Gaming companies jingle all the way

It's just three weeks to Christmas and Indian gaming companies have geared up with their offerings weaved around a plethora of topics relating to the December festival -- carols, cakes, decoration of the Xmas tree, Santa Claus and his magical elves and flying reindeers.

Reliance Big Entertainment's online gaming subsidiary, Zapak Digital, is launching three games dedicated to Christmas -- Christmas Bounce, Gift Grab and Christmas Desert Trail -- targeted at the Indian market.

"Gamers like to play games with a festive feel during this season. We are launching three games involving gifts and Santa Claus as we believe that during Christmas, people relate to Santa Claus the most. With an investment of Rs 4 lakh on each of these games, we expect to receive more than half a million gameplays from these games on Christmas,"says Rohit Sharma, chief operating officer of Zapak.

Gaming is big business during Christmas. A US-based marketing research company, comScore, reveals that December is the peak season for gaming with approximately 600 million unique gamers playing casual games.

Alok Kejriwal, co-founder and chief executive of Mumbai-based Games2Win, reckons that Christmas games are not just kids' stuff. Teenaged girls and boys, too, can play Xmas games based on romantic themes.

"We currently have two Christmas games and are planning to release six new games, translated in 22 languages in December. Dress Up Xmas Trees, Carve the Turkey, Kiss While Your Boyfriend's Parents Are In the Kitchen -- these are the themes that work for gamers in the age groups of 8-11 and 12-18," concurs Kejriwal.

Games2Win is investing close to Rs 10 lakh in developing the bouquet of six Xmas games and expects to recoup its investments over a two-three-year period since they are of the casual type. "We had a phenomenal Christmas last year with just about 10 million unique users playing on our network of games, which is a 45 per cent growth over the Xmas of 2007. This year, we expect to get 15 million uniques to play about 10 times each across the month (total 150 million plays)," Kejriwal says adding that online gaming is a $2-billion market in the US with Xmas games accounting for close to 12 per cent of that.

Games2Win is also in the process of migrating two of its Christmas games -- Dress Up Your Xmas Tree and Kiss Under the Mistletoe -- to the iPhone by this Xmas.

Hyderabad-based independent game development company 7Seas Technologies Limited, too, is planning to launch six games titled Ice Xmas, Xmas Hero, Xmas Grandpa, Ice Ride, Swagging Santa and Santa's World Tour.

 "For Christmas games, Santa Claus is the most preferred character. We are investing around Rs 15 lakh in these six Xmas games, which are expected to bring in a million users to our portal onlinerealgames.com during the season. We are adopting advertising and game licensing models and hope to see significant revenues by the end of January 2010," says L Maruti Sanker, managing director of 7Seas Technologies.

Kejriwal says with the massive explosion of games like Farmville, the Christmas games business is going to grow 100 per cent this season. Farmville is an online game on the Facebook, where each player starts off with a farm that is 12 by 12 squares large. "We believe that over the next couple of years, all games will be largely played on social networks as that's the festive season is all about -- getting close with family, friends and loved ones," he feels.