Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (R-ADAG) firm Reliance Entertainment on Saturday announced the launch of its online casual gaming portal, Zapak.com. Rajesh Sawhney, president of Reliance Entertainment, said, "With the world's largest youth population, India as a market offers tremendous potential. The gaming market in expected to grow to $200 million by 2010. Therefore, gaming is an important part of our entertainment strategy and we are investing $100 million in the venture over next 3 years." R-ADAG's gaming entertainment company Zapak Digital Entertainment, also announced its association with Bollywood actor Salman Khan, who will be involved conceptualizing games for Zapak. 'Love and perish' and 'Puppy razi' are two games designed on the life of Salman Khan, while others are in the pipeline. Talking about Zapak plans, Rohit Sharma, COO of Zapak Digital Entertainment, said: "The first phase of our launch would focus on establishing India's largest online casual gaming portal, Zapak.com. The portal would offer the largest catalog of titles across all the genres. We would also offer unique 'Score Capture' facility which further augments the competitive gaming spirit and allows lots of contests. We would also like to announce our association with Salman Khan for creating a zone with him on the portal. The zone will host games based on Salman's life. Salman will also work with us to conceptualize some games. In the second phase of the roll out Zapak will introduce massively multiplayer online games (MMOG)." The portal currently has over 150 casual games. Sudipto Majumdar, CTO of Zapak Digital Entertainment, said: "We have set-up operations of the portal on 100 servers and can today support upto 6 million users. We intend to increase this number to 1000 servers in the next 3 years.
