PUBG BAN TO HURT INDIA REVENUES OF TENCENT INC
Barely 24 hours after Chinese gaming app PUBG was banned along with many others, entrepreneur Vishal Gondal on Friday announced a local alternative of the game called FAU-G.
Gondal, who is advisor and investor in ncore Games, says the company had been building the product over the past six months and will roll it out by October.
“Games take time to build. You cannot make a game in 2-3 days. And we were definitely going to launch irrespective of the PUBG ban,” he says. Gondal, who has been developing games since he was 14, also founded a game development and publishing company Indiagames that was sold to Walt Disney for around $100 million in 2013. He is also the founder of preventive healthcare platform GOQII.
According to the company, FAU-G will be based on real scenarios encountered by the Indian security forces in dealing with both domestic and foreign threats with its first level set in the Galwan Valley. The start-up is planning to monetise the venture through in-game purchases.
The firm said it will donate 20 per cent of the net revenue generated from the game to Bharat Ke Veer Trust, which was conceptualised by actor Akshay Kumar and implemented by the Ministry of Home Affairs, to support the families of India’s Armed Forces martyrs. It is estimated that PUBG earned a revenue of about ~750 crore annually from India alone. The start-up is aiming for a similar revenue in the next year.
Valued at $885 million, the Indian gaming industry is likely to grow at 41.6 per cent (FY21) thanks to the growth of digital infrastructure and rise in quality gaming content, according to a report by Maple Capital Advisors. Game streaming platforms had anticipated the PUBG ban and were already focusing on alternatives. “Rooter had less than 10 per cent PUBG streamers and it was a conscious effort on our part to ensure that we focus more on other games like Free Fire and Call of Duty (COD). Both have strong engagement on Rooter and most of their top streamers are part of our user base,” says Piyush Kumar, CEO and founder of Rooter.
COD, launched in the US in 2003, is the most talked about PUBG alternative. “After the PUBG ban, users are shifting towards COD. Currently, we have started to experience close to a 30 per cent shift to COD from PUBG,” says Yash Pariani, CEO, Indian Gaming League.
ncore will roll out two more games in a couple of months — one with a music theme and the other on cricket. “We will be creating a world class gaming experience which will be better than PUBG as our team has already worked on some of the best game titles in the world such as Vainglory,” says Gondal, a college dropout who learnt how to develop games on the job.
However, not everybody shares the optimism. “It’s not easy to make high-quality graphics and experience at that level. I will only download the game after seeing reviews,” says Sahil Verma, a PUBG user.