JOIN USLocalising online gaming for India
When the internet in India was mostly used for e-mails and online chatting, Deepak Gullapalli, who was studying in London could see an opportunity in online gaming. He founded Head Digital Works (HDW), formerly known as Head Infotech in 2006 and started the operations with a couple of rented computers in a garage.
Head Digital Works is an internet-based technology & gaming group and now a parent company of multiple businesses, including their flagship product - rummy platform Ace2Three, Cricket.com, fantasy sports via Fan-fight and its social gaming arm - Witty Games.
Gullapalli says, “In the early 2000s, there wasn’t much that people were doing on the internet. Gaming just started globally. When I was in London, I used to see kids playing video games on their desktops. When I connected it back to India, we were still laid-back and used to insert CD ROMs in the PC to play. That was when I saw the opportunity and decided to build a localised gaming product.”
“I initially started with the idea of a virtual rummy game, since rummy is a very popular community game in India and people play it during festivals, in colleges and so on. This led to the launch of Ace2Three in 2009,” he adds.
The company had raised $2 million in 2010.
Diversification plan
The firm launched Cricket.com last year in line with its diversification plans. “Apart from rummy, we diversified ourselves into sports business. We incubated a start-up called fan-fight. We also acquired a domain, cricket.com, a news/content platform, more towards data-driven cricket statistics,” he says.
Talking about the evolution of the gaming ecosystem, he says, “We have seen the ecosystem maturing from desktop to mobile and virtual reality and so on. The evolution of mobile phones and the penetration of the internet naturally has helped the industry.”
On the question of staying relevant over the years, he says, “We have built brand image and consumer loyalty. Continuous innovation, leveraging data, new product launches help us and will continue to help us sustain. We have a strong analytics team that uses the data generated to build better features.”
Talking about the business strategy for 2020, he says, “IPL is only a few months away, so we are putting a lot of money and effort into fan-fight and cricket.com. Within the card games, we are working towards larger tournaments.”
Challenges
Gullapalli says that building trust has been a major challenge because this involves money transactions. This, however, he says has been built over time and it is hard for a new company to do the same.
“We have faced challenges around regulatory issues as well. The question of its legality keeps popping up. But we got to keep answering that it’s a professional business model. Awareness would help the sector.”