Mobile Gaming Conference, New Delhi: Our coverage of the conference is meant to be comprehensive, so I intend to continuosly post stories on what speakers have spoken at the event.
The comments made by Krishna Dhurba, Vice President at Reliance Infocomm, is particularly important. Because he has a different take on the pricing of games (or any other VAS product) as against other telecom operators, say, Tata Teleservices, who has been following a strategy of pricing games at Rs 25, Rs 30 and more.
According to Krishna, only five per cent of the 63 million mobile subscribers have downloaded games once. And only a fraction of that figure download games more than once. So one is talking about a small pie of customers. “All of us are fighting for a small share in that pie. But the challenge is to increase the size of that pie.”
It’s a very valid point. Reliance has always been a believer in expanding the market – remember, the inflection point in Indian mobile industry happened when they launched their mobile service in December 2002, and also the Dhirubhai Ambani Pioneer offer of buy-now-pay-later scheme etc.
Krishna says one needs to look at innovative pricing models. “No market research agency can say what is the right price point. The mobile game downloads are happening in places like Muzaffarnagar, Meerut and Moradabad (small towns in Uttar Pradesh),” he says. They don’t want to pay Rs 50 for a game download.
So Reliance has done something different. They launched Rs 2 per-play-model for a cricket game. “The challenge is to price games at Rs 2 per play and maximize revenues. We go to experiment, we got to do R&D. There is a market out there.”
Krishna’s arguments are valid. Don’t you think so?
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post