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Gaming companies have come up with gamification (making games around serious topics) concept as an alternative to opinion polls to give a much clearer picture about the pulse of the nation
With polling making headlines every other day and political parties increasingly relying on opinion polls to project outcomes, which often turn out to be incorrect, Indian gaming companies have come up with the gamification (making games around serious topics) concept as an alternative so as to give a much clearer picture about the pulse of the nation.
For instance, Mumbai-based Games2Win recently launched Kursi Cricket, an online and mobile game developed for Elections 2014 and which is being promoted by Google as the ‘Game for this Election’ on its Play Store. Kursi Cricket is all about encouraging users to vote (play) for their preferred politician.
“Gaming is the new ‘Youth Speak’ and can be a very interesting method of communicating important social points. The idea behind this game was to use Games2Win’s gaming engine to reveal the ‘choice of the nation’ at any moment. The leaderboard scores immediately identify the winning politician (as far as the voter sentiment is concerned) and how competitive the ‘game’ (pun intended) really is,” says Mahip Vyas, head (alliances and distribution), Games2Win.
Thus far, Kursi cricket has witnessed 450,000 downloads on iOS and Android platforms, and over 150,000 pageviews online. As on April 17, 2014, the leaderboard scores -- Narendra Modi: 13,52,82,047, Rahul Gandhi: 7,16,56,956, and Arvind Kejriwal: 7,16,56,511. Kursi Cricket is targeted at the 15-34 age group.
Kursi Cricket is a free game, sans any ads and any charges for in-app items. “This is a pro bono effort to make Indian voters aware of their voting rights. We hope the politicians involved appreciate our effort and encourage their supporters to play and demonstrate their popularity,” Vyas adds.
India ranked third on the Google Play Store for total downloads in 2013, where more than 30 per cent of the total downloads were games. Also, the mobile gaming market in India is currently pegged at Rs 1,000 crore, and is expected to grow three-fold to Rs 3,000 crore in the next two years, primarily driven by faster smartphone penetration and improved data networks.
According to Manish Agarwal, CEO of Reliance Games, the mobile gaming division of Reliance Entertainment Digital, politics as a theme is topical for a mobile game and topical games have their own traction. Therefore, gaming companies are increasing their focus there.
“The success of the game (political) depends upon the consumers’ acceptance to play. During the election phase, the game can be leveraged. But, consumers will not wholly focus on these. The shelf life of political games is limited to the election phase. The model can recover costs only when a political party is commissioning the development of the game. But if it is a pure consumer-based business model, recovery would be difficult,” he says.
7Seas Technologies Limited, a Hyderabad-based independent game development company, too is gung ho about the three online political games that it is set to launch next week. The company has developed India’s first political fighting games in 2009 after the interest it generated in similar virtual games that pitted an online Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama against his Republican rival John McCain ahead of the US elections in November 2008.
The three free online games – Election War, Vote for your Leader and Party Race – are caricatured and animated neither to promote any political party nor to make garner money but to create awareness about the importance of elections, says L Maruti Sanker, managing director of 7Seas.
“The gameplans of these games are all about players selecting their favourite leader and making them win. The idea is to educate and make the gamers cast their vote in the real ballot,” he says, adding that the company is expecting close to a million gameplays for the three games.
Agrees Nitish Mittersain, chief executive officer of Mumbai-based mobile content and application developer Nazara Technologies. The company has so far developed three games based on political themes. Meri Sarkar, which it launched in 2011, has been its top-selling game with over a million downloads. The game allows users to go through the entire election process, right from setting up political parties, choosing candidates, setting the agenda, contesting elections and be involved in forming coalitions etc.
“While most of our primary consumers are casual gamers, the people who download these games (politics-based) are more evolved. These are people who are interested in topical points and are interested in issues that affect our lives,” he says.
