Nazara Games: Playing to Win

With the mobile gaming market in India expected to boom, the Mumbai based company is ready to reap the benefits.

- Angad Singh Thakur

The years following the dotcom crash of 2000 were hard on Nitish Mittersain, the founder of the then freshly minted Mumbai- based gaming company Nazara Technologies (recently rechristened Nazara Games). His venture was building Flash-based multiplayer games, and planned to generate revenues through brand partnerships. But when the crash struck home, it destroyed any possibility of advertising income. The company had raised about Rs 75 lakh from angel investors at a wildly ambitious valuation of over $5 million and, in a short period of time, had hired a workforce of almost 60 people. Nazara had just begun and it was already time to cut back. “It took a couple of years to really get the full realisation of the magnitude of the crash,” says Mittersain, who was only 20 at the time.

By 2004, having scaled back operations and recuperated losses, Nazara and its founder were “back to square one”, or where they were before the bust hit.

The company had, by then, begun working on localised gaming on mobile phones. “We thought: Let’s build a big brand and a big IP [intellectual property] that people will recognise,” he says. And this was the biggest—and most audacious—idea they could possibly come up with: “Let’s make a game with Sachin Tendulkar.”

A few months later, Mittersain found himself in the cricketing icon’s home. A star-struck Mittersain showed Tendulkar a mock-up of the game that his team had put together. “He seemed excited. So I said, boss, I need exclusive rights to make games for you. He said: Okay, I’ll charge you a million dollars. That’s my minimum endorsement fee.”