India is the next big mobile games market, says Reliance Games' Manish Agarwal

okay so it's pocket gamer.biz we're in china shanghai for china joy and we've uh we're looking not at the chinese market now we're looking at the next big market the indian market we have manish from reliance games nice to meet you manish pleasure and you're going to tell us why why india is going to be the next big market for mobile games i think uh today's 50 million android uh phones in 12 to 15 months it'll be 100 million android phones huge massive market what i'm seeing in china today i think it's a 200 250 million android phones and that's what is going to be happening in india in 18 to 24 months the excitement which i'm seeing today in china i bet you in 18 months you all guys will be in india okay you'll be lining up there so when we were kind of talking the thing everyone says about india's is says massive you know massive downloads i think the fourth biggest download for android but no revenue i mean is that true how's that going to change so the yes there is a download and which is a great sign because the consumers

are willing to lap up good content so that's a really really very positive thing and no revenues is predominantly our own doing it's the gaming ecosystems doing not the uh consumer's fault we have a very strong value-added services business uh which is uh uh upwards of thousand uh five five hundred two thousand million dollars so consumers are paying yeah the the issue is for an in-app purchase to happen you need to be able to have a last mile payment experience okay now india is nobody's going to pay through credit card net banking debit cards and all of it it's going to be pretty much like china where you need to have mobile carrier building and that's must that's your number one second thing is you cannot expect an indian consumer to pay you 99 cents one dollar two dollar four dollars for your items it has to be india's relevant pricing what has happened is that though there is no language barrier in that country a lot of people have put in games as us which will not never allow them to

monetize and hence we have created a great myth about india that you will get downloads but you will not get monetization i think it is a wrong perception if you can do a pricing right if you can get the last mind payment right through billing api's integration of mobile carriers yeah you will see loads of volume you will see monetization happening and if we can and i'm my my endeavor in india is to prove to the rest of the world by getting a very good content let's say content from the kind of content of content which is a very very casual you will see one year from now people will say hey india is a market where we can make money and make downloads and you guys actually i mean you're kind of like creating this the infrastructure so you're actually doing your own app store is that correct i mean what's this that sounds like a lot of work to do yeah so what we are doing is we have we are saying essentially let's understand consumers our indian consumers have skipped the

whole pc gaming they're coming to mobile gaming for the first time they're coming to mobile internet for the first time and they don't know search and discovery right uh they need to get a curated gaming platform where they can do snacky and snappy games pick and play games they don't want ccgs and tcgs and mid codes and all of it all these jargons which you say they want a very casual games it could be a simple arcade puzzle match three racing action simple games we want to provide that now we want to really what i'm not suggesting is that that you need to take indian themes like in china korea japan that global themes will work but you need to give them simple games and curated games which they can play second thing is we are creating our own social sdks okay which really help us which really help gamers to figure out through their peers what games their pers their friends are playing and hence the discovery of games really happen the third thing which we have done is we've created a game agnostic leaderboard for them to keep on coming back to the

platform now what happens is that these points are a fad after some point of time you feel fatigued you say what the f this these points what should i do so we have done you can redeem these points in local cafe cafes you can redeem in mcdonald's and movie theaters and all of it so there is a continuous reason because indian consumers are very rational they want a value for money okay and and that's what we're creating a platform which can help you get more dius more engagement more discovery of games plus a curated content with right billing apis and a free coffee this is a free copy it sounds like this is the perfect platform this is i hope that's what i think now it's uh that as everybody said god or devil lies in execution yeah and i think the first step is i need lots of good content when i say lots of i don't need thousands of games i need good 10 15 20 games okay and that's what i want to tell through your site that hey look at india look at this at the right time you may want to work with us when you want to work with anyone but do the right steps and india will

make you tons of money in times to come you heard it here first yep good good investment advice thank you very much for your time thank you you