Mumbai: The confluence of casual gaming and esports is emerging as a potent business model for gaming platforms in India. One such platform ONMO, the gaming platform of listed firm OnMobile Global, is looking to grow its user base from over half a million to 50 million.
The ONMO platform is a web-based application that can be accessed by any browser by simply typing the URL (uniform resource locator) in the address bar. Any casual gamer can start playing its myriad games that range from 8-ball pool, mini golf to tower crush, sudoku. The key difference is that the gaming experience is designed in such a way that the user won’t spend more than two to three minutes completing the gameplay.
The quick burst of gameplay offered by the ONMO platform combined with the ability to wager real money (as little as Rs 2 to as much as Rs 20) to compete with other players is the secret sauce in its strategy to engage the gaming community in India.
The company launched their first brand campaign ‘Just Beat It’ in April conceptualised by Lowe Lintas Bangalore. The film was supported by an influencer-led campaign featuring Tanmay Bhat, Neha Dhupia and Radhika Madan who challenged casual gamers to play on the ONMO platform and beat the records set by them on ONMO’s most popular games.
According to E&Y, India has a 390 million online gaming community. There are 95 million paying gamers in India and 94 per cent of casual gamers play on the mobile. Esports and casual gaming revenues are estimated at Rs 2,900 crore in 2021 and the propensity for Indian consumers to pay for online games has increased as gaming gains social acceptance. Mobile gaming apps saw a 40 per cent increase in in-app purchases in 2021.
With over two decades of operating experience, Krish Seshadri has experience leading global businesses across India, Asia-Pacific, USA and Europe. His experience spans building and scaling digital & technology products, businesses and organisations in online gaming, digital content & entertainment, social media platforms, fin-tech, online recruiting & ad-tech.
An engineering graduate from Stanford University and an MBA from London Business School, where he was a Chevening Scholar, Seshadri has worked across a diverse set of companies. Early in his career, he was at AOL (now Verizon) in a range of leadership roles running product, content, marketing and sales operations in India and the US. He was head of growth and partnerships for Facebook India driving its user base in the country. He led the teams as general manager of Zynga where he built and grew leading social games. He was president of the online mutual fund platform FundsIndia. Before joining ONMO, he was CEO of online recruiter Monster.com.
Seshadri joined OnMobile Global as CEO in August 2020 and later took on the role of CEO of ONMO in October 2021. His focus is on building the D2C (direct-to-consumer) product leveraging his prior experience at the social gaming platform Zynga.
In a conversation with Indiantelevision.com, ONMO CEO Krish Seshadri spoke about the gaming platform, its features and functionalities, distribution strategy and growth outlook.
Edited Excerpts:
On the gaming platform ONMO
Over the last two-three years, mobile gaming has become an extension of mobile entertainment. So, it was time for us to move into the adjacent mobile gaming market. We have two-three products in the mobile gaming segment. ONMO is one of the larger products that we’ve been building for a year and which I currently run.
There are various elements to this product such as social gaming and esports. Mobile esports has become a reliable revenue model that is tried and tested across markets like India and the US. Esports is a big underlying peg of our product. We have also developed cloud-based games for our platform.
Our focus is not on hosting complete games, rather, we’re more like the TikTok of gaming. Each gameplay lasts for about one minute, two minute or three-minute sessions. Our research shows that the young millennial audience prefers to consume entertainment in bite-sized chunks. There is long-form entertainment in their media consumption but increasingly a lot of content is being consumed in short bursts. The rise of short video platforms like TikTok and Chingari across global markets are evidence of this trend.
We have a proprietary content management system that ingests content and identifies specific short gaming parts of a game. Those specific moments are then hosted on our platform available to players as challenges.
ONMO is primarily a B2C (business to consumer) product but we’re also exploring telco partnerships to distribute our games. Currently, there are relationships with 100 telcos around the globe. We don’t develop the games on our platform, instead, we partner with different gaming companies across the world. There are partnerships with over 100 gaming companies. Our platform ingests the games that they have developed. We don’t develop the games per se, we partner with different gaming companies across the globe. We’ve got partnerships with over 100 gaming companies now. We go through the games that they have and put them as these shorter challenges and then host them on our platform.
On the target market
Our target audience is primarily casual gamers between the age of 18-35 in India, North America and Europe. In terms of distribution, we have developed a web-based app which means that you just need a mobile phone and a web browser to access our platform. We’re focused on mobile gamers and will likely develop a native app for Android or iOS that would be available on the Play Store or App Store. The advantage of a web-based app is that we can rollout and do testing across global markets without the hassle of permission that is required by the app marketplaces. A user just has to enter their Gmail, Facebook or mobile number and jump straight into the action.
On the core offerings on the platform
There are two core offerings on the ONMO platform. First, are the core game formats. Right now, we launched real money cash gaming in two formats for Indian users where they can battle using INR (Indian National Rupee). There is a cash tournament that has a start time and an end time. Any player can join this tournament and be ranked on the leaderboard. There is a distribution of prize money at the end of the tournament.
Another format is our one-to-one cash battles where a player can challenge another player. The winner takes home the entire prize and the platform keeps a portion of the prize pool as a platform fee.
We also have a new format that is not available on any other platform. We call it ‘Beat It’ tournaments. In this format, players can beat the highest score of the day for a particular game within 24 hours. The picture of the player gets published on the feed until someone else beats their score. Players keep attempting this again and again as everyone wants to beat the score of the day. This adds a competitive layer to the gameplay that increases engagement and retention. Every research that we’ve come across in casual gaming shows that adding a competitive element to your games greatly improves engagement on the platform. We’ve seen this format of the game grow by 3X quarter-on-quarter.
The core product is cash tournaments and ‘Beat It’ challenges. Players in India can join and play with each other for cash (in rupees). We’ve also enabled Bitcoin transactions for players outside of India. For global players, enabling crypto payments is an important function because in the gaming community there’s a deluge of virtual tokens and users are habituated to using these tokens to purchase items. We pioneered virtual currencies when I was at Zynga with Zynga tokens. The only difference was that Zynga was a closed network but with crypto, these currencies can be sold and exchanged on an open network. It offers cross-region compatibility. Players across countries can wager against each other using a common token.
On the platform metrics
We launched cash battles in a beta format in January-February. We’ve grown to more than half a million monthly active users (MAUs) and we’ll probably double that number very soon. We’re growing at 70 per cent month-on-month and the number of game plays on our platform this quarter versus the last quarter is 3X.
The business model of ONMO on the B2C side is mainly via our esports model – players wager money for challenges and tournaments. On the B2B (business to business) side, we are exploring a subscription model with our telco partners.
On the growth strategy
Our focus from a B2C perspective is primarily on India. By the end of the year, we’ll look at expanding to other geographies in North America and Europe. In five years, we see about 80 per cent of our revenues coming from the US primarily in the B2C area. From a casual gaming perspective, the amount of money esports gamers wage in the US is multiples that of what they wager in India. The sheer throughput on the platform will be higher. India is a great market to start and build a sizable audience base.
In India, our go-to-market strategy for ONMO is leveraging performance marketing and brand marketing. We have an exclusive distribution partnership with short-form video platform Chingari to access its 100 million plus growing install base. We have an exclusive deal with them as OnMobile Global has invested in Chingari and their gaming channel. This will give us access to 50 million users which is a big number.
The company launched their first brand campaign ‘Just Beat It’ in April conceptualised by Lowe Lintas Bangalore. The film was supported by an influencer-led campaign featuring Tanmay Bhat, Neha Dhupia and Radhika Madan who challenged casual gamers to play on the ONMO platform and beat the records set by them on ONMO’s most popular games.
