Quick-steps to a Bollywood hit
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Joe Leahy
THE setting is typical Bollywood glamour -- a boardwalk over azure waters with beach huts in the background and a beautiful blue, if slightly pixellated, sky above.
The Hindi music kicks in and the dancer, a Bollywood hero in a gaudy jacket, starts clapping his hands and striking poses that would do John Travolta, or to use a more pertinent example, Indian movie star Hrithik Roshan, proud.
But the "dancer" is an internet game character controlled by Quentin Staes-Polet, a former IBM consultant, who is demonstrating on his laptop what he hopes will be India's first hit mass multiplayer online game, "Dance Mela", or "Dance Carnival".
Mr Staes-Polet has done what many consultants dream of but most fear to do: leave a comfortable job to gamble everything on what he hopes, based on overseas experience, could become India's next multi-billion-dollar industry.
"About a year-and-a-half ago, we put two and two together and realised there was an emerging internet population here in India but no one was doing large-scale gaming," he says, as his fingers dance on the arrow keys, directing the elaborate footwork of the on-screen dancer.
Mr Staes-Polet's company, Kreeda Games, is one of India's first internet games companies dedicated to what the industry calls "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" -- a genre in which large numbers of players interact in a virtual world.
The 39-year-old Belgian entrepreneur and his co-founders, Indian Ramesh Anumukonda and American Robin Alter, last month secured investment from the venture capital arms of two global technology groups, IDG of the US and Japan's Soft bank.
For his template, Mr Staes-Polet is looking to the on-line games industry in China, where the number of broad band connections has risen from minimal levels five or six years ago to about 56m today. India is today where China was in the early days, with only 2.3m users.
Shanda Interactive Entertainment, set up in 1999, has become one of China's leading games companies and today has a market capitalisation of about $2.4bn on Nasdaq. "It was zero in 1999 - it didn't exist - so this is the kind of scenario we're hoping for here."
An engineering and MBA graduate of Solvay Business School in Brussels, Mr Staes-Polet began his career on the business side of an independent recording studio in Hong Kong.
He moved to Universal in Asia, part of the Vivendi group, doing strategic marketing for its alternative music business.
Concerned that the large record companies were not taking the internet seriously enough, he joined a web site, OneAsia.com, which aimed to sell Asian music online to a world-wide audience. But the operation was forced to close after the dotcom bust.
IBM asked him to join its Asian internet media division and he began flying around the region, consulting with games companies in China, South Korea and Taiwan.
The idea for Kreeda struck him while he was on a flight, reading an article about Microsoft's hit mass-multiplayer game, Halo.
He realised no one was doing this in India. "The same day I called Ramesh and Robin, my partners, and we spent 48 hours thrashing out the business plan," he says. Two months later, he quit IBM.
The trio have ploughed over $250,000 of their own money into the operation and begun hiring staff. Mr Staes-Polet's experience at Oneasia.com had taught him how vital it was for an internet start-up to build a strong team, particularly in an industry where technical skills are at a premium.
The next breakthrough came with money from IDG, which invested in some of China's biggest web sites, and Soft bank. The sum has not been disclosed but is estimated at less than $10m. "The strongest thing here is the management team," says Anil Viakara, managing partner at Soft bank Bodhi Investments. "It's a team psychologically prepared for the challenges of building a business."
A central plank of the business model is to license games that have been successful elsewhere, rather than develop their own, which could take years and cost millionsof dollars. This keeps costs down and enables experimentation.
A visit to Kreeda's 40-strong team in a suburban house near Mumbai airport is like dropping into an internet café; jeans are the office uniform and Dance Mela posters cover the walls.
The game, which is in the "beta" or final testing stage and is aimed at both sexes, has been adapted from a Chinese version developed by a mainland company 9you.com. The characters have been given Indian features and Chinese music exchanged for Bollywood themes.
Players compete by pressing keys corresponding to arrows that appear on the screen that represent the footwork in the dance, each of which is adapted from a Bollywood movie. An arrow pointing left, for instance, means a dance step to the left. The faster or more elaborate the dance, the more difficult the game.
Dance Mela is free to play but over time, players are expected to shop on-line for items such as clothing for their characters and eventually even the songs themselves.
To overcome India's slow connection speeds, the game is designed to work on dial-up connections rather than broad band.
And since credit cards are not yet ubiquitous, Kreeda is distributing cash cards to internet cafes and other outlets around the country to allow users to buy and sell items on the site.
Kreeda faces some stiff challenges. An Indian research company, the Internet & Mobile Association of India, estimates the country's gaming market only generates about Rs210m ($5.2m) in sales.
Internet penetration is low at about 3.0 per cent of the population and there are signs of cultural resistance; India's education-obsessed middle classes worry that online games distract children from their studies.
Mr Staes-Polet cites studies that show on-line games have driven internet penetration in other Asian markets and he says objections from parents are nothing new. If Dance Mela does not catch on, he has more games in the pipeline. "We're in it for this game and the next game and the next game until the market finally explodes."
Under syndication arrangement with FE
THE setting is typical Bollywood glamour -- a boardwalk over azure waters with beach huts in the background and a beautiful blue, if slightly pixellated, sky above.
The Hindi music kicks in and the dancer, a Bollywood hero in a gaudy jacket, starts clapping his hands and striking poses that would do John Travolta, or to use a more pertinent example, Indian movie star Hrithik Roshan, proud.
But the "dancer" is an internet game character controlled by Quentin Staes-Polet, a former IBM consultant, who is demonstrating on his laptop what he hopes will be India's first hit mass multiplayer online game, "Dance Mela", or "Dance Carnival".
Mr Staes-Polet has done what many consultants dream of but most fear to do: leave a comfortable job to gamble everything on what he hopes, based on overseas experience, could become India's next multi-billion-dollar industry.
"About a year-and-a-half ago, we put two and two together and realised there was an emerging internet population here in India but no one was doing large-scale gaming," he says, as his fingers dance on the arrow keys, directing the elaborate footwork of the on-screen dancer.
Mr Staes-Polet's company, Kreeda Games, is one of India's first internet games companies dedicated to what the industry calls "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" -- a genre in which large numbers of players interact in a virtual world.
The 39-year-old Belgian entrepreneur and his co-founders, Indian Ramesh Anumukonda and American Robin Alter, last month secured investment from the venture capital arms of two global technology groups, IDG of the US and Japan's Soft bank.
For his template, Mr Staes-Polet is looking to the on-line games industry in China, where the number of broad band connections has risen from minimal levels five or six years ago to about 56m today. India is today where China was in the early days, with only 2.3m users.
Shanda Interactive Entertainment, set up in 1999, has become one of China's leading games companies and today has a market capitalisation of about $2.4bn on Nasdaq. "It was zero in 1999 - it didn't exist - so this is the kind of scenario we're hoping for here."
An engineering and MBA graduate of Solvay Business School in Brussels, Mr Staes-Polet began his career on the business side of an independent recording studio in Hong Kong.
He moved to Universal in Asia, part of the Vivendi group, doing strategic marketing for its alternative music business.
Concerned that the large record companies were not taking the internet seriously enough, he joined a web site, OneAsia.com, which aimed to sell Asian music online to a world-wide audience. But the operation was forced to close after the dotcom bust.
IBM asked him to join its Asian internet media division and he began flying around the region, consulting with games companies in China, South Korea and Taiwan.
The idea for Kreeda struck him while he was on a flight, reading an article about Microsoft's hit mass-multiplayer game, Halo.
He realised no one was doing this in India. "The same day I called Ramesh and Robin, my partners, and we spent 48 hours thrashing out the business plan," he says. Two months later, he quit IBM.
The trio have ploughed over $250,000 of their own money into the operation and begun hiring staff. Mr Staes-Polet's experience at Oneasia.com had taught him how vital it was for an internet start-up to build a strong team, particularly in an industry where technical skills are at a premium.
The next breakthrough came with money from IDG, which invested in some of China's biggest web sites, and Soft bank. The sum has not been disclosed but is estimated at less than $10m. "The strongest thing here is the management team," says Anil Viakara, managing partner at Soft bank Bodhi Investments. "It's a team psychologically prepared for the challenges of building a business."
A central plank of the business model is to license games that have been successful elsewhere, rather than develop their own, which could take years and cost millionsof dollars. This keeps costs down and enables experimentation.
A visit to Kreeda's 40-strong team in a suburban house near Mumbai airport is like dropping into an internet café; jeans are the office uniform and Dance Mela posters cover the walls.
The game, which is in the "beta" or final testing stage and is aimed at both sexes, has been adapted from a Chinese version developed by a mainland company 9you.com. The characters have been given Indian features and Chinese music exchanged for Bollywood themes.
Players compete by pressing keys corresponding to arrows that appear on the screen that represent the footwork in the dance, each of which is adapted from a Bollywood movie. An arrow pointing left, for instance, means a dance step to the left. The faster or more elaborate the dance, the more difficult the game.
Dance Mela is free to play but over time, players are expected to shop on-line for items such as clothing for their characters and eventually even the songs themselves.
To overcome India's slow connection speeds, the game is designed to work on dial-up connections rather than broad band.
And since credit cards are not yet ubiquitous, Kreeda is distributing cash cards to internet cafes and other outlets around the country to allow users to buy and sell items on the site.
Kreeda faces some stiff challenges. An Indian research company, the Internet & Mobile Association of India, estimates the country's gaming market only generates about Rs210m ($5.2m) in sales.
Internet penetration is low at about 3.0 per cent of the population and there are signs of cultural resistance; India's education-obsessed middle classes worry that online games distract children from their studies.
Mr Staes-Polet cites studies that show on-line games have driven internet penetration in other Asian markets and he says objections from parents are nothing new. If Dance Mela does not catch on, he has more games in the pipeline. "We're in it for this game and the next game and the next game until the market finally explodes."
Under syndication arrangement with FE