Zapak Breaks Even: $3M In Revenues Last Qtr, $1M From Advertising

Reliance Entertainment President Rajesh Sawhney has disclosed that Zapak, the online gaming businesss from the Reliance ADA Group had reported revenues of $3 million for the last quarter, and has broken even. What’s interesting is that only $1 million of the revenues were from advertising: Sawhney told MediaNama that the rest was from other revenue streams like subscription, and in particular - Events.

So it appears that Events are becoming a major component of Zapak’s business: a couple of days ago, the company announced the Zapak Gaming Championship with Gillete Mach 3 Turbo Winner razor as its headlining sponsor, and with total prizes worth Rs. 1 crore. Prior to this, they had organized the Zapak Corporate Gaming Championship, with Timesjobs as the lead sponsor, and gifts as prizes. Zapak claims a registered user base of 6 million users.

What we’d really like to know about, is how much money Zapak is earning any money from in-game sales - are users playing its Massively Multiplayer Online Game paying to upgrade their racing carts, buy avatars etc., or are they just being given upgrades as prizes or for loyalty? The fact remains that while revenues may be coming from the offline component, the opportunity for scale exists on the Internet - online advertising and in-game commerce should be its primary source of income, and that doesn’t appear to be the case. Dependency on offline events alone will limit Zapaks revenue growth - how many events can they do in a year?

Zapak Not Shutting Down Bangalore Office; Consolidating Development In Mumbai

Zapak is not planning to shut down its Bangalore office, COO Rohit Sharma told MediaNama. A recent blog post in Pluggd.in (a blog by a Yahoo employee), had claimed yesterday that “Zapak has decided to shut down it’s Bangalore office and has fired close to 40 employees.”

We contacted Sharma, who told us that Zapak had an engineering center in Bangalore with around 30 people in all, of which 16 people were in engineering. However, since some of the development work was taking place in Mumbai and some in Bangalore, it was difficult for the company to manage the two: product managers had to travel frequently between Mumbai and Bangalore. In order to consolidate development in Mumbai, the company asked most of the development team to move to Mumbai. Around 5-6 people are moving, while others have left.

Zapak maintains that they will still have around 15 people in their Bangalore office and and are not shutting it down. The southern operations of their Gameplex business operates out of Bangalore, and they are looking to hire sales and marketing staff.

Zapak Adds Single Player Mobile Games From Greystripe

A few months ago, we’d written about the launch of Zapaks mobile site - Zapak.mobi, in collaboration with Cotopia. What had suprised us then, was the sheer lack of games - just seven. However, we’d also pointed out then that the games launched were essentially turn-based multiplayer games.

Zapak has now launched single player mobile games in partnership with Greystripe, which has a far more robust catalogue of over 900 advertising supported games. Also worth nothing that the turn-based multiplayer games have been pushed into the background with this move, and the single player games load on the front page. Remember what Jump Games CEO Salil Bhargava had told us - Single Player Casual Games are what sell in the mobile gaming business.

At present, there are essentially two players competing in the Indian market. Both Greystripe and Hovr provide games to users for free, and monetize by displaying advertisements before and after the game. Greystripe had tied up with the ABP group to launch Mjoy4free a year or so ago, but that was eventually was shut down. Hovr has since partnered with Indiatimes and NDTV Convergence to power their mobile games sites.

Difference between Hovr and Greystripe (more…)

First Look At Zapaks MMOG CrazyKart; Not Much Customization

Zapak’s Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) - CrazyKart - which they licensed from the Chinese gaming giant Shanda, is live, and available for download at CrazyKart.in

Download: It’s a 230 odd mb file, downloadable from CrazyKart.in, and it took over 3 hours for me to download it with my 256kb MTNL connection. To take care of download issues (and indeed costs), Zapak is offering free CDs to users (see this). Remember that Kreeda Games also seeded their MMOG by giving away free CDs.

Integration With Zapak.com: While Zapak will use the MMOG to drive signups, they have integrated CrazyKart with Zapak.com to allow users to use their Zapak.com login ID.

More on gameplay, customization and monetization : (more…)

Zapak Launches ZapakWorld With 12236 Games; Claims To Be Worlds Largest

Zapak, Reliance ADA Groups online gaming company has launched ZapakWorld, a casual games site with 12236 casual games, which it claims is the largest gaming destination in the world.

So has Zapak licensed or developed these 12236 casual games? Not quite - they appear to be aggregating games that can be embedded. This is a model that we first saw being used by Sashi Chimala’s Knibble, a site which aggregating over 10,000 games, and was acquired by FX Labs for $3 Million.

How does this work? Chimala had explained in an interview: “We crawl the internet and look at other sites that allow casual games to be embedded. If you look at casual games sites, most of them allow their games to be embedded in a Myspace profile or a Facebook profile. So we collect them from all over. If a game developer does not want their game on our site, then we simply provide a link.” A similar game aggregation model has also been implemented by Web18 for In.com.

Any Zapak Games? I wonder if ZapakWorld is only aggregating, or whether there are any of their own games at ZapakWorld. Comparing the cricket section at ZapakWorld and ZapakCricket, I didn’t notice any ZapakCricket games at the World site.

Is More Content Better Or Worse? I’m not sure if aggregating over 10,000 games is any better than aggregating 3000. The way I see it, based on editorial rating and user ratings, a few hundred will make it to the top of the list. The rest are most likely to be ignored. The gap between the “tier one” games that are popular and the rest is likely to be large: The more content you add, the more difficult it becomes to discover the content you want to discover. But the “largest game destination in the world” makes for good PR, and the “long tail” of games will add to the overall site usage.

A suggestion for Zapak: This applies to any portal in the content space: I quite like the last.fm model of content discovery. Allow each his user his/her page which aggregates content they’ve last consumed, and compare it with content consumed by people with similar preferences. Accordingly, suggest to your users, content based on their “neighbors” favorites; Last.fm allows this with “neighbors channel”. This is content suggestion based on human preferences. The other alternative is what Pandora does - maps characteristics of songs, and recommends similar songs to users.

Either way, the objective is to make content discovery easy, and increase consumption - pageviews, time-spend and “engagement”.

Update: I just checked again, and the number of games available since morning appears to have declined marginally by 4 games - now at 12232. Note that users can actually upload their own games. I wonder if there’s an ad-revenue share model in the works.

Related:
– Ibibo: Overhaul and Mobile Games
– Zapak Goes Mobile With Zapak.mobi; Turn Based Games

Zapak Goes Mobile With Zapak.mobi; Turn Based Games

Reliance Entertainment company Zapak is in the process of setting up a mobile site - Zapak.mobi . The GPRS based mobile gaming site allows users to play against others, play single player games, chat with their opponents, and there’s an inbox on offer too. Some details here. Zapak appears to have tied up with Cotopia for the service, as well as the games. A few points:

The Product
The games require MIDP2 support. I downloaded three games - Chess, Reversi and Connect4, and the downloads were fairly small - 70kb, 58kb and 64kb respectively, though it did take 3-4 minutes for the download to begin and the game to be installed. Interestingly, each game is accessible separately in the menu, instead of, as a part of a single application, like in case of the Boonty tie-up. I wonder if Zapak will have more than Cotopia’s apparent bouquet of 7 games. Hovr also has GPRS based games, and powers Indiatimes‘ mobile gaming service; there was also a deal between Greystripe and the Anand Bazar Patrika group for a portal called Mjoy4free, but the site isn’t loading anymore and I wonder if that the end of that. Do let me know if you’re able to access - Mjoy4free.

The Games

(more…)