$200M raised. 90% year-on-year growth. 500 million gamers in-market.

[Music] Welcome to the special pocket gamer.biz podcast series because this time I'm joined by Craig Chapel. Craig, head of content of course at PG.biz. First of all, it's great to see you and it's like you're touching down from jet setting to all our events. So, uh, how you been? It's great to be on the interview show uh with you, Peggy. Uh yeah, we've been doing a lot of traveling. We did the Peachy Barcelona and now we're off to Shanghai on July 30th. It was your idea, so I have to give you full credit and I'm so excited because, you know, we have this great IP. We have the 50 top games, the top 50 games list. And yeah, let's do it. Let's be ambitious. You said, let's have them on as guests. We're going to get as many as we can. Obviously, not 50 because then we would just be doing that for a whole year. It's weekly, right? Um, but we do

have a returning name and even a bigger splash because we have Nazara Technologies and if you've been watching the news and Craig, you've been writing the news and reporting it. They are on fire. They are doing a ton. So, it's truly a true pioneer in Indian gaming. So, we're fortunate because we have Nidesh Mitten. He is founder and MD of Nazara Technologies. So, I'm surprised you even have the time because it's like everything going on. I'm getting something in my inbox. You know, first of all, you've launched India's first listed games company and then you're building it to a multi-vertical powerhouse. We're seeing it esports publishing and you've grown it to a company that we need to know and watch because yes, it's in the top 50. So, how would you describe your studio for our listeners? You know, Nazara started in 1999. So, it's been over 25 years that we've been around. We started with a dream of being India's largest gaming company. But over

the years, we've gone global and look at ourselves as now a global gaming company versus a Indian gaming company. Like you mentioned, we have gaming studios that produce IPs on mobile and now even PC and console. We have esports business. We're also having related ad tech businesses. It's a pretty well diversified business. India of course remains our home market. It's a market that's growing very fast and is very exciting for us. But we're equally excited with our global expansion and all the fantastic studios that are working with us uh in what we call the friends of Nazara network. One of your LinkedIn posts I think it was like a few months ago might have been last year. uh you've been as you say you've been pretty busy but one of the interesting things that you said was uh correct me obviously if if I becre is that in recent years kind of the investor interests has kind of taken off I think you meant like in India but also in Nazara so you're saying that for like

the past 25 years obviously you've been building up the company but perhaps that much investor interest hasn't been there what's changed for Nazara and the India games market to kind of drive that. Yeah, I would say I think especially the last 5 years have been, you know, accelerating at a very fast pace for us. I think multiple things are at play. One is from a India market perspective, you know, gaming consumption in India has just exploded with the way mobile internet penetration has grown. You know today in India with 4G and 5G at very cheap rates everybody's online digital payment ecosystem in India is really well developed and I think that's uh really boosting consumption. We have over 500 million uh mobile phone gamers uh in India. Maybe the monetization is lagging a bit but consumption is very high and that's very exciting for us. I think from a investor perspective particularly the Nazara IPO which

happened in 2021 we had 75 times over subscription to our IPO and this was India's first gaming IPO. So I think that kind of brought the gaming industry in India in focus for Indian investors as well as global investors and I think that has uh been very beneficial to us being able to garner invest interest. You must also appreciate that you know we are listed in the Indian stock market which is now a fairly deep and fairly active well sought after you know equity markets with global investors making sure that they have their slice of the pie in this market. So we are able to attract very strong local and global investors. Thirdly, over the last I would say six, seven years, right, Nazara's kind of transitioned into this global platform which allows us to demonstrate our ability to scale. We have been growing fast. If you see our latest quarterly results, we posted a year on year 90%

growth in revenue while uh you know continuing to be very profitable. So I think that of course no investor would complain about and we're also in this I would say moment in time where M&A is has been working well for us. We've been doing it for many years and we're kind of scaling it up globally and uh being able to partner with a lot of fantastic companies including a few others in your top 50 list. So so I think all of this coming together makes it kind of very exciting. I want to ping on what you said um Craig you know talking about the investment I mean I'm reading now Nidish that you're targeting 10 billion valuation within five years um maybe it's the platform you know the friends of Nazara but what is the biggest driver you see getting you there yeah you see it's important to understand that Nazara is uh you know not a new company and it took us 25 years to get to the $1 billion valuation

we created at about $1.3 billion today. But I think both how the Indian gaming market is poised to scale especially on monetization over the next five years is going to by far be the fastest growing gaming market in the world in terms of revenues as well. and uh also our ability through our friends of Nazara platform to expand globally and partner with profitable gaming studios own you know established IP uh the strong M&A pipeline with the high returns of capital strong synergy etc uh I think can get us there it's a snowball effect right we're also now the larger we're growing the more we're demonstrating our capability especially to do M&A in the correct manner uh more and more investors are you know getting attracted to us which allows us to raise more capital and deploy faster. I would say in the last 18 months we've raised uh over $200 million of capital.

The prior 20 years we probably raised $5 million or $10 million of capital. So I think it's this snowball effect that we are seeing and that's why we're setting our ambitions uh much higher from where we are today. How realistic I mean is is 10 billion is that just kind of the number to kind of attract interest because obviously the past few years the games industry globally really has been through a very tough time. I believe uh you know the positive sentiment in India which we are able to benefit from uh turns the negative sentiment globally actually to our advantage and we are able to you know leverage like I said uh partnerships investments and acquisitions with some really fantastic companies including the the ones in UK we've done last year and this year with uh Fusebox games and curve games established companies who've been there around for many years fantastic teams

and one important way of Nazara working the friends of Nazara that I keep referring to we operate in a fairly decentralized manner which means that the teams that we partner with or invest into continue to remain fairly autonomous and are able to continue to drive to their ambitions while we roll up our sleeves and help wherever we can right so I think that model has kind of been tweaked over the last five seven years and I believe that's our secret recipe or our magic recipe to let us 10x from where we stand today. I just want to get back to the the ecosystem and understand friends of Nazara. I mean what what is that um exactly? Is that a platform? It's going across different verticals. So what is a fit in the platform? What isn't a fit in the platform? Obviously you want to grow the platform and maybe you know companies people in our audience want to understand you know is there a fit? How do they fit? So maybe you can just unpack that a little bit more. Sure. So friends of Nazara is our gaming

platform uh which is powered by centers of excellence in user acquisition, data analytics, artificial intelligence, product etc. Right? We have strong teams across the board and we look to partner with gaming studios that have you know established and successful IT and who can benefit from some of these core competencies that we can bring to the table for them while they continue going down the path and journey that they have already been in. So for us uh from an M&A or investment perspective we obviously look at uh gaming IP whether it's original or licensed. We look at uh you know the founder or the team management team mindset. What are their uh objectives? Is this company profitable or has a clear path to profitability? We're not in the mindset of investing in large burn companies. That's not our DNA. Uh obviously what is the strategic value to our core gaming

vision or platform synergies and it's really 1 + 1 equal to 3 4 5 11 right? If it's 1 plus 1 is equal to two or 1.5 then it doesn't matter and is there an opportunity to scale globally or unlock you know new revenue streams uh I think u if I were to give you an example right with the fusebox acquisition that we did uh last year the team there is uh in UK headed by Terry fantastic they really understand the narrative story- based gaming genre and uh they've been doing fantastic work with Love Island over the last few years and uh alongside us you know we've helped them with some additional bandwidth in India we've helped them on certain of these core competencies that we spoke and now they're on a path of launching a game of quarter including they've just released a big brother last month they're going to launch big boss in India in multiple languages a lot of exciting things happening so that's the way we really enjoy working with these teams and just

helping them accelerate down the path that they're already there you basically have a portfolio across the whole company that spans kind of so many different segments and genres and platforms. So you've got games and within that now that you've also bought curve studios and you're talking about fuse box. So you got mobile, PC, console, publishing and developing wildly different genres, you've made investments in poker, uh you have media investments, you have esports investments. So why why are you pursuing such a broad wide scope rather than focusing on like a speciality does that and does that come with risks that you're spreading yourself you're spreading yourself quite wide at the moment I think there are two perspectives one is certain investments that we have done for example in poker basi which is India's largest poker platform or we own majority stake in nwin gaming which is India's largest esports company both

companies having 70% market share and you know dominating the markets have been very India first uh India specific opportunities of large scale on macro trends and it made sense for us to go down that path from a global perspective a lot of our focus is on core gaming both on mobile and PC console PC console being a new entrant and within that I would say some of the elements that I just spoke to you a few minutes ago right so I think uh some specific opportunities in India but larger core gaming play globally is the way we are approaching it. While it does look diversified uh it does come with some advantages as well. The wider canvas uh gives us a lot more optionality in terms of having many more companies fit our filters because I would say our own filters are pretty pretty uh strict or pretty you know tight and therefore the larger of the companies we can put in top of the funnel we're able to get better options.

If we narrow down our focus too much then I think uh it would be a little tougher for us. So I think from that perspective the wider canvas is helping us. Of course the flip side of uh you know being a leader in a niche of course has its own merits but we chose to go down this path. Lastly you know with our experience of 20 25 years I've realized that one uh slotting yourself in a very narrow space can have its own challenges because our businesses continue to be very disruptive. things are changing all the time and having a slightly wider portfolio allows us to be nimble enough to you know go with trends evolve ourselves just the way we've done in the last 25 years you said um that the business is kind of autonomous so I'm curious like how how do you bring them together or or do you not they all run separately or is the grand a plan to okay well we can harness this publisher to help that developer and then the second question

there is what happens if when one of these companies kind of fails which can happen with such a broad M&A strategy are you concerned that then it kind of brings the rest of the company down which has happened with certain other big publishers yeah I think uh we trying always to find the right balance between you know running a decentralized operation which is autonomous uh with the management because they need to feel empowered and continue to feel responsible for their business and also get the reward for it. Right? So our structures are built in that manner where the managements are highly incentivized for performance and they are given enough freedom and space to be able to execute in the way they think right. At the same time our intent is always to add value where we can. Now whether different studios and different companies have different areas where they need help. You know it could be on data analytics or user acquisition or

getting up to speed on AI or just using our network with platform owners and we plug in where we can. We do bring a core DNA of focus on profitability with growth. We're a very cash flow minded company. So we're not really worried about your revenue or your EIT or your PAT but more about uh your cash flows. So I think certain DNA elements we do try and infuse to the extent we can. Now in terms of synergies, you know, I've always had a belief that one of the biggest failures in M&A is caused by overestimating synergies at the time of acquisition, overpaying for the synergies which may never materialize and also because you've kind of visualized so many synergies right from day one of the acquisition, you start pushing the management of the acquired company just to focus on synergies and deliver on this synergy. ies which kind of you know defocuses them from the core business in itself. So our approach has

been quite the opposite where while we may look at synergies at a holistic high level we actually buy a company for its core capabilities and for its own core business and we let the synergies kind of evolve over a period of time with much uh softer hands I would say and that has worked better for us. How would you describe the current state of it and what still needs to change for India to reach its full potential? Because I've been hearing since for a decade now at least uh oh it's about to kind of uh the revenue is going to rise quite a lot. It's going to be the big new market and I feel like it still hasn't happened. Although we did have PUBG Mobile and Garina kind of prove I think that there there there is a market that's willing to spend but still the level of downloads versus level of spending is still quite low. I think taking a step back it's important to understand uh the

history here right India has been a mobile first gaming market unlike many western markets or eastern markets which would be you know kind of PC first markets or console first markets uh these devices never really were accessible in India so real people's first experiences of playing games really came with the Android phones uh let's say in 2007, 2008, 2009, right? Naturally, the first approach of these gamers was to be very casual in nature or hyper casual in nature. Keep trying out new things, right? And therefore, India has been a mobile first, casual gaming kind of nation. Uh propensity to pay therefore has always been less. People were happy to you know just consume free content uh to the extent that they can and uh carry on, right? And there's so much of free content available. There was never a lot of uh I would say

well-made uh localized content because uh the market didn't really support or justify the kind of large investments it would take to you know make very localized highquality games earlier. But over the last decade especially a lot of things have changed. The devices have become cheaper and much more powerful. They're really high quality gaming devices in the hands of 500 million game Indians today. The second thing is like I was saying the data is very fast and reliable. It's among the lowest cost in the world. So people don't think twice about using data. You have 5G rolling out all over the country again probably at the lowest costs in the world. So I think that's fantastic and digital payments has been completely eye openener in the last decade right I think the adoption of digital payments in India is so high probably among the best in the world for every microp payment uh this didn't exist earlier but in the last decade it's really taken off uh extremely well so all of these put together combined with the fact that 65%

of Indians are below the age of 35 we really have strong youth demographics And Indians love entertainment whether it's Bollywood and other things right so I think there's a natural progression to gaming so you have a market high consumption digital payments work now youth is coming up which is very much into gaming I think you will have a situation where in the next 5 years or so the Indian market will really surprise everyone and I'm actually very surprised I think it's because of this pessimism that you spoke about that uh it's happening It's happening. India's been a potentially large market for a really long time, right? But it's never really delivered that I'm surprised that in 2025 there's very few global players who are really active in the Indian market. And I think a lot of them are missing something uh very important. Uh also why we launched Nazara publishing to partner with a lot of global players and help bridge the

Indian market for them. Great segue. I wanted to get to that. But I was also thinking what you said before when Craig asked you about your M&A and you said you know you're opening opportunities for Fusebox in India. So that's that's pretty different and that's pretty exciting. Yeah. So I think uh a lot of the engines that monetize well uh married with a strong local IP could perform extremely well. So for example, Big Boss in India, which is the kind of the you know sister concern of Big Brother is very popular in India right across the country runs in eight different languages and it's a perfect fit for the engine that Fusebox already has and the narrative that it already has. I think that partnership, facilitating that partnership, helping generate the local narrative that is required, helping uh localization in terms of local live operations, local influencer marketing, local branding and

also different ways of local monetization. I think there are multiple things that we can do. One of our ideas are that companies that we invest in, of course, how do we open up the Indian market for them, right? which can be uh if not very large today at least give them that I would say lead uh going forward in a market that will start scaling very fast. We kind of been talking about how Nazara has kind of been building up the company and we mentioned kind of the opportunities in India and you're like surprised not as many companies are looking at it. Uh but as for studios within India, what can they do to find success on the global stage and not just within India because you know for Nazara you've got kind of you've been around for decades but now you've kind of got all this money to pump into expanding internationally. Yeah. What can other smaller India studios be doing? Yeah. you know uh the challenge with Indian studios over the decades I would

say or in the last decade largely has been that a lot of the teams had strong competency when it came to you know graphics animation coding quality assurance but I think there was uh culturally because of lack of exposure there was uh challenges in game design and monetization and I think a lot of the Indian developers have not been able to get global success probably because of gaps in some of these areas. I think that's uh being fixed pretty quickly now. I'm seeing starting to see success stories. our own uh product Kopia which was made in Mumbai right here in India right has been a long-term success in the US markets you know topping the charts quite regularly and has sustained for a really long time I think last 7 years very successfully you've got other examples like play simple which have done extremely well

and world games etc so I think you're starting to see Indian developers break out and I think you will see a lot more of that our prime minister is himself himself pushing this uh you know in the last Independence Day speech he actually called upon Indians not to just play games but make games for the world. So we're also seeing very strong uh governmental support in terms of you know this direction. So I think uh uh slowly but steadily we are getting there and uh over the next few years I think India can be the next Turkey type of market or other markets emerging markets which have kind of you know uh had really successful global gaming companies emerge out a lot of the strength of India is in data understanding the data AI a lot of innovation there so I'm wondering is that going to play more in favor of the Indian games market overall because people want almost personalized

games within games. It just seems to me that as that is more data driven and more business driven and perhaps less about the gameplay but it's more gameplay plus segmentation personalization all of that is that where you see it headed particularly when you think about AI in the mix I mean this might be what the differentiator is yeah well Indians have always been very good in math so I'm true I'm sure we can use that as a hedge for ourselves But I think more importantly like I was saying earlier leveraging AI in the correct manner will help probably plug some gaps in the Indian developer capabilities which may allow them to kind of blossom globally in terms of using AI for gaming both in terms of how games are made or how they are engaged how players interacted with I think uh it goes without saying that that is the future right and if whether it's an Indian company or any other company

anywhere in the world who doesn't move fast enough to catch up with that uh you know trend is going to get left behind. We are very cognizant of it and therefore we are doing a lot of work both at the parent level here at Nazara as well as with our studios in India's games industry on a global level is still quite a nent industry even though there's been companies there for a very long time like yourselves uh do you think they're particularly well placed to actually take advantage of these new generative AI technologies? I I was at a talk last year at Dubai Game Summit and Jeff Lindon was the founder and president of I Dream Sky was talking about the opportunity in the Middle East because it was a new industry. They weren't kind of make it's the wrong word but like constrained entrenched in kind of old ways of making games. Do you think that in some ways that could be said for India's games market that you could actually adapt quite quickly? Well, good to hear of Jeff. He's been a good friend of mine. and I haven't heard of it about him or off from him since a

while but uh but uh absolutely I think uh we're very seized about leveraging AI in the right manner there's a lot of buzz uh generally of AI as everywhere here in the Indian startup ecosystem as well lot of funding going into them and I think that just kind of gravitates everybody's focus on that piece of technology I think uh gaming companies here I'm seeing a lot of developers uh pick it up very past. I think one of the reasons is uh while Nazara has been you know quite successful in raising capital being a publicly listed uh gaming company in India I think younger gaming companies are still not seeing enough capital flow into their markets which means that they're still operating on relatively lean teams and lean budgets and naturally pushes them into now using AI to the maximum extent possible which I think is a great thing. So yeah, I again feel that this will be one key reason uh where you will see Indian

companies starting to emerge globally in a much more successful manner. So we're talking about how studios are pushing the boundaries with AI and of course it wouldn't be a show if we didn't talk a lot about AI because that is the deal but it's getting us excited as an industry. What gets you excited at Nazara Nidish? I think uh seeing our revenues grow 90% year on year and yeah that was good our grow% year on year keeps me excited so at least the teams know what needs to be done but uh but I think uh honestly you know I started coding games when I was seven in basic language on a ZX spectrum and therefore I've always been a technologist at art. I didn't really study computer engineering etc. I just did business studies and actually kind of dropped out of college because I started Nazara when I was 16 25 years 26

years back and therefore if you were to ask me uh what's exciting us at Nazara in terms of beyond business as usual I think uh we we remain quite excited about opportunities around web 3 uh around digital asset ownership we're quite excited about what virtual reality and the metaverse will offer. We're not while it's again somewhat like what you said about the Indian market. It's been kind of on the horizon for a really really long time and therefore a lot of people are very pessimistic about uh you know VR etc. I think we're very bullish. I think that is the future form of gaming and uh therefore we are doing some stuff. We just published one game called Poker was on Meta and Apple Vision Pro. So we're doing stuff around that. And then third of course uh everything and anything to do with AI. I think that's a beauty of our uh being in the gaming business right at any point of time you see the business in the next 5 years will completely transform due to

all the technological changes that are happening around us and that keeps us very excited. So, I thought I would round it out because you told us about what gets you excited, but you know what also gets you grounded because when you're not running Nazara and building and scaling, you're also playing saxophone in a jazz band, right? That's that's quite a contrast. So, how do those disciplines come together? I know it's about math at some level because music and math that works, but uh how does that work for you? Well, like every Indian uh you know, I was fond of Bollywood and a particular song in Bollywood. Uh that made me learn the saxs when I was much younger and I was kind of uh we had a kind of a jazz scene here in Mumbai with a few clubs where we used to play with a jazz band. So I've just kept that hobby going. I try and play on the weekends and sometimes share a song on LinkedIn or so because otherwise there's too many life lessons on LinkedIn going on all the time. So maybe I thought I'll break the monotony

on once in a while. Yeah, you're right. LinkedIn is just too too much professional. We are fun, not just professionals. We are people. I speak to a lot of startup entrepreneurs here in India and I think uh for me my 25 years of experience can be you know kind of uh what I like to say is the three Ps which is uh uh passion uh perseverance and positivity. I think if you can maintain these three Ps for the long term you will more likely than not be successful and happy. Making me wish you were in politics here Nish. I will leave with that thought. We need more people thinking like you in Britain. I think it's two Ps. I think we leave out the positivity in the At the moment. At the moment. It's been fun here. It's been fun here. I mean, it's been It's not work. It's not work. I could do this all day. So, I guess we have one more question, though.

Okay. Which is that we ask everybody uh and that is what is your favorite game? I guess there's two questions. What is your favorite game right now? And if you can pick one, what is your favorite game of all time? So right now I've been trying to play all the popular games published back of games. So Boply life and human fall flat and for the king and just trying to figure it out whenever I can get access to my console, my PS5 because my kids have usually taken it over. Fortnite is what they're doing all the time. Uh but uh if I reflect back in terms of what was my all-time favorite game actually what comes to and I may give my age away but what really comes to mind is Prince of Persia. Ah nice solid and the remake's on its way. Yeah. Must be pretty exciting. This has been great Craig. Um it was your idea to start this series. I want

to continue it and I'm so glad we could kick it off with you Nish because there's so much there. It's not just a story of a top games studio but how one stays at the top of their game literally. So thanks so much for your time. Thank you. My pleasure. This show is all about how to do your job better, how to make an amazing game, how to market it, and you have a say. So, if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on, then we would love to hear from you. We want to hear from you. We want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness. So, if you have any suggestions for us, if you have any feedback for us, you can always get in touch. You can email us at podcastpocketgamer.biz. You can find us on Twitter @pgbiz. And you can reach out to us through the pocket.biz website. If you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts, you

can find them at pocketgamer.bizodcast. And we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows. And we've got you covered on all the major platforms. So subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said, look for us on YouTube. If you want to read it, hey, you can do that, too, because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocket gamer.biz website. Tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz Biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future.