After IPL, gaming startups like Reliance Games want to play football

BENGALURU: Gaming companies Nazara Games, Play Games 24/7, Reliance Games, Games2Win and several others launched cricket-centric games during the IPL season; the gaming companies are increasingly looking at live sports as an avenue for launching games with football being the next game in mind.

Nazara Games’ Cricbet, a real time cricket virtual betting platform, saw a fairly high level of traction with up to 15,000 active users after 1,00,000 downloads.
“In terms of retention, around 60% of users came back to place bets for the second match, and up to 30% of users came back for the 15th match, this real time virtual betting platform has the potential to be integrated into various sports,” said Manish Agarwal, CEO of Nazara Games. An individual user placed up to 38 bets during a single match, and approximately 1.5% of users converted from a free user to a paid user while playing Cricbet.

The company is now eyeing football as the next live game to introduce virtual real time betting for mobile gamers who are football fans; they will reintroduce the game during the football English Premiere League.

Play Games 24/7 also launched a virtual real time cricket betting platform during IPL. However, the company refused to comment on the traction seen, but aims to introduce the real time betting platform into other live games, including football, basketball, amongst other live sports.

Besides the virtual real time cricket betting platforms, other gaming companies including Reliance Games, Games2win, Moonfrog Labs, all launched cricket-centric games during the IPL. “The IPL cricket game that we launched resulted in more than Rs 5 crore of game play till date, end users spent an average of 7 minutes on each gaming session every day, we even saw a high number of game installs from other cricket-crazy countries like Australia, South Africa, Bangladesh and even Pakistan,” said Amit Khanduja, CEO of Reliance Games.

After studying user behaviour during the IPL season, Reliance Games plans to increasingly look at live sports as an avenue for mobile gaming. Most of the gaming companies claimed that a large amount of their user base for the IPL games was urban male mobile gamers.