Mauj has launched 2 Mahabharata games in 2D and 3D – Abhimanyu and Bheeshma – centered around characters from the classical Indian epic. The company claims there is an increasing interest in mythology based games, but we wonder if there’s anything more to the choice of topic than gameplay. The games are priced at around Rs. 50 each.
I tried to download the game, and thought I’d point out a few things that Mauj can do better:
— The release suggests that one can download the game from www.mauj.com. I accessed www.mauj.com from my handset, and I wasn’t redirected to the mobile site. Randomly, I tried out http://m.mauj.com and http://wap.mauj.com . The former just had the page “It’s working” splashed across it. http://wap.mauj.com took me to a page with a lot of content, but with games fairly low down the page. Perhaps a quick link on top would ease the discovery of content.
— On accessing the games section I was unable to find the Mahabharata games – neither a banner, nor a listing.
— A search for Mahabharata yielded nothing, but then a search for Abhimanyu led me to the right game. The search box was at the bottom of the page.
— When I clicked on the download button – I was willing to buy the game if only to assess the gameplay, I got the following message – “Sorry. This service is not available for your network. Please contact your service provider with your needs.” I’m on Airtel.
By this time, a consumer would have lost all patience and closed the browser window. While this problem wont occur in a majority of the cases, because content purchase is intrinsically linked to the mobile operators since they provide the billing, a company still needs to ensure that the discovery of content on their mobile platform is easy. Perhaps an icon based approach – like the kind Rediff is following for http://world.rediff.com should be adopted, and search should be a primary source for allowing access to content.
