Tech Shout!

Reliance always has a history of bringing out products and services that are aimed at the common people. It had launched a casual gaming website Zapak which has become a rage with the gamers in India. Zapak CTO Sudipto Majumdar is quite optimistic about the Indian market. Zapak is aiming to rule the PC screen by introducing new innovative casual games. They are also planning to roll out an MMOG in the coming months.

He said, “Zapak is the first Indian portal that has gotten into gaming in a big way. Shareholders have put in a large amount of money. We are covering the entire spectrum of gaming. We are looking at casual games, MMOGs and skill based games, which are in between casual games and MMOGs. It’s the first Indian comprehensive gaming portal. Our shareholders, our president Rajesh Sawhney as well as our promoter Anil Ambani envisioned Zapak as they wanted to catch the youth of today. India is a young country; more than 50% of the population is below 25, so how do you get them? Obviously, you get them from the four screens you have, there is the Movie screen, the TV screen, the PC screen and the mobile screen. So on the PC screen, the strategy to catch the people is through games. So that’s how the idea of a gaming portal like Zapak came into being.”

Zapak has been made in an international way and they have introduced many features like Zapak TV, where gamers can upload gaming related videos such as reviews on the Zapak website. They are also planning to come out with a game download service, where they will offer international games at Indian prices. And to keep up the growing trends, they have launched Zapak Girls, a website dedicated solely for the members of the fairer sex.

Majumdar feels that there are lots of women and girls who are interested in gaming. He explains, “Zapak Girls is a segmentation of our offering. We find that the very unknown statistic in most gaming circles is that, in most western countries, majority of the casual gamers are females and not males. In fact, there are females who are 40 plus. The exact profile, which is never thought of as a gamer, are the person who is playing poker, who is playing mahjong, who is playing Max 3 and different, different types of games and stuff like that. So it is a very wrong stereotype that girls and games don’t go together. So what we tried to do was, we tried to think of ‘How do I highlight that lot of games that we have, which need to be segmented as and presented as, so that women come to know, that there is a place where they can come and play games. Games are not about blood and gore and action. That’s how the idea came. Then we followed through the execution called as Zapak girls. So it is a face of Zapak that is more targeted towards women.

The MMOG by Zapak will go into closed beta in August and after that the game will go into the open beta stage and then the game will be rolled out for the Indian gamers. Majumdar has assured Indian gamers that the MMOG will be of international standard and will not be something that has passed its lifecycle in other countries.

Content wise, Zapak is planning to go as per the demand of the market, especially the demands of the Indian gamers. For example, anime is catching up fast in India, so according to Sudipto Majumdar, Zapak might make games on anime, if there is enough demand in India for that genre.

To conclude, Zapak is very confident on the Indian gaming scenario and they will continue to bring out games that appeal to the Indian gamers as well as provide international quality content for the games.