Indiagames

» see indiagames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Vishal Gondal founded Indiagames in Mumbai in 1999 with a team of five. It made and published games for whatever screen would take them, which in the early 2000s meant Java phones, and it sold them through the carriers' own menus. Its best-known credit is the first Spider-Man game for mobile. Licensed versions of Garfield and BioShock followed.

By April 2005 a Telecompaper report described one of the largest wireless content development operations in the world, with more than 200 staff selling through over 100 distribution channels. It had been profitable for two years. The carriers it named were Orange, Verizon, Sprint, Singtel, Airtel and Vodafone.

The ownership changed faster than the games did. In that same report TOM Online, a Chinese wireless portal, already held 76.3 percent. Cisco and Macromedia then paid 4 million dollars for a combined 18.2 percent, which left TOM with 62.42 percent and Gondal's group of original shareholders with 19.4. In 2007 the Indian media company UTV bought a majority, and in June 2010 the studio was renamed UTV Indiagames.

In October 2011 UTV paid Rs 94.56 crore for the shares it did not yet own, by MediaNama's figures, at a time when Indiagames was reported to earn about 400,000 dollars a year on 11 million in revenue. Disney finished buying UTV itself in February 2012, and the studio came along as part of the package. Gondal ran Disney India's digital arm from September 2012 and resigned in April 2013. His next company was GOQii, a fitness tracker startup.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ behind the operator's menu ~

I did not know the name until this queue surfaced it, and that is a fair summary of carrier-deck publishing. The buyer saw Spider-Man and a price on the operator's menu, and the studio in Mumbai stayed out of sight. The brand was built for carriers and licensors, who were the real customers.

At home it was more visible. Indiagames ran Games on Demand, a subscription PC games service sold through Indian broadband operators, and it put games on the set-top boxes of satellite TV providers. Cricket was the constant. Its last big release was ICC Pro Cricket 2015, the official game of that year's World Cup, out on PC with a cut-down version for phones.

~ relieving letters ~

On 27 August 2015 NDTV Gadgets reported that Disney India was shutting down development at Indiagames and that about 30 developers, programmers and artists among them, had been handed relieving letters, the Indian term for the paper that ends a job. They had been the team on ICC Pro Cricket 2015. Disney's reply to MediaNama called it a restructuring of the Interactive business "focused on sustainable profitability and innovation", and added a sentence worth keeping: "The Indiagames brand will exist the way it is." It declined to say what the focus areas were.

The website tells the rest. indiagames.com served a full site through May 2014. By November 2014 it was a single line, "This site is temporarily not available." After that it showed a logo on an empty page, with the alt text "Indiagames Games on Demand", and it was still that way in August 2018. Disney left console game publishing altogether in May 2016, when it canceled Disney Infinity. English Wikipedia's infobox ends the studio in 2014 without a source, and I have dated it to the month the developers left.

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