Desh ke naam pe dhabbaa!

So, as I am walking along Blackfriar's bridge on a brilliant, sunlit Saturday afternoon, my mobile begins to ring (it always rings whenever I want to be left alone soaking in the beauty of things around me) and I hear the voice of a fellow Indian student at the LSE who has landed up in the same seminar group as me for a particular subject:

"Dude, have you looked at the case study the prof gave us on Friday yet? Tune to kar hi liya hoga?"

Here, I must clarify:
1. I positively hate people who address me as "Dude".
2. I need to set the record straight about IITians.

I reply in my most sage-like voice:
"Dost! (notice!) Tujhe IITians ke baare mein kaafi galat-fehmiyan hain! The deadline for that assignment is next Wednesday. So I am probably going to look at it on Tuesday..."

After an extended period of horrified silence at the other end as the truth sunk in:
"Oh my god! Dude, you guys are so damn fast!"
Drat and damnations and a major "convincing-others-not-to-take-me-at-face-value" fail!!! That silence was not inspired by horror, but by awe! The truth did not sink in!

I wonder if I could leverage this a bit more for future gains... :P

Adios!

A Simple Prayer...

I do not want to know where each of the roads that I can choose from leads.

Amen!

Pyaar ka naya(?) formula

Given the sheer volume of bhaat occurring nowadays between B. and me (yes, we both are inordinately bhaatu people - one of the pleasant surprises of the past few months), this was bound to come up someday.

...
"So why didn't you tell her about it?", she asks
"Well, I barely knew her and rarely ever talked to her", I reply.
"Arre, to kya tha yaar - she's a very nice girl. You should have asked her out! 2.2 ke dus chakkar maarte - ek kisi round mein bol dete usse!"
What the...?!! I didn't know it was that easy!
Stupefied by the simplicity of it all, I made sure that I clarified the mechanics of the solution.
"Okkkkkkk! So yeh dus chakkar kya pehli baar mein maar lete ya should I have spread them over several days/months?", I ask honestly.
"Ek din mein??!! Paagal ho kya? Ek hi baar mein 22 kilometre ghumaoge? Ladki mar nahi jaayegi?!!", comes her stern reply.

Adios!

A very genuine question...

When girls go to the rest room, why, just why, do they ask the other girls around, "Would you like to come along?"
 (And this applies to girls universally - India, Europe - anywhere! If guys began doing that, it would be the scariest moment of my life!)

Adios!

Adios 2009!

2009 brought way more than its fair share of ups and downs. So, it is quite apt to end this tumultuous year with my favorite quote:

"“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” 
 - Agatha Christie

Here's to this awesome thing called life - and wishing a great new year and decade to all!

Bhor...

Back in August 2003, when I began my life at KGP, I hated it. I didn't like the classes, I was constantly being told tales of comparison by my fellow students - how IITB or IITD were better and how we had all made a grave mistake by coming to this god-forsaken place. It was no more than a village - far away from any decent facilities. It was my first time living in a hostel, away from home and, worst of all, the mess food was horrible. Besides that, one had to attend NCC training and sit for hours in the merciless KGP sun during the Independence Day celebrations at the institute main building. Add to that the incumbent director's passion for giving long speeches and you could imagine why I was beginning to hate the place.

But then, something happened on the 18th of August. It was the institute's foundation day - a holiday - and there was supposed to be some sort of a musical programme scheduled for the evening. Despite my reluctance (and preference to have dinner rather than attend some musical concert), my friends (ok - acquaintances at that point of time) dragged me to "Netaji" (the auditorium) where the "ETMS Production" was supposed to take place.

We went in, saw some people arranging stuff on the stage, doing sound-checks and saw the auditorium fill to capacity - with people beginning to sit on the stairs as all the chairs were crammed with people. And then, the show began - some good performances of certain Bollywood numbers and a very active audience made me feel quite good about attending this - I was being entertained.

But I was not prepared for what was to come later on. A bespectacled singer in a kurta picks up the microphone - announces the name of the song that was to be performed - and the crowd cheers. And then begin the first few bars of a guitar-intro which will live with me forever! I cannot describe what happened after that - suffice it to say, that something beautiful was happening. The song seemed to go on and on and I was transfixed, wanting it to never stop! The brilliant music, the sheer talent of these people and the undiluted joy that was apparent in the unforgiving but, nonetheless, loving KGP crowd made me realize something. That I was falling in love with this place. I wanted to be part of it, not just be "entertained" - dive head-first into the beautiful chaos that KGP was - and become one with it. A simple song made me realize this - that I was with the most awesome bunch of people I could ever be with.

And I have never fallen out of love with KGP ever since - and I am sure, none of my peers have, too.

Thank you Indian Ocean and ETMS for bringing "Bhor" into my life and rest in peace, Asheem Chakravarty.

 Adios!

The Game Plan

So what struck me this morning as I was sifting through news feeds and friends' updates on Facebook was a little tid-bit about Zynga sealing a $180 million funding deal with investors.

$180 million!! Wow! That's surely a very neat package for a stake in an online games developer (that is actually worth about $1 bilion). For the uninitiated, Zynga is the developer of Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World and all those games which clutter up your updates on Facebook.

If you were a game-developer, you would want a piece of that pie! The way you choose your market will matter a lot if you're just starting out.

It might not be for your dream platform (let's accept it - nothing beats development work for immersive, photorealistic games) but as long as it can attract users initially, it is going to take you a long way in that quest for the holy grail you were initially after.

What follows is a small guide for choosing a target market.


1. The non-portable games - 

• Description: Meant to be played in a fixed location. These have multi-million dollar budgets, much marketing hoopla and often fetch higher revenues than the biggest of blockbuster movies. Genres vary wildly from first-person shooters to real-time strategy and from role-playing to simulations.
  
• Platforms: The platforms that support these are (a) the PC (b) the consoles: the XBox 360, the Nintendo Wii and the PS3 (and their older-generation counterparts). Examples of such games include Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Assassin's Creed, The Sims, Guitar Hero, Half-Life etc. 
• Revenues: People are going to pay to buy and play these games and quite handsomely so. A well-established game-brand can spawn multiple sequels which can outsell even the original titles. Moreover, the multiplayer component in several of these games allows for revenue generation via dedicated networks supported by the platform - e.g. the XBox Live Service. Profit margins are whoppingly good.
  
• Costs: Usually pretty high. A major title can involve costs in the range of $30-40 million and development times of 2-3 years or more. Major technical advances are made with the release of each new title and the R&D costs are punishing. Add to that the distribution and marketing costs involved and you have a fully-fledged movie budget on your hands.
• Caveats: To develop for most console platforms, you have to be an established developer and need to enter into licensing agreements with the console producers - namely, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Development costs are also higher for these platforms as they require specialized tools for writing code and creating game content. If you're small fish, that's not going to happen smoothly. (However, the Xbox platform offers the XNA Development Platform which is free. Users can also join the XNA Creators Club Online for a fee and release downloadable content for the Xbox. 70% of the revenues generated from each download are transferred to you - the publisher.)
  

2. The portable games - 

• Description: Meant to be played while on-the-go. Includes all titles meant for the Nintendo DS, DSi, Sony PSP, iPhone, Zune and all other mobile platforms. This sort of gaming activity is usually very addictive. Genres vary.
  
• Platforms: The major platforms were mentioned above. Examples of such games include Mario, Zelda, Mortal Kombat etc. 
• Revenues: Again, people are willing to download games/buy cartridges, discs for these games due to the addiction factor. The non-web gaming market for mobiles is not that huge - but is growing. However, the portable gaming market is absolutely huge! The Nintendo DS made its 110 million-th sale in December - that's a lot of little machines out there - all hungry for your games. But caveats follow.
• Costs: Development costs are not as high on a per-game basis than for the major PC/console games. The games are shorter, the game development cycles are shorter and hence, the failure rates are lower. Accordingly, since this is a volume market, the profit margins are lower. However, for established brands, people are willing to pay quite a lot.
• Caveats: Again, the issue of licensing with the hardware-makers rears its ugly head. On top of that, the special nature of the hardware requires specialist developers for these platforms - and those people might not come cheap.

3. The web games - 

• Description: Meant to be played on the web (duh!). The audience is usually playing these out of boredom. Many of these are coupled to Facebook drawing on its power to make real people interact with each other. Ease-of-installation is another factor. The fun-part usually comes from interacting/competing with people you know.Genres typically include strategy games (Farmville, Mafia Wars), puzzles or role-playing.
• Platforms: Most internet browsers having Flash/Silverlight would support these.
  
• Revenues: Penetration in terms of user-base is extremely high. But most users would not be willing to pay for playing such games. However, most users would not mind seeing a small advertisement or a product-placement within/outside the game either. This is the primary source of revenue for such games. If you can make people stay on Facebook, Facebook can serve those people ads - Facebook makes money and so do you.
  
• Costs: Development costs are extremely low - even a single developer can create something useful and enter into agreements with major social networking sites quite easily. The profit margins, however, are driven by volumes and hence are extremely low. Also, as the user-volume grows, appropriate hardware/software expenditures need to be incurred.
  
• Caveats: How freely you can use the data of your users and how much of your revenues will be eaten up by your social networking partner are things that can vary a lot. Most web-games suffer from the huge-peak-and-tremendous-decline syndrome as well. Let's accept it, games are a pastime, free games even more so - keeping interest levels high consistently is tough and innovation is paramount. Most publishers in this arena try to build large, successful game portfolios rather than a single epic product which might rise meteorically and then die out.

Again, game development is a huge business - projected to be worth $91 billion in terms of revenues by 2015. The underlying technological factors and the associated costs will keep on changing rapidly (much more rapidly than in other computing sectors) and so will the users' requirements. Also, revenue is not the only thing that matters - the game development industry generates a huge amount of intellectual property and brand value - just with its R&D - and that's always going to be a major part of the total value of your business.

However, creating something fun will always matter - everybody needs to take some time off from the serious stuff!

Adios!