As published in DNA Money, Bangalore

The world’s second-largest game publisher Electronic Arts, has tied up with Indiagames to provide many of their flagship games through its Games on Demand (GoD) service.

As of now, only the older games from EA like FIFA 07, Battlefield 1942 and NFS Underground, will be available. Indiagames already has around 300 games under its belt from developers like Popcap,  Microsoft, Eidos and Atari. According to Vishal Gondal, founder & CEO of Indiagames, they are  already in talks to start selling new games on GoD. “There are two types of services. One is the  subscription model and the other is the purchase model. In the subscription model, you pay a certain amount on a monthly basis and you have a catalogue of 300 games to choose from. In the other
model, you pay for a game and it’s for your keeping.There are services like Steam, which let you do
that, but no Indian player does it,” he said. GoD service has seen a 120% growth in the last year
and has an active user base of 35,000 gamers. “What is interesting is the varied interest gamers have. The most played game on the site is Zuma Deluxe, which is a casual game followed by NFS Most Wanted and Indiagames T20 cricket. These gamers spend up to 8 hours per week on the site,” Gondal said.

The model like the ones used by Indiagames, are given a thumps-up by game developers who have to face rampant plagiarism issue in India. According to Gondal, around 85% of the games sold in India are pirated ones. To make the downloads attractive to the price-sensitive audience, Indiagames uses powerserver, which means the game downloaded will not add up to the data usage of internet users. The largest online game distribution service as of now is Steam with over 20 million user accounts.

There are, however, newer services coming up such as OnLive, which will not require gamers to download or install game. The game will play on the site’s server and will be streamed to your  computer, like a YouTube video. They make use of an indigenous compression technology to deliver gaming without latency. The service, however, requires a steady bandwidth of around 20Mbps
to play games at highest resolution.

Indiagames would be foraying into iPhone gaming market with a cricket game, the details of which
will be released later on. The game will make use of touch-screen interface and seems to be a modified version of Indiagames T20 cricket game.