, hey, this is the Wakanda India.
Robbie John's Insights on Indus and Super Gaming
00:00:37
Speaker
Indus is the game Robbie John has been building at Super Gaming, his gaming studio backed by companies like Skycatcher, A16Z and Bandai Namco. He sits down with Akshay Dutt on the Founder Thesis podcast to break down how the game's business actually makes money.
00:00:58
Speaker
Robby John, you
Roles in Game Development: Developers, Publishers, and Consoles
00:00:59
Speaker
are the founder and CEO of Super Gaming, which is a game developer. Welcome to the Founder Thesis podcast. And ah let's first understand this term of being a game developer. What are the different stakeholders in the gaming industry and where is a game developer in that layering, in that stack?
00:01:20
Speaker
in that stack Thank you, Akshay, for having me on the podcast. Hello, everybody. My name is Robby. I'm the founder and CEO of Supergaming. Akshay, thank you for doing this on a Sunday. I'll quickly jump into you know the gaming industry and my understanding of it. At the high level, you've got you know the platforms. ah you know That could be the hardware platforms, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, which actually make consoles. It could be the PC
Democratization of Game Distribution
00:01:43
Speaker
platforms, ah which is mostly Steam and Epic, or the mobile platform owners, which is really the Android ecosystem and Apple iOS. After that, you've actually got the publishers of games, probably the most famous one and the ones that we work with, Abundant Amco, but also many others, including Tencent, ah you know,
Super Gaming's Evolution and Strategies
00:02:01
Speaker
very large very large publishers around the world. And finally, you've got the game developers, which is us, ah who are actually building the games.
00:02:08
Speaker
ah When we think about it, the developers are actually building the gameplay and the experience. Publishers are kind of handling the commercialization aspects of it, like the go-to-market, scaling, distribution of it. And then the consoles are providing the hardware and, you know, much more deeper. Reach and reach to end consumers, basically. Correct.
00:02:25
Speaker
Okay. yeah ah Does the game publisher like a Tencent or a Bandai Namco or a Crafton, they give you ah money to develop a game or they give you a revenue share? How ah how does that relationship work?
00:02:40
Speaker
Correct. A distinction is that sometimes a publisher can be a developer himself and will have an in-house developer team, but they will also kind of do second party or third party publishing, which is, you know, some of it, what I call second party is people will actually contract a game developer to kind of make a game for them, with them.
00:02:56
Speaker
Or it could actually be just kind of providing distribution, which is a third party publishing deal. Like somebody's made the game, I'm just providing distribution. um So most publishers would actually have various flavors. There's nothing called a standard publishing deal. I've kind of probably done 10 or 12 of these and each one of them has been very distinct from each other. Sometimes you get money, sometimes just a revenue share, sometimes just get IP. That's the structure of all of these deals. ah But obviously the the best model is to actually be the game developer and the publisher of your own titles, which is more common on mobile platforms, which is really how we got started.
00:03:29
Speaker
it It sounds a lot like how Hollywood or Bollywood operates. Like you have the studios, like you have, let's say Warner or or HBO or whatever, and which are working with the people who make movies. Sometimes they find, sometimes they buy the movie, whatever. Correct. A big distinction, I would say, came in in the way that we got our start.
00:03:50
Speaker
ah You know, like I wouldn't have started in the gaming industry unless the app stores kind of came along came alive, you know, and the app stores allowed us to kind of get this game distribution direct to consumer.
00:04:01
Speaker
Game development has moved to where you can reach a consumer directly thanks to the distribution provided by an Apple and Google. ah That's really how we exist. That's really how we got started. i wouldn't have dreamt of competing in the games industry, especially on PC and console, because people have been on that, had a head start ahead of us from 25 years.
00:04:19
Speaker
They had a you know lock on distribution. When the app stores came out, you know we were on mobile from day one. um you know I was fortunate that you know we actually started very early on the iOS development platform. In fact, we were one of the first iOS developers for coming in from India. ah ah probably a six or seven title went to top grossing.
00:04:36
Speaker
um So that's really how our story of Three Guys, A Dog in a Dream went to kind of building a whole game studio, which is what we've done over the last 15 years. Today we're about 120 people and been building real-time multiplayer games on the app stores for the last 10 years.
00:04:50
Speaker
Okay, amazing. um Microsoft has purchased, I remember reading something about Microsoft purchasing a game developer or a game studio. or what what What was that deal about?
00:05:01
Speaker
So I think, you know, Microsoft has purchased a number of studios. If you're kind of talking about Activision purchase or Blizzard or any one of those, and all of these are multi-billion dollar deals.
00:05:12
Speaker
Essentially, what what you have is ah larger platforms might be publishing or kind of buying these studios to get exclusive content on all of their platforms. some Sometimes it's for capability like mobile, like, you know, Activision was mostly ah like, life let's say, for example, King was purchased by Activision for Candy Crush, which is really a mobile game ah inside of the platform. So you would see these M&A opportunities in the gaming space, largely from a distribution perspective.
00:05:38
Speaker
And Activision is a game developer. Okay. So Activision is a game developer that actually makes Call of Duty one of the most famous titles all around. Okay. Okay. So the the reason to buy these game developers is you get that IP. And I think just like Hollywood...
00:05:53
Speaker
Like say, a Harry Potter IP has value or Dune IP has value. So developers own franchise IP, so to say? You've got a Call of Duty game that comes out every year or every couple of years. So that's franchise IP. Some of it could just be that, you know, there is what we call ossification in the app stores, which means, you know, hey, people have kind of gone up the ranks and it's a known name, like Candy Crush. You've probably heard of it. And that's really where you're buying, you know, the distribution of the brand, which kind of becomes the default everywhere.
00:06:20
Speaker
ah So that's really what we've seen in the M&A space over the last few years. Okay, okay, okay. Very interesting. Is the gaming industry bigger than the film industry? but The gaming industry is bigger than movies, films put together.
00:06:34
Speaker
Okay. So, like in terms of entertainment spend or entertainment wallet share, you're you're saying that gaming globally has a bigger wallet share? Gaming globally has a larger wallet share ah from a consumer perspective than movies, music put together.
00:06:47
Speaker
I guess maybe I'm an outlier here because I know my monthly bill has more spent on my Netflix and all these other subscriptions than what I spend on a game. I mean, I buy one game every six months, but I guess I'm an outlier here, right?
00:07:00
Speaker
Correct. So I think you're an outlier, but it's also, you know, most likely you grew up like me in India, where we didn't really grow up in a gaming culture. I was lucky that i had an uncle who actually gave me a console very early. So that's really how we kind of grew up.
00:07:14
Speaker
But what we've seen around the world is that, you know, now we're on probably the second or the third generation that's grown up with a console in their a hubs. I actually actually work on an IP called Pacman, which is as old as I am almost. It's a 45 year old IP. And, you know, it's been there since the early days. So we kind of have seen people who played the first, um you know, we actually had one of our investors who actually played the first ever game made inside of it. And that's kind of something that we kind of think is um it's a cultural, gaming is a cultural phenomenon. It's been there ah from a number of regions and people who grew up in gaming always consider it to have the highest return of investment of their time.
00:07:52
Speaker
Hmm. Okay, got it, got it, got it. People who, like you're saying in the West, generally, the, the like say, spending $100 on a game is completely acceptable, whereas $100 might be what you… You know, starts at about, you know, I would say $20 to $60 was kind of the number inside of it. But, you know, an average person is spending anywhere between $150 to $300 a year on a game.
00:08:12
Speaker
and dollars a year ah on ah on gim Okay. Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay. Interesting. ah So now, how do games monetize? what What are the different strategies? And I believe not all games are games that you buy upfront. Some are monetizing through your attention also. Exactly. Exactly. So I'll tell you like the broadly, you know, all games initially monetize through what are called simple one-time purchase models. You buy the game, that's it. Yeah, this is the CD you would pay for a Overall, you can bought a box product, you know, and you never had to kind of spend more money on it. Eventually, all of these models now move towards what are live service models. Today, you might get the game for free, but it monetizes through in-app purchases. You know, you're buying a skin, you're buying an upgrade, you're buying a battle pass. But there's also a new model which is called the subscription model, whether it's the Xbox Game Pass in which you're kind of paying a fixed monthly fee to get an access to a library of games outside of it. So that's like a Netflix model, like ah all you can eat. Correct, all you can eat. So it's like we've moved away from this one-time transactional model to a more ongoing engagement-driven revenue model.
00:09:18
Speaker
um And when you think about mobile games, you also open up one more category, which is really markets like India, where you're not spending this kind of money, you really have an ad-driven monetization model as well. So a bunch of casual games will actually monetize really heavily with ads.
00:09:32
Speaker
um So combination of in-app purchases and ads is probably the prevalent, you know, ah monetization model. And then you've got the GTS, which is still continuing to do the box product.
00:09:43
Speaker
GTA? So you've probably heard of GTA 6, Grand Theft Auto 6, which is coming out later this year. It's going to have been delayed for a few years, but it'll probably be like a three, four billion dollar game when it comes out.
00:09:57
Speaker
So there are these like marquee games which people will... marquee games, probably GTA is probably the biggest marquee game name out there. ah And you'll hear of it when it first, when it comes out. It's been delayed a number of times. We don't really know the date, but this holiday season is probably when it'll come out.
00:10:12
Speaker
How is a PUBG kind of a game monetized? I know it was very, very popular in India at one point at time. It is. It is still popular. It's known as BGMI in India. um Again, PUBG also monetizes using in-app purchases.
00:10:24
Speaker
ah When you kind of look at the gaming market in India, um when you think about what's changed in India over the last five, seven years, um you know, what we've seen, you know, the mobile or the Android device itself is about 12 to 14 years old. So people or kids who grew up, you know, went to school and kind of learned to play simpler, casual games inside of it. As they grow older, they kind of gotten on boarded using a battle royale game, which is what PUBG is, which is a much easier game to kind of pick up and play versus, let's say you know, a deeper, deeper, more engaging kind of game.
00:10:57
Speaker
um i'll I'll take a step back. I'll try and explain this with an analogy or with a small story that I kind of went through. um So I've been building shooters since 2016, you know, so Battle Royales became a phenomenon a year later. Can you tell me these types, these terms using Battle Royale, Shooter, what are what are the game types that are out there?
00:11:18
Speaker
Sure. So when you think about all the games, they're broken up into genres. ah And there are there could be multiple genres of games. Like, you know, what I specialize in, which is making shooters or first-person shooters, arcade shooters, or, you know, military simulator shoot shooters, milsim shooters. These are all one category. Then you've got RPGs, you've strategy games. Something like but ah Doom. I don't know if you remember that. More an arcade shooter that kind of started out. One of the earliest shooters ever made.
00:11:45
Speaker
ah In fact, one of the first shooters made inside of it. um That's really the part that, you know, these genres were established. And I would say that if you think about the staples of the industry, I would say shooting racing are still the staples of our industry.
00:11:58
Speaker
Okay. So shooter, first person shooter is one type and racing games. Okay. That also I understand. You probably played a Mario Kart. You probably played an NFS. You probably played any one of these racing games growing up.
00:12:10
Speaker
ah What about, say, like a Plants vs. Zombies kind of a game? What is that? More a casual game. I would say more in the casual game category, which is more a simpler kind of game to kind of play. But again... massive market. The casual market is as big as the mid-core or the, you know, what we call the hardcore gaming market. Okay. Okay. Now, sorry, I interrupted you while you were talking of 2017 about shooters. Okay. So, I'll kind of come to a point in terms of thinking a little bit about our journey.
00:12:36
Speaker
um You know, so we've gone to YC, we kind of... well I went to YC in 2011, about 15 years ago. In that time, i was actually building educational games. I got a lot of help from people who kind of thought that games for good is really a good way to kind of do it. um So I kind of went and worked with a lot of game studios. I learned really how to build a game studio from that experience.
00:12:57
Speaker
ah In 2013, we kind of shut down our educational games business and we kind of were transitioning over to building real games. um we We chose to kind of say that what is one thing that we as founders did uniquely is that in my team of four founders, we actually had two of the best Unity engineers and two of the best cloud or or server engineers.
00:13:15
Speaker
That's why we chose to make real-time multiplayer games, which requires both you to write a client as well as the server in which the game is running. Our first game was a game called Ninjam Dash, which is a real-time platformer. ah And at that point of time, we kind of realized that, hey, it works. And Counter-Strike, which is probably the most popular PC game at that point of time, would probably be a great great game to bring to mobile.
00:13:36
Speaker
Everybody would laugh at us at that point of time ah because, you know, to play two-thumb shooter or a twin-stick shooter on a touchscreen device was was really hard to make. ah Made it using an auto-shoot mechanic and that's really how we got started. That's the game that we built first called Mask Gun.
00:13:52
Speaker
um So building what we call a TBM or a Team Deathmatch Shooter is really what we did. um In 2017, a large phenomenon kind of occurred called Battle Royale. Battle Royales are a phenom which kind of said that, you know, 60 people or 100 people jump into an island. They scavenge for guns, weapons, and they kill each other to survive. The Last Man Standing wins.
00:14:14
Speaker
ah When you think about it, this concept was new and novel compared to two factions fighting each other, most more more like a war. And this phenomenon really took off. ah Initially, I did not get it. You know, like for me, shooting kind of was the the fun part of making the game and playing the game. I had this chance conversation with one of the makers of PUBG and ah one of our early investors, his only LP was PUBG. And so he made that introduction and i asked him I asked him a question that I've actually asked all game developers. I asked all game developers like who've been successful, like, hey, did you know that your game was going to be a hit? And almost every time everybody said no.
00:14:51
Speaker
But here was an outlier who actually told me that, yeah, I knew it was going to be a hit. So I asked him why. And he said that whenever i used to play or stream my game, my grandmother used to watch me and she got it. For me, that was the number one lesson in terms of legibility.
00:15:05
Speaker
and When I say legibility, what do I mean? When you're, you know, if you're watching cricket or American football, if you don't know the sport, you can't really watch it. And that's really how some of these games are, like Valorant, League of Legends, you know, these are for MOBAs. You can't really understand the sport if you don't know the sport. But when you have something like soccer, everybody can watch it and understand, which is why it's the most followed game in the world.
00:15:27
Speaker
ah Similarly, so would say Battle Royales are the soccer of shooters. They made it very legible for people to understand. So in a new market like India or all emerging markets, these games became the first mid-core game that onboarded a ton of users. ah That combined with, let's say, you know, free internet, Android devices getting much better, and you being able to voice chat with your friends created this cultural phenom that we kind of call PUBG today.
00:15:54
Speaker
ah PUBG, Free Fire are all these cultural phenoms. And that's really how we started our journey as well. We kind of finally understood why these games are occupying so much of a mind share and so to say onboarding gamers or mobile gamers all over these emerging markets. And that was our trigger to also say that, hey, we we should make a battle royale next, because that's really where we see the ah ability to bring on board a lot of new users.
00:16:17
Speaker
Okay, interesting. um You've gone over a lot of ground, I'm going to ah rewind and ask you to clarify some of the things. So ah what is Unity? You said you had a team in which two people knew Unity.
00:16:29
Speaker
Sure. ah So typically when you're making games, um you actually need a game engine. um Some of these are called commercial engines. Unity and Unreal are commercial engines. Typically, Unreal was always used for PC and console games to be made. Unity was made more, so to say, more for mobile games.
00:16:45
Speaker
ah Even within mobile games, if you want to make it for a platform like Apple and Android at the same time, but then you choose a third-party platform like Unity, which kind of trying to make it natively on Apple iOS or using the Android framework.
00:16:58
Speaker
um So Unity was really the the platform of choice from our perspective to build something that is platform agnostic, to build our first mobile game. So Unity would, for example, take care of the physics that ah if I walk off a cliff, I will fall down.
00:17:13
Speaker
So Unity comes in and helps you integrate your assets, your physics, your rendering pipeline, your networking pipeline. All of these components are kind of inside inside of Unity itself.
00:17:24
Speaker
Okay. How big is ah Unity as a business? It sounds. Unity is a publicly listed company went public just after the pandemic. I think probably a $30 billion dollars company. Okay.
00:17:35
Speaker
Not as big as the game studios themselves then. I would say that it it should be as big, but you know because it doesn't really make games. Like when you compare a Unity versus an Epic or an Unreal, Epic is the owner of Unreal Engine. ah But you know when you think about Unreal, the engine company also makes Fortnite.
00:17:53
Speaker
ah So you see a combination of content, which really kind of is is really the secret of why I would say Epic is probably a bigger... it's not It's not public, but probably a bigger company than Unity.
00:18:04
Speaker
I'll take a step back, Akshay, and kind of explain this from how we see what a great gaming company looks like. So when you think about the two great gaming companies, and we think of two I think of Valve and Epic Games.
00:18:16
Speaker
When you think about breaking down the bottom most here, it's the game engine. In case of Valve, it's source, the game engine that is used to make all the games like CSGO and the others. In case of Epic Games, it's the Unreal Engine that powers all of its games. The middle tier is content. So, you know, you've got CSGO on the, on the,
00:18:37
Speaker
ah Valve side, you've got Fortnite on the Epic side. And on top of these, once you've got the distribution of content, then you actually build a marketplace for trading of all of these assets. So you've got Steam on the on the side of Valve, which is the biggest third-party marketplace that you can actually trade in for across all of your games. And then you on the Epic side, you've got the Epic Game Store.
00:18:59
Speaker
ah So that's really how to think about these three layers inside of it. Any company that has all these three layers is a much more valuable company. help me understand i want little more clarity here epic is doing everything it has an engine it is itself a developer so they are actually creating games it is also a distributor uh it's a publisher of course they are funding that and it is also a distributor where they have ah a game store where people can buy okay okay that's phenomenal okay So when you see this, owning that customer end to end ah probably gives you a lot more. And a funny story is, for example, PUBG came out, PUBG was built on the Unreal Engine.
00:19:39
Speaker
Fortnite was a very different game. They saw the success of PUBG, of a Battle Royale game, and they changed Fortnite to kind of be a Battle Royale shooter as well. And, you know, Fortnite is probably multi, you know you know, much larger by a number of, you know, by a multiple of factors.
00:19:57
Speaker
ah Fortnite has, remember live events and a whole lot of stuff. It sounds like a social space as well as a game. So when you think about all of these games, um you know, especially during pandemic, these games really, really took off because, you know, this is a place where you, we we kind of say that Fortnite is not a game, it's a place.
00:20:14
Speaker
It's a place where you hang out with friends. You kind of you know you might come in and you might not even play Fortnite, but you might come out to hang out with your friends. I see this very frequently with my kids as well. Whether it's Fortnite, whether it's Minecraft, and now Roblox, I see them hanging out in the game sometimes a lot more than just playing with their friends.
00:20:31
Speaker
Same thing is true in PUBG, Free Fire, where you'll see a lot of people hanging around, you know, inside of a game, talking to their friends while playing a game sometimes, because these games can also allow you a little bit of downtime, you know, whether it's strategy in the stock market, what I did our institution, what didn't in school, you know, all of these conversations are things that I've actually heard in a video game while playing with strangers one of these places. Okay, okay, fascinating. Okay, okay, got it. So, now, you said that...
00:21:00
Speaker
ah you decided to in a way build the first mobile first person mobile shooter game when that business ah which went to YC tell me a little bit about that business which went to YC what was it called then so went to YC for a company called Tap to Learn in those days we were actually building educational titles on the iPad ah We mostly sold it as, you know, one-time purchases. Subscriptions weren't invented yet at that point of time in the App Store. That's really where our business died.
00:21:30
Speaker
ah You know, because people would buy it once and never kind of pay us a again. So that's really where we died. Subscriptions very early in the App Stores. ah But then what we kind of learned from there was to kind of build this game called Mask Gun, which is a first-person shooter ah on a mobile device. Our launch platform was an iPhone 4. That's how early we were in that space. We learned quite a bit of just kind of getting the shooting right, making it auto shoot, making it more accessible.
00:21:54
Speaker
Today, Maskgun is 120 million users worldwide. ah So really learned from building that. ah But today I would say Maskgun game or ah the the arena that you play the game in is the size of a football field.
00:22:07
Speaker
ah But when you think about a battle royale game, it's the size of a city. ah So one is a 400-400, you know, meter kind of space. The other one 8 kilometers by 8 kilometers. So when you think about the scale of these games, it's a much different way to kind of think about it. Yeah.
00:22:23
Speaker
You founded Tap2Learn. You took it to, you pitched to YC on their education game concept, which you realized is not really scalable because… it really It didn't really work for us for two reasons. um And the two reasons were clearly that, you know, you you had two customers.
00:22:44
Speaker
You have to get the kids to play and the parents to pay. Both of them are equally hard. And that's really where we kind of realized that, hey, ah on the pull side of things, where people are playing your game, they're coming and paying you for skins. You don't have convince them to play. You have to do anything else. That's really where we kind of pivoted and kind of became a true game studio.
00:23:03
Speaker
Why isn't ah Tap to Learn a big studio that you're running today? Like, what what you had YC backing, so you obviously had investors. Correct.
00:23:14
Speaker
So, you know, we we are our motto was to kind of think about educational games or games to teach people, ah games to teach people, essentially. But we realized that you couldn't teach everything using games or you couldn't teach everything through the app store. So when we thought about the scale of the opportunity, it was much smaller than, let's say, becoming a mobile game studio.
00:23:35
Speaker
So, yeah, ah you, again, I'm recapping what you said. So you built the first mobile and then you realized the battle royal format and how it is really what will work in emerging markets. ah so And then, you know, and so...
00:23:50
Speaker
To continue the story or, you know, our theory was, okay, hey, Battle Royale games are probably the most emergent genre of games that will kind of dominate and be the the game that kind of A, distributes really well, two, monetizes really well.
00:24:03
Speaker
But then what's the gap, you know, or the thesis for us was very simple. Battle Royale monetization is through in-app purchases like skins and things. Battle Royale monetization is kind of the highest category of monetization in India. For example, if you look at the the Indian games market between, let's say, 2022 to 2025, Battle Royale games have probably made the most money in the app stores. They make, I would say, ah about a billion dollars a year in a market like India.
00:24:30
Speaker
ah When think about it again, kids who grew up on a mobile device are now in the workforce. They have both time and money. They're spending money inside of it. Apart from, let's say, you know, GDP improvement and all of that. So that's kind of one category.
00:24:41
Speaker
The second thing, um from our perspective, like, okay, there was a great market, but you know, what's your wedge? What's your niche? What we realized is that, you know, over a period of time, I would say India has probably got 500 million people that have played a battle royale shooter, probably the capital of battle royale shooters in the world.
00:24:57
Speaker
ah So when people are, so many people are playing a game, you're you're looking ah for a differentiation. One of the key things that we looked at India and other emerging markets is that fundamentally, gaming is an expression of your art and culture.
00:25:10
Speaker
And we found ourselves underrepresented in the world of gaming. So you don't hear of Indian art, culture, or even emerging markets, art and culture inside of video games. It's mostly a few stereotypes that you kind of see.
00:25:22
Speaker
And we thought that as people kind of saw or kind of played this a lot more, there would be a demand for locally relevant, culturally rooted games inside of all of these formats, but it's just playing an imported game.
00:25:34
Speaker
ah That's really when we kind of came up with the idea of building Indus, which is an Indo-futuristic shooter. ah when I say endofuturistic shooter, um we thought that the West didn't see Indian art and culture in a positive way. had no expression of Indian art and culture instead of a video game, especially. They were very inspired by this movie called Black Panther, in which they actually showcased Wakanda to be the the most futuristic city in the world. But at the same time, it was or a showcase of African art and culture.
00:26:05
Speaker
A combination of doing that. So when people looked at our initial art style, they kind of said, hey, this is the Wakanda of India. That was really a good way to kind of think a little bit about it. When you think about our stories of mythology and whether it's the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, we've not put that inside a video game because we feel like there is too much of religious and political kind of, you know, intolerance towards these themes. We chose the word Indus because that's a chapter that every kid in India studies.
00:26:32
Speaker
ah The lesson was mostly in China when we saw that hey the way the Chinese m MMOs kind of you know dominate, kind of taught their audience was to kind of take a book called Journey to the West and kind of adapt it into a video game.
00:26:43
Speaker
and What is MMO? Chinese m MMOs? China plays a lot of ah like large PC games and though these PC games are much harder for people to understand how to clear them.
00:26:56
Speaker
You know, so think of it, you know, it's 2002, 2004, it's China. The PC revolution is going, is is happening um and people are kind of mostly playing games made in Japan or Korea. At that point of time, a company called NetEase kind of adapts a Korean MMO or a massively multiplayer online game. These are games where people all play together. They go on quests together. They roam around places together. but What's the name I would have heard of in MMO space?
00:27:22
Speaker
Journey to the West is really the the the game that I'm talking about. World of Warcraft is probably a large MMO. Okay, World of Warcraft. Yeah, I've heard of World of Warcraft. Yeah. So MMOs, you know, again, there's categories like MMOs, MMORPGs. So World of Warcraft is more an MMORPG, RuneScape, Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars. Final Fantasy also I've heard of. Okay. You Shaper MMOs, Destiny, Division, Warframe.
00:27:48
Speaker
And then today you've got these mobile MMOs like, you know, Genshin Impact. probably the most famous of all of these. ah So that's kind of something that, you know, we've kind of seen everywhere.
00:27:58
Speaker
um But I would say that the story that inspired us was the story of, ah you know, Nettie's kind of culturally adapting ah an MMO or a Japanese-Korean MMO to kind of playing playing really well in the Chinese market and onboarding everybody through a book that every Chinese kid reads called Journey to the West. That's really our inspiration for calling it Indus and kind of teaching people um and telling people of imagining a world where the Indus Valley civilization doesn't die. ah But kind of we say that, hey, the Indus Valley civilization was so advanced that it flowed to a distant galaxy. And you're now discovering this galaxy in the year 2500. That's the premise or that's really the art design ah for Indus. And that's really how we got started.
00:28:40
Speaker
Okay, so you are ah aspiring to make Indus as a AAA game. Just help me understand what is a AAA game? um So typically, when we kind of say AAA, it mostly means a large budget production. But it also stands for the fidelity, quality, or being on all platforms, consoles. ah While everybody in India has wanted to kind of make a AAA game, we are not there yet.
00:29:04
Speaker
ah There's no Indian AAA game. There are a bunch of AA games, which s will be an indie AA title from an Indus perspective. We'll get there, but not quite there yet. How much does it cost to make a AAA game? based you know You already know which AAA games are out there in the world, like GTA. Correct. So I would say that, you know, the the accepted budget around the world was anywhere between a $100 to $300 million dollars budget to build a good AAA title. If you account for GDP or paying parity, that number would probably be 30 to 50 million dollars in India as well. ah There would be, but today the advancement of, I would say, art, tools, e etc. can probably allow you to make it for much less.
00:29:43
Speaker
ah It comes down to a, like, you know, we've kind of seen companies in China do this for much less, 20, 25 million dollars. We kind of see that here. But again, i would say it's not just the money, it's also the time and the experience of these teams. So if you built a AAA title before, maybe working for a large Western studio, you now building it using these tools and advancement would be a lot easier and a lot cheaper.
00:30:04
Speaker
What makes you confident that you will be able to build a AAA game? How much money have you raised or do you have that a team which has built a AAA game in the past? Sure. um So i think, you know, two things that kind of give me confidence was, hey, I think not just the AAA game, but also an understanding of the player market. We think that, you know, gaming is probably as, you know, GDP improves, as we kind of see an upliftment in society, kids grow up playing video games. ah We kind of see that there's a demand, there's a natural demand, which kind of fuels the need to make a AAA title. ah The second part of it is India has always been an outsourcing nation for the rest of the outsourcing, you know, kind of market for a lot of AAA providers. So the talent has always been there. People have always been working on outsourcing art, programming, development, technical art, all of that.
00:30:51
Speaker
So that talent is already there. So when we were hiring, we kind of see this talent all there. ah What we kind of still feel is missing is the quality, the monetization, all of those layers. and It takes a little bit of time. I think making a great title ah is like engineering a perfect storm. You've got to get many things right. Art, theme, market, timing, engineering, marketing, distribution. um So that's why it's not a wonder that most good game studios or most AAA studios take 10 years to be successful.
00:31:24
Speaker
ah We've been on this journey for four years ah building Indus. But we think that, you know, that's one of our big reasons of saying that our team has worked together for a very long time. The CBO and me at this Super Game have worked together for 24 years. The rest of the founding team has been together for 15 years. ah That's one big aspect of it that covers, you know, large areas of development. The second part of it is this newer talent that we're getting through. from all over the world. like Today, kids grow up and they want to be a game developer from day zero. ah They studied that path. like where I would say we are an immigrant to the game development ecosystem, but there will be natives inside of it. People who studied and grew up studying game development, went abroad, studied game development, and are now coming back and wanting to build their own game.
00:32:06
Speaker
That's really the second part of why we feel confident. Third part of it is ah there is now capital that kind of fuels the ambition. We've raised $20 million dollars um from a combination of large studios, strategic investors, Skycatcher, A16Z, Bandai Namco, which has given us both capital as well as insights in terms of success and failure of these models. We've learned a lot more from failures, I would say. ah We've kind of been confident in terms of being able to build a title, ah but the learning has been in terms of figuring out the success parts of it. Even people who've done AAA for a long time cannot guarantee success. And that's kind of been our humbling lesson in terms of saying that when you put a game out, ah the audience reaction to it, you can't choose your audience, so to say. You can't choose what kind of players come to your game. Learning, adapting and delivering to them a better experience is what we've kind of been doing in our last two years.
00:32:58
Speaker
How do you de-risk the... spend on a AAA game. I'm assuming that with these big studios, there ah it's a franchise IP, so spending $100 million, dollars you're pretty much sure that, yeah, the GTA V earned this much, so GTA VI will also earn more than that or whatever. ah But as a young studio, how do you de-risk yourself?
00:33:20
Speaker
Correct. So I think one of the ways that we've kind of learned about how to de-risk our studio is to kind of invest ah most of our time in terms of building the game engine itself. So if you if you go back to my understanding of Epic and Valve, what we did was to kind of think a little bit about investing everything from an engine perspective. All of the learnings of the people that work here over these decades we kind of adapted and put it inside of the engine itself.
00:33:44
Speaker
ah Today, the engine is also used by third party developers, the most famous of which is actually Bandai Namco's Pac-Man game, which allows us to kind of make a revenue from all of it. So the engine business as IP is also one of our other ways of kind of monetizing the business. It also allows us multiple shots on game, allows us to be time in market, adapt to the game.
00:34:04
Speaker
And we've also built every game that Super Gaming has built, has been built on the same engine. So when you think about it, it's a it's a good flywheel. Like every game makes the engine better. The engine better makes the next game better.
00:34:15
Speaker
ah So that's kind of how we de-risk, so to say, the business. But at the same time, you know, ah success in this space is hard. ah So you still have to kind of take multiple shots on goal, keep improving it. You know, these are there's no silver bullet, just multiple lead bullets that you need to kind of do to kind of be successful here.
00:34:32
Speaker
Very interesting. ah Where would you rate your engine compared to Unreal, Unity, or the third engine of Valve? I forgot the name. um So, Source is the third engine that you were talking to. But today, when you think about it, every large studio has their own custom engine. So, when you think about the large publishers like an EA, Ubisoft, all of these have their own engine.
00:34:55
Speaker
ah You know, what we kind of decided to kind of understand is saying that, hey, all of these engines, they were not commercial engines, they're not available for you to use. So, what we did was to kind of adapt our game on top of these commercial engines like Unity and Unreal. So if you think about it, there's a little bit of, you know, white space between these two engines. Unreal is really good at building PC console, but might not be very good at building it for lower end mobile devices. ah You know, Unity is very good at building for lower end devices, but cannot build high end games inside of it. That's the gray space that we kind of wanted to adapt.
00:35:27
Speaker
At the same time, we didn't want to teach people a whole new game or a whole new engine. So we said that we'll build it on top of Unity, but we'll bring in all the aspects of an Unreal or a AAA game engine and integrate it instead of our game. And that's really how we kind of built our own engine. We won't call it an engine. We mostly call it a platform or a shooter augmentation platform, ah which kind of allows us to make real-time shooters on a platform like Unity for lower-end devices. It's a mouthful. So we just call it the Indus Engine.
00:35:58
Speaker
Okay, okay, interesting. ah Unity is open source, like you can adapt it and build on top of it? You can adapt you can adapt it, um you can kind of write on top of it, you can customize its rendering engine, you can customize its networking layer. And that's really the parts that we've kind of run and built over a period of time.
00:36:16
Speaker
No, but is it open source or ah do you pay royalty to Unity? No, you don't have to pay royalty to Unity because essentially replacing, you we use Unity only for its platform um agnostic layer. Everything else is custom code that we use on top of it.
00:36:30
Speaker
Okay. So there is some part of the Unity engine. There is the runtime engine. The Unity runtime is still part of our engine. Okay. So Unity runtime engine is open source, which is what you're using. It's not open source, but it's it's available for you to run commercially.
00:36:44
Speaker
Okay. Okay. We're not modifying the the source. we We're writing our own modules on top of it. Okay. so So if I understand correctly, you're selling a Unity plugin.
00:36:56
Speaker
A plugin would be a very small way to kind of put it together. but Yeah, I understand. We're selling a framework on top of Unity that is used to build real-time multiplayer games. So people who want to use your platform have to first have Unity and then they... Most developers already have Unity. Already have Unity, right. And then they pay an additional amount for this platform.
00:37:17
Speaker
We save a serious amount of time in years by kind of taking something that's already proven and running. You can start from scratch, so that's the zero to one journey. But rather than starting from scratch, you can just focus on what quality of game that you want to make. And we handle our framework handles, you know, the network layer, the rendering layer, making it work on lower end devices. And something that's now worked on, you know, I would say 200 to 250 million devices.
00:37:42
Speaker
Got it. Okay. Okay. and Understood. ah Is that your only source of revenue today? So our IP games, our platform, our, so to say, our platform that's licensed by other parties, but we also do a bunch of co-development partnerships with other companies to kind of make games together with them.
00:37:57
Speaker
ah So we did a cricket game, you know, some time back, kind of are working on a very new title that's coming back. ah These are like one-off revenues. Recurring because, you know, once you make the game, you still kind of work on it over a period of time. So most of the work that we did was not work for hire, but more partnerships in which we kind of contributed our experience also as part of it. So we kind of did IP development there also, but not as first party, maybe a second party.
00:38:19
Speaker
what What are your games which are already out, which are already monetizing? I think ah two games that are already out for us are, you know, so we essentially run Indus as our primary game right now. But we also run, you know, Indus is out in India, but we also have a version of it that's for Brazil, you know, we kind of look at emerging other emerging markets. And so this game is called Prime Rush. It's launched last month ah in Brazil as well and has been very promising from a returns perspective. And we're kind of doing something in the Middle East as well. So when you think about it, um Indo-futurism in India, the same story, but with Latin Futurism for LATAM, for Arabic Futurism in the Middle East. So that's kind of ways or regions that have also been underdeveloped and have been underrepresented in the world of gaming. Those are two areas that we've kind of been working in closely as well.
00:39:07
Speaker
Okay, very interesting. So, ah ah how long has it been since Indus launched? Indus launched in um early late 2024, early 2025.
00:39:19
Speaker
Okay, and what's been the traction so far? like is it we are We're at about 10 million users, you know, from our user-based perspective. But what we learned from it was mostly, you know, what do people really want?
00:39:31
Speaker
ah So we kind of have been like, so so to say, working on improving it. So when we kind of started off, we kind of got some really good reception. But what we realized over a period of time is that for our market, we are kind of building something that's more a modern battle royale, more like Apex Mobile, which is another another game that's kind of that we adapted or can we adapt it and build something for. But what we realized is that the users wanted something a lot more casual. And that's mostly what we call a Free Fire audience. Free Fire is another battle royale shooter that's really popular and played over a billion users. What we realized is a lot of our users were more Free Fire players. They wanted something that was a lot more casual in the market like India.
00:40:09
Speaker
um That's really the adaptation of what we've kind of done. But at the same time, keeping an eye in terms of what we wanted to do differently in terms of building one new layer of like you have Battle Royale games as a genre. I would say Battle Royale games have been now a saturated market. There's a new genre of these games emerging, which is called extraction shooters.
00:40:28
Speaker
ah So Extraction Shooters have kind of been the story of 2025 with especially a couple of games coming out, um you know, called Ark Raiders, called Delta Force as an Extraction Element as well and Marathon from Bungie. Those are three titles that kind of define the genre of Extraction Shooters. And what is different in an Extraction Shooter? In an extraction shooter, so what happens in a battle royale, a couple of things happen is that the loot is not persistent.
00:40:53
Speaker
Like what happens is that you jump into an island, ah you kind of take you take whatever weapons e etc, you shoot somebody, but then you come back and you start from zero all over a again. Okay. ah But the way that we thought about battle royales was more in terms of, like, say a pearl diver jumping into an ocean every time.
00:41:11
Speaker
He jumps into the ocean floor, he's searching for a pearl, he doesn't find a pearl every time, but he comes back with, let's say, you know, lobster or maybe seed even. All of these have real world value. Extraction shooters or something like that, You go on raids, you actually bring back something valuable from that raid, which kind of makes your next jump or your next raid a lot more powerful or you come in with a lot more resources inside of it. So the loot is persistent from that perspective. That's a fundamental change from what a battle royale is.
00:41:39
Speaker
Got it, got it. So essentially you keep leveling up in the game. Correct, correct. You just level up with with resources versus just XP or points or coins. Got it. Okay, okay, okay. And then it also it also offers a unique way of kind of thinking a little bit about it. Because think of it it that if you're the scavenger, and what we see happening in Arc Raider lobbies all the time, is that you might be competitive with somebody else who's coming there and kill him and loot his stuff as well. Or you might be collaborative with him and say that, hey, I'm not going to kill you. Let's kind of scavenge and let's kind of, you know, defeat these PvP, PvE elements also and kind of take back the loot together. What is PvE?
00:42:16
Speaker
um You know, player versus environment. So you're kind of shooting down on robots, you're shooting down environmental obstacles versus PvP, which is but player versus player, which is typically what a battle royale is.
00:42:27
Speaker
Okay. Okay. so So that's the, that's kind of been a layer that we've been working on. We call this BRX or Battle Royale Extraction. So that's kind of the mode or the new mode that we've been working on for about a year ah since we launched Indus and that's really coming to market now. um We launched something in in Brazil last month and we continue to launch in the rest of LATAM, Middle East ah later this month.
00:42:49
Speaker
ah How does it work? So will you launch Indus 2 which will have these elements or just the Indus game itself? keeps We co update, you know. um So the beauty is that we're a live service game. It allows to kind of keep updating the title as well.
00:43:02
Speaker
ah Sorry, a live server? Live service game. Live service. Okay. So what happens is that every week or every month or everything, we keep updating the game. Whenever we have a new mode we've got a new update, it's very easy for us to keep updating the game so that players who invested their time and money inside of it still retain all of their old purchases, old items, still all of that.
00:43:21
Speaker
So GTA is not a live service game that they're taking out GTA 6? No, no, that's not a live service game. that It continues to have updates for GTA 5, but GTA 6 will be a whole new game. Okay. So but when you're like massively revamping the game, then you give it a different number, like then it moved up in the series.
00:43:38
Speaker
Correct, correct. So if you're kind of changing, like, you know, in our industry, they say sequels never do well. ah so So that's kind of for one part inside of it. So you could actually do seasonal elements. But for example, if you've got a one game like Fortnite, there's no Fortnite 2.
00:43:51
Speaker
It's the same Fortnite forever. There's no PUBG 2, for example. So that's kind of the way to think a little bit about it. That's the change in the model ah from a live service game perspective. Okay, okay, okay.
00:44:03
Speaker
The sequels don't do well is directly contrasting with the franchise IP value. ah So I think sequels in the sense that in mobile, there's no like disc 2 that did well better than 1. It's also true in movies we've that we've kind of seen, right? You know, I always tell people that no second movie has actually been better than the first, except for maybe Terminator 2, which I think is my all time favorite movie.
00:44:26
Speaker
But they make money for studios. That's why studios keep making it. They make money for videos. Like Fast and Furious is a great example of it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I think the the critical part um here is that, you know, when you think about attention, ah you know, how do you get people's attention? how do you market to that audience over and over again?
00:44:45
Speaker
I think that's really the part where, you know, if you just keep yourself as Fortnite, you've a large market, you keep updating it, you keep retaining that interest. A bit of a new title, do you have enough interest for people to kind of come in and buy it again?
00:44:57
Speaker
So you'll see it in a lot of games that are not live service games, which kind of have sequels. You know, so there's not, you know, you they want people to pay again because people have already played for a box set. Now they want people to pay again inside of it. It's a finite amount of content. Let's say it's three hours of content. It's it's so to say a campaign that you need to finish arithmetic three to 40 hours. ah But so I'll make it a second version of it and I'll charge you small amount of money for it okay got it uh so you said india has 500 million gamers uh indus is currently at 10 million gamers it's a massive way forward for you massive gap um what did you not get right because of which you are only at 10 million today
00:45:39
Speaker
Like you would have probably wanted to be a 100 million game, right? I would say that overnight getting to 100 million is a pipe dream. ah You know, so when you're competing against, so two things, right? You're competing against ossification in the market, you know, which means people have been there for the last seven to eight years. It's the same game.
00:45:54
Speaker
Players have bought enough money inside of that game. They spent money inside of it. Then to shift from a game that they've invested time and money into your game, suddenly it's not going to be an overnight journey. So it's mostly trying to figure out who are the new players coming to the market.
00:46:08
Speaker
If you've been playing Fortnite for a while, there is no incentive for you to switch out of Fortnite. Because you have your skins, you have your assets. Your friends, your skins, your purchases are all there. And that's why you'll see that most gaming titles, would say 70% of the revenue earned in the app stores goes to titles made before 2020.
00:46:27
Speaker
So the breakout or the new breakout of these titles, um you still have to keep finding your wedges, figuring out what do people like. But at the same time, you know, it's not that you can sit on the side of the river and guess how deep the river flows. Our intention with Indus and kind of launching it just in India.
00:46:42
Speaker
um So typically when we launch a game, um like for example in Masked Gun, I only launched it in Australia and New Zealand in 2017. By the time I launched it in India, it was three years later. ah so I kept launching it, like India was the 37th country that I launched it in.
00:46:56
Speaker
Because... You know, in those days, nobody in India played a shooter. So we got all of our good feedback in markets like Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, before we actually bought it to India and then the West. um And, you know, in this case, what I wanted to do with Battle Royale was to launch it in a market like India, where everybody plays a Battle Royale shooter. So the feedback is very, very, very instant. ah That's really what we kind of learned from our lunch in India. What's broken, what needs to be better at.
00:47:22
Speaker
ah What we learned was to then partner with a partner like Loud in Brazil. Loud is probably the largest e-sports group in the world, but also master of Free Fire. What we learned from them was essentially what does their community want? What does the Free Fire community want? What do they care about?
00:47:38
Speaker
ah I would say that our learnings in India were little limited because India is still, i would say, gaming literacy is not very high from a player perspective. Everybody wants to make you exactly like PUBG or exactly like Free Fire, which is all that they know.
00:47:50
Speaker
But to read between the lines, kind of figure out what that is, that's really why we expanded to one more market as well, so that we ensure that we were getting enough understanding of what we're trying to build or what we're pivoting against. Or where does the puck go from here?
00:48:03
Speaker
And that's really what we did for the last year. um So I would say that from a market perspective, that's probably been our toughest year, but also the most year of learning. We learned so much more. We fixed our game so much better. Our metrics from a year ago versus now are 3x to 5x better. If in India, purchasing rates were like under 1%, in Brazil, that number is 6 to 12%.
00:48:25
Speaker
Okay. And I think that's really the that's really the big difference in terms of learning from all of these markets and adapting your game for all of these markets. Do you get second chances? You released Indus, there was a muted response. Would someone come in and try again?
00:48:41
Speaker
ah Yeah, i would say that, you know, ah i I don't like to take no for an answer. I'm the persistent one who will kind of go again and do it. and There are many journeys or many, there are like sufficient number of success stories of our market where people are kind of kept at it, kept at it, kept at it and kind of became successful, whether it's an Among Us or even Fortnite itself. that Those are all opportunities that we kind of have learned from scene. And being in the market and having a live shooter out there allows you to understand the pulse of a user um It might not be your title that's working now, but you understand where the market is headed into or what's needed to kind of build next.
00:49:18
Speaker
Okay. Okay. ah When you said that you tied up with Loud ah in Brazil, what is is that like a marketing partnership? They are promoting you there or what is it like? So Loud is a large esports org. So what we think about differently today is that, you know, distribution has changed fundamentally. Influencers are not just marketers, they actually are narrative creators, they're kind of building the community. So I think of this influencer-led distribution or community-led distribution as the next way to maybe deeper inroads. not this one flash ad that you saw, you installed my game, but kind of being in the community, talking to the players, building the community over a number of years. I believe all of these are still nascent markets.
00:49:59
Speaker
Like I still think that over a period of time, the next set of players in India will seek the next kind of battle royale shooter, may might be an extraction shooter. They might want to play one that's made locally, that understands their choices and respects those their art or their choices in terms of art. So we think that those markets will continue to exist. And you'll see that everywhere, like, you know, from the MACDs or the Domino's kind of starting out. But today you'll see a lot of Indian food startups, you know, whether it's Kannuki Chai or Chai Tapri's versus the Starbucks kind of dominating the market.
00:50:30
Speaker
That's really how we see each one of these markets also having something that's culturally relevant and local. So I think yeah you're right about influencer marketing. In general, a lot of marketing dollars are now shifting towards influencer marketing.
00:50:44
Speaker
um Are you doing that in India also? And like, is there a platform way to do this or is it like one influencer at a time you go and acquire and like, how does it happen? So what we don't think about creators as marketing channels, we think of them as distribution infrastructure.
00:51:00
Speaker
ah So we think of, you know, that's what we did. So what we did is we kind of said that, hey, tell us what a community really needs. We'll be able to get exactly for them. ah Let's kind of get more feedback from them. So now it seems like co-creation versus something that you're just talking to and telling people about. So I think that's really what's different. In India, also we have these partnerships, ah Loud is obviously, you know, when you think about, you know, the influencer, so to say space in India, it's not as mature as what you kind of see in a market like Brazil, where Loud was one of the first free fire orgs that kind of came out, but built this over set seven years. So there's a very well defined journey of somebody being a player wanting to play in a Loud tournament, wanting to become a Loud influencer, to kind of running his own team, to kind of creating his own agency. So that kind of, so to say, tower of want, so to say, or tower of desire is well defined in these markets. What we've kind of learned from each one of those is something that we'll see, we'll start to see in India as well. Like, you know, you'll see a lot of like esports has not been successful in India yet.
00:51:59
Speaker
Or these influencer channels have not been successful yet. But people will learn, adapt, and you kind of see these breakouts coming through in the next couple of years. So, Loud essentially runs these tournaments and people sign up for it. And then Loud also is like a talent agency where they are managing influencers. okay But they manage something like 2,000 to 3,000 influencers. They're not just a marketing agency, right? Like I said, they ah you know they have a large collaborative kind of environment. they They run some of the biggest esports teams in the world, esports rosters in the world for games like Valorant, League, all of these games.
00:52:33
Speaker
So that's again an opportunity in India for someone to build loud for India, like an esports focused. get And there are there are, you know, so there are companies that have kind of started out there, ah you know, that are kind of doing it. There are e-sport or some of them are successful as well. Like, you know, there's a soul, there is an orangutan, there is, ah you know, um there's an opera, which is a talent agency. We work with a bunch of these already. But we kind of see that here, the professionalism and what we've seen in other markets is is probably a maturity phase that will come to India soon.
00:53:06
Speaker
So ah the way you're monetizing Indus is the in-app purchases approach, right? good and And what platforms are people paying it on this are playing it on? like ah Is it on an Xbox or an iPhone? No, Indus is only on Android and iOS devices. It's only on mobile.
00:53:25
Speaker
And Battle Royale generally is mobile only? um there's a large There is a large... The Battle Royale mobile market is maybe 5x bigger than the Battle Royale PC market. ah PC markets are more, i would say, Western markets, that kind of where people play PC or a lot more. But mobile is really where the distribution opportunity is. um So I'll kind of explain why mobile first. From our perspective, the game or the product gets better with usage.
00:53:50
Speaker
ah So the the best way to think about it is we are in a lot of these emerging markets because there we get distribution. Distribution makes our product better with real feedback. Once, you know, a mobile user is a little more tolerant towards bugs in a version that kind of comes out. But a PC user would be not so tolerant from that perspective. He would just never play our game again.
00:54:11
Speaker
A console user would be the least tolerant inside of it. So we think that there's a value chain that you grew up to. That's an engineering product. Think of it as, you know, you are almost running the equivalent of a clinical trial. You kind of improve, improve, improve. Once you kind of hit product market fit, then you go to a higher platform like PC. Then you go to console and from there on.
00:54:29
Speaker
um So I think the challenges has really been monetization in markets like India, ah where you kind of have have limited spend markets inside of it. Global markets are a lot more kind of rewarding from that perspective. That's really where we kind of went there. That's really why we built for some of those markets to kind of understand what are the challenges and how do we scale.
00:54:47
Speaker
um What do we think comes next is, you know, while we continue to work on Indus ah and kind of, you know, Indus is called Prime Rush Abroad. And it's an interesting story because Whenever we've taken Indus abroad, we've kind of realized that most people can't call it Indus. They say Indus.
00:55:06
Speaker
um Like, you know, in and that kind of ruins our brand. Like we tried explaining it, but, you know, every person that would come up to us would always call us Indus. And what we noticed from a UA perspective, when people kind of see Indus, they don't really install it. ah So kind of selling that became much harder. And we kind of came up with the name Prime Rush. But R in Brazilian Portuguese is H.
00:55:28
Speaker
So it's Prime Hoosh. And typically when people are playing a shooter, they're always saying rush, rush, rush, you know, like, so hoosh, hoosh, hoosh. So that's kind of where the name kind of has a, as a jingle that kind of resonates locally as well, which is why I have games called Prime Rush. Also in, you know, what we've learned from emerging markets is that you've got to have a name that's third grade English friendly. so that everybody can write the spelling of Prime and Rush.
00:55:53
Speaker
And Prime, generally with Amazon, Prime means something good, super, you know, which is our name as well. ah And Rush really is a game term. So that's why the game is called Prime Rush everywhere. um And so we're doing something interesting, which is, you know, our next platform is not PC and console, but PC and console, but through a platform called Roblox.
00:56:13
Speaker
I don't know whether you've heard of Roblox. Yeah, my kid plays Roblox. Perfect. So you understand the whole story of Roblox for us is that what we think has changed in that space. Like I've got two kids as well, you know, 12 and 15. And one of the key things that we've seen is that earlier it was common understanding wisdom that, hey, your kid will play Roblox, which are slightly kiddish games till they are about 12 to 15. And then they'll graduate to playing something like Fortnite after that.
00:56:41
Speaker
I think that has changed significantly over the last couple of years. ah You know, we've been working closely with the Roblox team as well. And we saw that hey more than 60% of the audience on Roblox now perfectly fitting into our audience of the kind of games that we make there.
00:56:56
Speaker
ah And that's an untapped market from a premium quality games like Indus on that on that platform, which is really what we're doing now. So it'll be like an app in app, like someone on the Roblox app can open another app inside that app, which is the industry.
00:57:12
Speaker
Great. So when you think about it, you know, it's like the TikTok experience or it's like Reels. You don't really have to... it I'm not asking you for a heavy investment of your time or money to install my app and then go through it. You see it, you click it, you play it, you experience it. ah But it's also, I would say, further down the product maturity cycle. Your product has to be that good that it can make an impression in 15 seconds. So that's kind of the the bar in terms of Roblox. But at the same time, we think that, you know, that's an area that we feel very confident of kind of understanding and doing well in, given the fact that we're at a product maturity cycle, but we also understand the Roblox platform better now.
00:57:48
Speaker
So you don't use the same Unity platform to develop it for Roblox? Like Roblox would have their own engine? Roblox has its own engine that you build games on. But all the content that we built everything on, because we built our own engine, all of these exist as separate discrete pieces. And it's been very easy for us to port these over to something like Roblox.
00:58:09
Speaker
Which also makes your platform more lucrative for developers who want to develop in Roblox. Correct. Correct. So you can be multi-platform when you take an approach like that. But that's really something that we kind of think about is every developer at some point of time will be thinking about these things. Right, right, right. Okay, interesting. um Okay, so, ah you know, there is this ah ah Play Store tax or App Store tax of 30%, I believe, ah for whatever in-app purchases are happening on games.
00:58:40
Speaker
And i believe Fortnite is fighting a legal case against Apple to remove that tax. What's your take on that? Because, like, essentially, if you're... Like if your sales is 10 million, you will get only 7 million from that, right? Correct. I'll tell you the tax on Roblox is a lot higher as well.
00:58:59
Speaker
You know, so ah in Roblox, the dev experience less than 40%. Because there's the 30% going to Apple and another. Not necessarily because they also have PC. But I'm saying that okay im ah I have a slightly contrarian view to this. ah You know, and if you think about it, you know, we were three guys, a dog in a dream that did not have a way of distributing our software.
00:59:21
Speaker
ah you know So anything that we would make, we've already been making software. So from between 2000 till 2010, we were building software, but nobody was really, we weren't finding distribution for it. ah The app stores came and changed all of that. So Supergaming or, you know, our company would not exist if we didn't have the app store app stores inside of it. The app stores bought us distribution, but also bought us pays players and peers. It allowed us experimentation inside of it. Being early inside of it meant that, you know, we were kind of beneficiaries of getting a lot of free users. ah So I would say that for me, that 30% has never been a pinch point over a period of time. ah As it gets more competitive, I would say that today what hurts more is less than 30% of that App Store is taking. But the fact that now, you know, you you are actually spending a lot more on the platform. You're spending UA ads on the platform to acquire users. You're spending money on infrastructure that you're also kind of, you know, paying a Google, um Microsoft or anyone or AWS to kind of run your infrastructure. So that kind of starts to hurt your bottom line at some point of time.
01:00:24
Speaker
um So that's kind of something that, you know, I'm grateful to Apple and Google to kind of reduce those taxes. i would say it's 15% for under 1 million, which covers like a large portion of indie developers to start with. But they've also kind of been talking about subscriptions and now are at 15%. And over a period of time, tiered purchasing kind of reduces to 20%, you know, with the epic suit. But those are all things that are kind of you're paying to kind of get the distribution that an Apple and Google can guarantee.
01:00:52
Speaker
ah You said you have to run UA ads. What are UA ads? So user acquisition ads, you run Google UAC, Meta, all of these are ads. Like when you search for an app, it suggests other apps. To install, To install your app, so you have to run UA ads as well, which again is money that you're spending on the platform.
01:01:09
Speaker
Like someone searches for PUBG and they will see and like a Prime Rush ad over there or something like that. Okay, got it. And you said there is infra cost that you're paying to Google and Apple. Aren't you using your own servers to host the game? What is this? Yeah, so you use Google Cloud because that's infrastructure that's available. Like our games run in 150 countries. Google Cloud and AWS probably give you the best infrastructure to run your games all over the world. That's really where you kind of do.
01:01:34
Speaker
So like, you know, all of our platform runs on Google Cloud. and has been running there. And we also sell our platform on Google Cloud to other partners. Super Platform is sold on Google Cloud. So that's kind of a partnership with a cloud provider. But that's also where you spend money.
01:01:47
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Okay. So cloud costs for gaming companies start to rack up pretty fast. good Correct. now Especially for us, because we're a real-time multiplayer server. Everything, all the players are playing against a cloud server inside of it. like Every player is connected using a cloud server. They're playing against it.
01:02:04
Speaker
Okay, okay, okay. Okay, interesting. and I want to kind of end with understanding how do you build a gaming studio org? You gave me a few things, like you said, quality, you said design, you said engineering, just help me understand what is the org structure of a gaming studio?
01:02:24
Speaker
I'll kind of explain. So typically what happens is, you know, on one side, like, you know, you've got the creative leadership, you know, you've got a creator. i was kind of come up with the vision part of it and saying that, okay, we have that. And that's mostly led by, let's say, a creative director or a game designer inside of it or a bunch of people in that space. Once they kind of come down to it, then there is probably the engineering org side of things, which is the game developer org. You know, there could be both the server side, what's running on the server, what's running on the client,
01:02:52
Speaker
ah Both of those teams kind of work together. so that's really the game engineering piece inside of it. That's the game developer layer. And then below that, you have content layers. And that content could be multiple layers as well. The content layers could be, let's say, environment art, which is, you know, the world that you play in. But it also could be character art, the characters that you play with. Or weapon art, the props that you play with. Like you'll see the gun out there behind me. That's a gun from our game called in Indus, called shotgun. It's called Kismat.
01:03:19
Speaker
ah You know, and it's called Kismat because if you're in my hand, it's your Kismat. So that's kind of that's kind of the art that kind of goes instead of making a game. And then there is 2D concept art also. Like before a gun is made in 3D, you know, as a model, it's kind of made as a sketch and then 3D artist kind of er adapts it and makes it. Then there is technical art instead of art, which takes the 3D model, rigs it and makes it appear like a real weapon inside of it.
01:03:44
Speaker
So that's all I would say under the broad purview of art um Producers or project managers equal equivalent in gaming are called producers. They actually run the org and kind of, so to say, traffic signal manage like what's coming when, etc. and speed up and slow down certain aspects of it. And then under it, you've got two more layers. One of it is the whole quality assurance layer of people QA testing it, ensuring it's all coming together, being built, ensuring that the bugs are going out to everybody. So that's quality assurance. And then the last part of it is even more, which is, you know, I would say marketing and live ops would be the two big layers. So once the marketing is running the GTM inside of it, it could be promo art, like who's making the video for the game, who's kind of rolling out content every day. And then the live ops parts of it are really like every update goes out every week, like small updates, new content, new weapon, new skin. ah So, you know, so there's a live ops org also that kind of is being built over a period of time. So I would say 8 to 12 orgs operating a game is kind of what we've learned how to do. um Earlier, a lot of this would just be chaos, whiteboards and chaos. But over a period of time, tools have kind of been built. This integration points are gotten well-defined. Documentation has gotten better. Communication has gotten better.
01:04:56
Speaker
But also I would say with AI, a lot of these tools are now talking to each other. You know, so like a continuous, like, you know, somebody submits a build, it's automatically submitted and runs an automated set of test suites. ah Something automatically fails, a QA is informed of it. Or the performance of a new version is compared against a previous version as a benchmark. All of the data is now available versus is it being done manually.
01:05:19
Speaker
So in our office, when you come in, you'll see a bunch of these you know devices just running tests automatically, you'll see a bunch of servers running you know pieces of the game automatically. All of that is like the automation layer that kind of helps coordinate between themes.
01:05:32
Speaker
um Getting all of these all to work together to produce something that's correctly timed for the market is probably the biggest challenge inside of it. So we've learned how to run the studio architecture, figure out like, you know, concept art needs to be three to six months ahead of what is LiveOps need. ah That's kind of the timings that you kind of learn over a period of time. In our earlier days, we scrambled through a lot of it. A lot of it was very unstructured.
01:05:55
Speaker
Today, we've got a better handle and across a lot of these because we've just shipped so many games. But in in it, the beauty is still people. ah you know In the end, it's just the high quality people over a period of time that learn how to manage these processes and kind of work with each other, communicate better is really the secret of running a studio.
01:06:13
Speaker
Okay, fascinating. How is, you said like a AAA game would, given India's purchasing power parity would cost about $50 million in India, but you feel that with the help of AI, it can be done in $10 to $20 million. One role of AI you told me is the quality assurance that gets automated and bugs.
01:06:33
Speaker
Automation, in general automation, in general automation, I would say that, you know, anything that was boring, manual, tedious and kind of can be tested, can be called out a lot faster using a bunch of AI processes. What about the creative parts of it? Like, say, if you want to make a gun, you can just now give a prompt, right? So is that happening? I don't think, I don't think from a gaming perspective, we're there yet.
01:06:57
Speaker
You know, so I don't think we're there yet. um You might be able to kind of create good concept art. It might not be the most tasteful. I think AI has not got taste yet. That's still a layer inside of it. That's still a very manual creative process inside of it. But, you know, for example, if a concept artist is using AI to kind of generate, you know, 20 more concepts inside of it, that's the better use of his
AI's Impact on Game Design and Production
01:07:20
Speaker
fame. versus doing well, like, you know, i would say it's, you know, bicycle for the mind is really the way the imagination kind of layer opens out with AI. Anything that he wanted to do is a prompt of AI. Now we can actually put it all together before he stitches into what to take and what not to take from it.
01:07:34
Speaker
ah Now somebody who takes it can kind of probably visualize his one drawing in three modes using AI and kind of figure out and solve any of his doubts versus having to call the guy and send it back and forth many times. That streamlines your production process for 3D art.
01:07:47
Speaker
ah integration was a manual process. Now there are tools that automatically take it, pick it up, figure out what happens, integrate it and even come back with what issues are there, need to fix it. Integration into the game engine, like when this gun is picked up by somebody or how does it fire or stuff like that. Okay. then there are a bunch of new tools that come out to animate a lot of these layers inside of it. Like, you know, anything that's standard, um anything that can be cloned from ah a, hey, you know, Hrithik Roshan was like this in this movie. Can you clone the animation to work exactly like that?
01:08:18
Speaker
It can be possible. Earlier, you would do a mocap, ah you know, hold, know, put somebody inside of that suit and kind of capture it. Today, AI can probably do that just from a novel phone camera. Mocap means motion capture. so So you have an actor who's who's firing a gun and that is motion captured and then it is anim or an animator. Yeah, then it's kind of played on your 3D models. So that's kind of something that now happens automatically as well.
01:08:44
Speaker
So that's kind of, these are the things that we kind of see as what has been the speed through every process getting better. At the same time, i would say availability of these tools earlier was not so easy, right? But today all of these are available to a kid out of school.
01:08:57
Speaker
um You know, and then the last part of it is why is it cheaper is because earlier this was the purview of a selected few who got access to these things, who were exposed to these things. But today ai is kind of my 12 year old is as good as is as good at 3D modeling, building a game, understanding how to ship it as somebody who's probably gone to game design college for it.
01:09:19
Speaker
And that's kind of the speed at which I think the skill improvement will kind of come in, which kind of makes me very hopeful that it will not take 10, 20 million dollars, but maybe three to five million dollars to build some of India's next big titles.
01:09:31
Speaker
Okay, amazing. it You said India has some midcore games out. ah what what What does this term midcore mean? Midcore is not as hardcore. Hardcore games are, think of it as a game as a job.
01:09:43
Speaker
Like, you know, people just play that game all day, ah day in and day out. That's probably a version of a hardcore game. or Like super immersive. Super immersive, but also maybe a job. Like, you know, you're an esports competitor inside of it. So you just play League or Dota all day. You know, it's almost that way.
Growth of Midcore Games in India
01:09:59
Speaker
But the mid-core game would really be something that, you know, you can't play it on in a bus or you can't play it on a travel route. You have to kind of dedicate your time. It's most likely it's a landscape game. So you're going to place it this way and kind of put your head down just do that, not do three things at the same time with it.
01:10:18
Speaker
I would say the the best mid-core game built in India is a game called Raji, also built in Pune. I would say that that's something that kind of was a success and kind of inspired a lot of indie developers to go and make more of it. And we have seen, I would say, 10, 12 new games come out, which have this promise of a Raji.
01:10:34
Speaker
ah So we'll see our first commercial success in that space. We've not had a lot of commercial success yet from an Indian gaming industry perspective.
Indian Gaming Industry's Future Prospects
01:10:41
Speaker
We're still waiting for that big hit. um Like in China, they say that the blacksmith Wukong game when it came out was a billion dollar game and kind of changed the way that people look at China's AAA industry. And that was 20 years in the making.
01:10:53
Speaker
ah India is not there yet. I would say we're still probably five, seven years in the making. But there will be a blacksmith Wukong kind of moment in India. There are many talented people kind of building games in that space. ah Age of Bharat, you know,
01:11:07
Speaker
bunch of Bunch of new, like Ejo Bharat is in Pune, so that's how I know of it. A bunch of people are coming together to kind of have slightly ambitious ideas. Indus was an ambitious idea for us and we kind of kept our head down and have gotten it out. That's been our, so to say, consolation to start with. We're not successful yet, but heads down in terms of figuring out the next thing.
01:11:26
Speaker
Amazing, amazing. I wish you all the best and thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you so much.