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Indian gaming companies plan to target women as their new set of customers. In India, there are around 12 million women online users, almost one-third of internet users.
The online casual gaming market is projected to touch $100 million in India by 2010, which is already a $2.25-billion market globally. Women gamers are expected to double in this segment by 2010.
Alok Kejriwal, founder and CEO of Mumbai-based Gam-es2win, says: "Across the world, women have increasing access to the internet. Women are the most important customers for most brands because they make the biggest purchase decisions at home. As online games are advertisement-supported, you have to make games around the decision-maker (read women), whom advertisers are chasing."
Games2win creates games based on the 'intuition' platform, which enables women gamers to enter the site and play a game purely by intuition rather than reading instructions, says Kejriwal. Games2win has so far released 60 games targeted at women and has spent around Rs 4 crore (Rs 40 million) on their development.
According to Maruti Sanker L, managing director of Hyderabad-based 7Seas Technologies, an Indian woman is the most influential member of a family and games aimed at her could be the best opportunity to target the whole family.
"Kids would be attracted to play games suggested by their mother. We are already in the process of developing educational and mind-games to keep women and their children glued," he adds.
7Seas Technologies has launched over 50 women-centric games on its gaming portals - onlinerealgames.com and neodelight.com. Of the 1.4 million subscribers on onlinerealgames.com, 30 per cent are women. The company plans to launch 50 more games with women-centric themes.
Sashi Reddi, founder and chairman of FXLabs, says gaming has become a new avenue of entertainment for today's Indian women. A reason behind this trend, he says, is the increase in the working population and that gaming acts as a stress buster.
"The simplicity of these games keeps women hooked for hours together. Television soaps have become monotonous in nature. Also, Indian women are ready to try out newer and different platforms for entertainment," he adds.
"To connect with the Indian audience, we chose Bollywood actress Malaika Arora Khan as brand ambassador for the game Agni - the Queen of Darkness.
The game, launched a couple of months ago, revolves around the story of a mother and a child. The game is targeted at both women and men. Also, the game has lots of adventurous puzzles, one of the favourite genres among women gamers. Making the game women-centric does not really mean we are simplifying things. The theme is only to connect with the target audience,"
Reddi says, adding: "Our next two games will have strong women characters and will be launched soon." Salil Bhargava, chief executive officer, Jump Games, part of Reliance Entertainment, says women also tend to play more of casual games on mobiles.
Strategy, word-based, match-three type, puzzle and arcade games do well among women. Even lifestyle games work with women, the targeted age group of which could be 15-45 years.
"We develop games primarily for the mobile platform. Though we have not developed games targeted specifically at women, most of our casual titles, including Love Meter, Be My Valentine and Malaika Aqua Diva, have been popular with women," he says.
Zapak Digital Entertainment Ltd, another division of Reliance Entertainment, has gone a step further and has created a sub-site - Zapakgirls.
Rohit Sharma, COO, Zapak Digital, says: "There are currently 30 games available on the site. Our plan is to add almost 1,000 games by the year-end. The development of these games is already on in studios across the globe."