- Bombay Play, a game studio based in Bangalore.
- The company raised $1 Million in funding.
- Funding was led by Lumikai, Playco, and Leo Capital.
- The company has raised $2.5 Million to date.
A Bangalore, based Game studio Bombay Play, has announced to have raised $1 Million to develop social games for the global market.
The Game Development opportunities have been inactive in the recent couple of years. Even as the country thrives with tech startups growing into big companies with billion-dollar exits.
But Lumikai announced its first gaming fund for India in August, and now it is making its first investment into Bombay Play. Lumikai led the round, joining existing investors Playco and Leo Capital.
A decade ago, India had only about 25 game companies, market researcher Newzoo said. Now the country has over 300. But those studios have been starved for money. Perhaps $300 million to $400 million has been invested in Indian game companies in the last few years, and most of that came in the last 24 months, according to Lumikai.
“We have something to prove here, that world-class games can be made in India,” said Jones in an interview with GamesBeat. “That’s why we decided to include the name Bombay for a popular place that everyone knows about India.”
Bombay Play’s History
Oliver Jones and Abhas Saroha founded the company. Jones previously led game design at Glu Mobile and Zynga, before co-founding Moonfrog Games, where he helped create one of India’s most successful card games, Teen Patti Gold. Saroha previously led engineering at Zynga, Moonfrog, and Makemytrip.com.
The co-founders have worked together for nearly a decade. Moonfrog, which included the famous American game developer Mark Skaggs, behind the Command & Conquer and FarmVille games.
Moonfrog was about building for India and for the Indian consumer. “These games were culturally relevant in India, and it was a blind spot for most international game developers. With Bombay Play, we are not just looking at the Indian consumer. We’re actually looking global and exploring a lot of ideas right now.”
There is a good thing about making games that appeal to both the Indian and global markets. That is, both are demanding best-in-class multiplayer features, he said.
Encouragement from other Developers
Bombay Play has found inspiration from other countries. India’s challenge isn’t so different from China’s own efforts in the past decade. It’s worth noting that 20 of the top 100 games are now made by Chinese developers.
“We have been some bias, especially in the game industry, like there was toward China,” Jones said. “There were commentators saying Chinese games could get metagames and complex systems right, but they couldn’t get the gameplay right.
Similarly, India is viewed as the back office of the world, with a lot of software service companies and that they just handle the back office for the game companies.”
Bombay Play’s first multiplayer game Card Party has been downloaded more than 10 million times, and the studio is already profitable.
The studio has now raised $2.5 million in seed financing to date, and it will use the funds to accelerate product development on multiple live, social multiplayer card and strategy board games while doubling down on its current early hits.
Bombay Play will target Android, iOS, and the Facebook gaming platform (on the PC). The company will make HTML5 games, based on the lingua franca of the web, so the games can pretty much run anywhere that a web browser runs.