Indus Battle Royale has become a rage in the gaming arena and it has not even been released yet. In a space dominated by the likes of PUBG, BGMI, CoD: Mobile, Indus is making its presence felt in a big way. Catering to millions of potential gamers, Indus is poised to become a top game in its genre. But there's more to the game than meets the eye.
SuperGaming recently made headlines for its collaboration with leading YouTuber Techno Gamerz and for introducing Heena Sidhu, an Olympic Pistol Shooter as a playable character in the game. Indus takes inspiration from Black Panther but with an Indian touch. The game showcases what Indo-futurism looks like. If the game's trailer is anything to go by, it has nailed every bit of the detailing.
Indus is developed by a Pune-based gaming studio called SuperGaming, which is also known for its other popular titles MaskGun and Silly Royale. The MaskGun alone has over 67 million players since its launch and the newly-released Silly Royale amassed over 22 million players. Having established a prominent foothold in the gaming industry, SuperGaming puts India on a global gaming map.
SuperGaming is on a rapid growth trajectory and it has raised $20 million from many VCs, including Akatsuki, 1Up Ventures, Dream Incubator, BAce Capital, and Bandai Namco among others. The company is thinking on a global level, taking lessons from the world's biggest gaming studios, as it goes on to leave a permanent mark in the gaming space bearing the Indian flag.
SuperGaming co-founder and CEO Roby John spoke to Sami Khan, News Editor, International Business Times at the Apple App Accelerator in Bengaluru. In a candid conversation, Roby talked about the upcoming title Indus, India's potential in the gaming space, Apple's role in SuperGaming's journey and more. More importantly, Roby is confident that "Apna (India) time aagaya". The text has been edited.
Q: Tell us about SuperGaming.
Roby John: SuperGaming is a gaming company based in Pune, India. Our company's mission is to put India on the global gaming map. India has 1.4 billion people, and 700 million gamers. We find ourselves underrepresented in the world of gaming. Super gaming is changing that by putting Indian art, culture, and tech into the world of gaming.
Is running a gaming studio anything like Apple TV's Mythic Quest?
[Laughs] I wish, I wish. Mythic Quest story is one that's an inspiration. I think development studios are much simpler, faster, and less fancy. But I also feel SuperGaming is inventing its own culture. Starting very small, we were 30 person studio for about 10 years. We are very large but retail that small culture by ensuring that all teams have their own office, and studio set up, retain their own culture, and their own timings.
How does you plan to break through competition with your upcoming battle royale title, Indus?
There are 2-3 things. While we're in the red ocean of battle royales, we believe there's a blue ocean of talking about content that you would like to see inside of it. Much like you eat home food, which kind of becomes the default. You might eat out once in a while. But if there's obviously no home food and you're in a different city, you're forced to eat outside. We realized that battle royale doesn't have Indian content inside of it. We feel like that's the art culture that you've not seen so far. If you can actually bring that in, we found a lot of acceptance inside of it as evidenced by upgrade-ness, our restoration numbers, and people viewing us on YouTube. We did early community development and we realized that there's a great potential to tell our stories.
Our goal, our vision is to build a company around identity, We're trying to showcase who we are, tell our story authentically, and we feel like that's our critical advantage is that only we can tell the story.
What role did the COVID pandemic play in your life as a company?
I don't really say that the pandemic was a good thing. Making a battle royale is really for the world's top game engines. There are probably three or five companies in the world that know to do well. The pandemic really helped us focus. Our team is very young and if you take 35 of those people and lock them instead of a building, and give them nothing else to do, they'll become productive. They start writing a game and that's what we made. We made Indus during this pandemic where we had this crazy focus because even if we wanted to do something, we couldn't.
We were in the office. Because the office gave us the gym, we actually had access to food always, A lot of the people are not married, they were isolated. So the office was a great camaraderie. If you ask me to make Indus again, I might not be able to. That's the power of focus.
What is Indus, your upcoming battle royale game, all about?
Games are made in three layers, get your attention, retain your attention and monetization. To get your attention. I call my game Indus because that's something that 1.5 billion people grew up learning. The idea of it was inspired by the story of Afro-futurism, that's 2050 to 2070 movement with the movie Black Panther. What they did was tell the story and glorious past of the culture of Africa, but also said Wakanda is the most futuristic city in the world. We realized that's a story that resonated everywhere in the world, and in every region, Black Panther and the story of Afro-futurism was a trending topic. We built on that success and said, Hey, there's 1.4 billion of us we'd love to tell that story as well — of Indo-futurism. That's really what we built our game around.
As we presented it to people everybody loved it. So we built it up to a large extent. We asked ourselves how can we take traditional culture but also visualize India in a way that nobody's done. What does India look like in their 2,500? That's really the game Indus is all about. So essentially Indus is the Wakanda of India.
Indus is the Wakanda of India
Besides Indus, which is your favorite SuperGaming title?
Obviously, Indus is my latest, so I'm biased. We actually made five great titles already, but we recently launched a new title called Silly Royale, which is played by about 22 million people. Again, a product of the pandemic. But we actually built a game called Battle Stars, which is essentially a shooter-made casual. Like a PUBG or any other battle royale takes 10, 12, and 15 minutes to play. It's a dedicated effort. But if you have two to five minutes to play with your friend, let's make this a quick thing. That's what Battle Stars is. It's currently my favorite game because we just launched it a month ago. We actually charted on top of it. It was the number three game in India - all on the power of community, as well as, currently supported by one of India's biggest YouTubers, Techno Gamerz, who's actually in our game. I think that's the first-ever large collaboration, anything of the scale ever.
Do you see India and Indian companies widely recognized in gaming space globally?
I will tell you my own personal experience, I've been going to 14 GDCs (Gaming Developer Conferences) which is in San Francisco. This year's GDC was actually the most crowded ever. I think between 25,000 to 40,000 people showed up as it was happening post-pandemic, after two years. So I'm wearing an Indus hoodie and I had five non-Indian people come and tap me on my shoulder and say, "Great game. Looking forward to it." And at that point in time, I felt great. Either the marketing is working really well, but also I felt like Indian gaming is coming because people recognize Indus, it's there in our name itself. Obviously raising money creates visibility as well in the gaming community, which is very tightly knit.
If you open Pacman, you'll see our logo come up there as well. For me, it's a bucket list item that I've ticked off because Pacman was the first game that I played as a child. To see my company's logo on that is cool. I often say, don't tell this to Bandai, but I would've done that project for free.
That's why I think the time has come [for India]. But more importantly, I think a greater time is coming because now the world is seeing the second-largest gaming market in the world.
The next part is just to look at our demographic, 500 million people are under the age of 20 and all of these people are going to grow up with games. But the second most important one — why is now a time for India — is that kids who grew up with a mobile device in their hand are now in the workforce. They've grown up playing games, they now have dispensable income, and they have time. We're seeing monetization increase as well inside India. So you'll see the world's eyes will be on India and its gaming market, which traditionally has been an IP-supported model, but now you get UPI, and we're doing more digital currencies than anything else. Everybody's got a very good internet connection, thanks to Reliance Jio and direct devices. I think that's now India's time.
As a developer, what is your take on the opinion that iOS is a walled garden?
I'll start off by giving you a precursor that as one of India's first iPhone developers, my company would not exist if the iPhone developer ecosystem would not exist. I don't value the walled ecosystem piece. I think it's more trust ecosystem. The reason is that not being able to let your device do harm to a user is the primary factor that I learned working inside of the Apple ecosystem. Apple's SDKs, the way that they sandbox everything, or they also test a lot of these things allow us to build that ultimate experience for our players. Standardized hardware obviously helps, being able to do a lot of these devices helped us quite a bit. In the early days, this was the latest value to us because you know, I know that I'm only building for these many devices, this kind of hardware and I can actually test all of those. That's helped us in the early days of developing products. We find the developer ecosystem inside of Apple is very well supported. They understood how to do all of it and they're pioneers of it all. In the early days, our first app took three days to submit. Today, I think we're submitting 20 apps in a day sometimes on a build inside of a test flight. So that's something that has changed in all these years.
I don't value the walled ecosystem piece. I think it's [iOS] more trust ecosystem.
Tell us about Apple's role in your journey.
As I said, I owe my existence to the entire Apple ecosystem. We were one of the first iOS developers in India. Our third game kind of became a massive hit so we became three guys that make $10,000 a day, which allowed us to build a company around this. So SuperGaming would not exist without Apple.
Being able to reach out to customers using Apple's trusted brand and ecosystem has given a halo to our brand as well.
Today, with the amount of device capabilities spread across the world, the Apple developer ecosystem has reached out to us in ways that we've not seen. We were recently at the Apple Store along with Tim Cook. We also did India's first gaming Today at Apple talk at the App Store in BKC. So I think, just being able to reach out to customers using Apple's trusted brand and ecosystem has given a halo to our brand as well.
What is your monetization approach? How are your relations with investors?
From a company perspective, our monetization business is free to play. We believe finding as many people to play a game without the barrier of having to pay for it is the critical part. We only make real-time multiplayer, which means these are high CC or require high current currency, so that's why we are free to play games. Only 1% or so of the people monetize. But what we've learned over the period of time is what drives them close to monetization. Whether it's being able to express themselves in their field avatar, being able to pay for consumables inside of the game, being able to upgrade their weapons, cars, et etcetera. That's something that we've learned how to do by just being good at building an engine that learns and observes some players' behavior. So that's our monetization secret.
One thing that's aided our monetization is how India is increasingly becoming one of the faster monetization countries. India is adding more new payers to mobile platforms today than the rest of the world combined, which is crazy. We used to think about "Apna Time Kab Aayega" (When will our time come). Apna Time Aagaya (Our time has come).
We used to think about "Apna Time Kab Aayega" (When will our time come). Apna Time Aagaya (Our time has come).
The second part is investors. Gaming is traditionally being supported by a lot of investors because we understand that gaming is the next media entertainment. This is my second favorite statement from the pandemic. I say that all VCs became interested in gaming post-pandemic because they were sitting at home and they realized what the kids were playing. We saw a lot more interest post the pandemic obviously. We raised our Series A, but the way that we've chosen to raise money from is difficult to understand from the outside. Not a lot of people understand all the secrets of gaming or how large a monopoly or how big a business it can be. You'll see most companies raise a very little amount of money and afterward, they don't need money. So we learned from those people.
Our first investor was this Japanese company called Akatsuki, which is the maker of Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle, which makes $2.4 billion a year. When they heard we were making Pacman, they reached out to us. We raised money from 1UP Fund, which is the co-founder of the Xbox. That gave us a lot more deep insights in terms of how to think about it, and how to build a true game studio. So far, we've raised about $20 million from a bunch of investors.
