The lifecycle of a blockbuster movie is fleeting, though some titles manage to carve out a longer shelf life than others. About a month ago, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion was the talk of the town, and being toasted globally, having crossed over Rs 1,000 crore in revenue globally, and hitting third spot in the US box office in the first week of May.

Bengaluru game studio Moonfrog rode the hype-train to the top of the charts, too. Coinciding with the movie release, the studio launched Baahubali: The Game, a mobile multiplayer RTS (real-time strategy) game based on the second release in the Indic fantasy series directed by S S Rajamouli. The game quickly rose to the top of the Google Play charts in India in May, and was briefly the most downloaded game, and the second most downloaded app in the country.

It was a prescient move for Moonfrog, which until a quarter ago, was best known for its card game, Teen Patti. The Tiger Global-backed game studio has upped its game by tying up with some of the biggest popular culture brands in India. It launched Alia Bhatt: Star Life, a mobile role-playing game in which the actor shows you the ropes on how to be a Bollywood A-list star. The game is a desi take on Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, and has seen over half a million downloads so far.

“Some people of the opinion that they are the highest quality games in India. It makes us very proud. But this is just a journey, and we have a long way to go,” says Mark Skaggs, the veteran game developer who joined Moonfrog Labs in February 2016. Skaggs is a hit maker with several revenue spinners under his belt including FarmVille and CityVille during his seven-year stint at Zynga and C&C:Generals, C&C Red Alert 2, and Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth in his Electronic Arts avatar.

Moonfrog has among its ranks ex-employees of Zynga, Google, and Microsoft.

Let’s crack Baahubali

The opportunity to make a game around the Baahubali sequel came up in a conversation between Moonfrog co-founder Tanay Tayal and Sharad Devarajan, CEO of comics and entertainment company Graphic India. They were in touch over Graphic India’s projects, which they wanted to make into games, Skaggs says in an email interview.

“During one of these conversations, Sharad spoke about Baahubali 2, which got the Moonfrog team excited. We saw the movie here in the studio, and felt that it could be a great project for a strategy game,” he says. “Subsequently, we connected with Arka Mediaworks and Rajamouli for conversations around content integration.” Arka is the production company behind the Baahubali series.

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The storyboarding process began with an ample amount of dogfooding, to ensure that the elements of the game were matched to the framework of the genre. The concept art team included Aditya Chari, who had also worked on the original characters of Baahubali.

Says Skaggs: “We started by watching the movie over a 100 times, along with research on the historical elements as depicted in the film and the possibilities of what could have been 2,000 years ago.” The team were looking closely for nuances in iconography, colours, architectural styles and clothing styles. “The idea of a gold mine came from the scene where the soldiers are taking gold from the praja to make Bhalladeva’s statue,” he adds.

(For those wondering, this particular plotline occurs in Baahubali: The Beginning, released in 2015. Bhalladeva, played by Rana Daggubati, is the antagonist in the movie, in which two brothers clash for control of a kingdom. According to film lore, an actual 100-feet statue weighing 8,000 kg was erected by over hundred sculptors.)

On Google Play, Baahubali: The Game has an average 4.4 star rating, and over five million downloads since launch. While Moonfrog team is pleased with the user traction, their focus going forward is longevity and player experience, Skaggs says.

IP-led full stack game engine

Moonfrog’s new playbook is built around creating IP (intellectual property) around the film industry in India. Launched in March this year, Alia Bhatt: Star Life came together after Moonfrog had approached Alia’s team with a concept around the lifestyle simulation genre, which would allow her to connect with her fans directly. Aimed at the desi millennial girl, an often ignored demographic, the Bollywood star’s connect with the millennial audience was a key driver. “We pitched it to Alia, and she liked it. She wanted us to include some more ideas, which we did. All in all, it was a great meeting of minds,” Skaggs says.

The game is a fantasy journey for a player, who is befriended by Alia’s game character. She helps the player become a celebrity, and goes through various adventures guided by Bollywood star. “On the art side, we had to do a lot of work to get her face right, to get iconic locations in India that people could identify with and so on,” he says.

In a recent meeting over tea at the Moonfrog Labs office in Ulsoor, Bangalore, cofounder Kumar Puspesh highlighted the team’s efforts at building a game engine from scratch, tailormade for Indian audiences and keeping Indian network conditions in mind. Puspesh says that the in-house game engine helped it run on the lowest common denominator, specs wise. The game size can be as low as 24MB, depending on the type of phone the player is using. For comparison, Clash of Clans, a popular real time strategy game, is 110.9 MB on iOS and 87.1MB on Android platforms.

“Once you make a game which can run on a single core processor, on a Rs 5,000-8,000 phone, under stringent network conditions, it’s going to work well on a high-end phone, without reducing quality at the same time,” Puspesh says. “At the same time, on the network side you have 4G to 3G to 2G, also — there’s quite a big chunk in smaller cities or towns.” Moonfrog wanted a tech stack that could run on any device used in India and in often patchy network conditions “without any hiccups,” he adds.

To better understand the mindset of an average Indian gamer, Skaggs switched to a low-end 3G phone. “This phone holds about one-and-a-half games before it runs out of space and the response time is much slower than my high-end regular phone,” he says. “There’s nothing like living and working in this type of environment to teach you lessons you just can’t learn in the USA.”

Clash of Clans Clone?

Puspesh says there is nothing more Indian, in recent times in terms of a mythical, fictional, character than Baahubali. “It’s the right combination. People who have never played, or never heard of strategy games can actually last take that step, and try to relate to buildings, to units, to characters, to fighting units. How do I take Baahubali in the battle, how will it increase my power over the enemy base… those kinds of things become a little easier to grasp,” he says.

The Moonfrog cofounder dismissed criticism that Baahubali: The Game was a Clash of Clans clone, as game genres have been ossified over the past few decades. The game was intended for audiences that have never played a real-time strategy game, he emphasises. “Just as a genre, a real-time strategy game has been popular since long time, not just on the mobile, but even in the PC world. We’ve all grown up playing Age of Empires in our childhood, to Command and Conquer, to Civilization. Small things, from the skin, to the gameplay mechanics can change the gameplay experience,” he says.

He compared the process of building a game to that of building a TV serial. “You can hope that a someone likes crime and drama, then they will like this kind of series. You have to iterate on it — learn what kind of moments matter, these kinds of upgrades, and these kind of changes will actually make it more fun for this audience and others.”

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The Baahubali game was also notable for its localisation efforts — it can be played in four languages: English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. “That’s learning and context you will not find anywhere else in the world,” Skaggs said. While the team declined to share any figures on active usage, they said that downloads in the regional languages are healthy. For now, the team’s top focus is player retention. “The game has to deliver fun, surprise and delight to players and be something that a person enjoys spending time playing,” Skaggs says.

RoI proposition

India’s online gaming industry is expected to grow more than 3x to cross $1 billion by 2021, according to a recent Google-KPMG report. Some of the top grossing Indian mobile game studios include Delhi-based Octro and Mumbai’s Play Games 24×7, who are focused on card-based games. On the Play Store top free app charts for India, Baahubali is ranked at 45, while Clash of Clans is at No 78.

If Moonfrog succeeds with its playbook, the potential rewards could be huge: Supercell, the maker of Clash of Clans, was acquired by China’s Tencent for a whopping $8.6 billion in 2016. The markets and revenues are not comparable, of course, but still. The opportunities are there and the eco-system is ripe for a blockbuster hit, says Skaggs. “You have 120 million active mobile users in this country. Every single change — demonetisation, more digital payment options, lowering of data costs — is an opportunity for the game market.”

An industry expert says betting on movies makes sense but is measured in his predictions on how the strategy will play out. “Basically, it’s a known thing that in India cricket and bollywood are big drivers, when it comes to media consumption. I think that extends to games as well,” says Amit Goyal, cofounder at SuperSike Games, a New Delhi-based game development company.

“Whether this is going to work or not, time will tell. There has not been a massive success out of India, in either of these genres. There have been successful games, but not to that extent. I hope it works out for them,” Goyal adds.

Goyal thinks no game studio in particular is at the commanding heights of India’s game-dev economy yet. In his opinion, India is a particularly hard market to crack, monetisation-wise, other than card games, nothing much has clicked, as Indians are averse to spending on games.

Even if you want to run an ad-supported game, the online advertising rates in India are lower, as compared to more evolved gaming markets, he says. “Game development studios from mature economies have various support systems which India still doesn’t have. The people who are putting in the money are waiting for someone to crack it in a way that can monetize it very well, but as of now, at least from my experience, India is not really a great market for monetisation,” he says.

However, Goyal did offer praise for Moonfrog’s full stack game engine in-house. “Any company that sort of sticks to a single engine and has all their processes streamlined, they will end up saving a lot of time on development, recruitment and training. These are very real issues that any company faces. Aligning all your forces on a single engine I personally feel makes a lot of sense. The bigger you get as a company, the more it makes sense.”

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