Abhishek Securities

  World Cricket Championship 3 (WCC 3), a 'Made in India’ franchise's gaming app, has won Google Play Store's Best of 2020 award in the users choice category. WCC 3 is the third edition of an app made by cricket gaming franchise Next Wave Multimedia. ‘Google Play Best of 2020 Awards’ are given to the most-voted  apps  in different categories on the Play Store. Commenting on the victory, Next Wave Multimedia's Co-founder and CEO P R Rajendran said the win encourages the firms to continue with more innovations and usher more features and engage even more players. He dedicated the award to "all the WCC fans out there.” The WCC franchise crossed 143 million downloads globally since its inception. As pandemic brought cricket to a standstill worldwide, 22 million downloads took place just between February and August this year. The recently launched third edition of WCC has been infused with a host of innovative and engaging features which aims to provide an immersive gam...

Gaming and sports media company Nazara Technologies today announced that it has acquired a majority stake of 51% in Paper Boat Apps. Paper Boat Apps is the company that developed Kiddopia, a popular educational games app which is targeted at kids in the 2-7 year age bracket. Nazara issued shares worth INR 43 crores to complete the final tranche of the deal. This transaction is part of the Rs. 83 crore deal to acquire a majority stake in Paper Boat Apps, valuing the company at over Rs. 150 crores. Last month, Nazara acquired a majority stake in fantasy platform Halaplay Technologies. According to the release issued by Nazara, Kiddopia now has an annualized revenue run rate of over Rs.175 crores. Kiddopia was launched in 2017 by husband-wife duo, Anupam and Anshu Dhanuka. The app has more than 5 millions downloads and over 300,000 subscribers. Anupam Dhanuka, co-founder and CEO, Kiddopia said, “This investment from Nazara has helped us focus on product enhancement and m...

Online Gaming: Stars are aligned for a strong uptake Unlike other Asian economies (like China, Korea etc), India till now has not shown major uptake in online gaming. But now with improving telco infra, evolving gaming ecosystem & with huge Millennial/Gen Z base we see growth picking up. Recent lockdown led to a strong uptake in online gaming. Monetization though may take time given nascent stage of the market. India online gaming could be classified as 1) Casual gaming ($630 mn in 2019); 2) Skill based like Fantasy games & card based (2019: $620 mn) and 3) PC/console based (2019: $650 mn). The overall gaming industry was $1.9bn in 2019 and is expected to be $8.4bn in 2024 (35% CAGR) as per Redseer, with Fantasy games growing fastest. Regulation is an overhang & could improve. Indian laws permit game of skill but not game of chance. Fantasy games have been banned/have limited access in 5 states. Some of India gaming cos are Gametion, Nazara, Dream11, Octro, Moonfrog labs. N...