SuperGaming: Crafting India's Gaming Revolution
A Deep Dive into Their Diverse Game Portfolio, the Pioneering Indus Engine, and Their Strategic Move into Web3 and the Metaverse
Welcome to another episode of Founder's Funnel, where we bring you closer to the visionaries reshaping the Web3 landscape.
Today, we're featuring SuperGaming - a powerhouse in India's gaming revolution. We explore their journey of creating hit games like MaskGun and Silly Royale, and delve into their ambitious project, Indus - an Indo-Futuristic battle royale.
Get ready to be inspired by their innovative approach to gaming, commitment to community, and the fusion of creativity and technology.
SuperGaming's Core Mission and Game Portfolio
SuperGaming makes mobile games for you to play with your friends and family easily. These include Battle Stars, Silly Royale, MaskGun, and Tower Conquest as well as the official PAC-MAN game. We’re also building Indus. It’s an Indo-Futuristic battle royale that’s our most ambitious game to date. Our mission is to build India’s gaming revolution.
Building a Gaming Revolution in India
Our intent with SuperGaming is to build mass adoption of video games beyond the Innovators, Early Adopters and build deep into the Early Majority of Players in India to truly cross the chasm. This is something that games like Call of Duty Mobile, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Farlight 84 have not been able to breach in the Indian market. Based on our early experiments we believe we may have found a way forward with our focus on mass scale adoption via LiveOps, Streaming and the halo provided by esports.
While our backgrounds and experiences of the entire team are extremely diverse ranging from coding for mainframes to advertising and DJing, there’s one common trait: the willingness to roll up our sleeves and do the work. Our ability to dig deep and power through consistently has helped us tremendously in bringing our games to life.
Focus on Real-Time Multiplayer Games
Our focus on real-time multiplayer games stems from our strengths in networking and tech honed over years of development expertise. Here are some of the learnings from MaskGun, our biggest game to date.
Content cadence matters: We started shipping a whole lot more content and brought the game back to our original vision of what a modern mobile shooter would look like. One of the advantages of just having a little bit of success on the shooter team was that we’ve been able to scale our team. We soft-launched in 2016 with a ten-person team that’s now grown to 150 plus with all that experience in making a shooter game through various trials and errors.
Frame rate matters: We have this maniacal focus on ensuring that you’ll see for us if there aren’t 40fps on every [low-end] device we’re going to fix it.
Gains in retention: Our day 1,000 retention on MaskGun was three percent. What most companies think about as day 30 retention is a three-year retention for us.
Gameplay + social hooks = virality: If we got one Facebook user, we usually ended up with 5 more. That was our organic growth and how we grew to 80 million users worldwide. As per our formulas at the time: if I get you to play with a friend and you enjoy it, you’re going to keep coming back.
Gender split: We had 10 percent of the topmost players in the game as female. The top five countries for us were also non-obvious before the launch. The game did really well in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and India though we had launched in these countries only after 3 years.
Building seamless communication tools + drop in/drop out multiplayer: I believe these communication tools allowed us to do two things. It allowed me, for example, to send player messages. But it also uses all of our automation. When you think of an FTUE [first-time user experience] in most games, it will tell you how to play the game for the first 30 minutes. But here we’ve built a communication system where we can do an FTUE in the form of inbox messages throughout the entire player lifecycle. Even if you’re at level 50 and not winning enough we’ll tell you what to do next.
End result: We had seen that 15 percent of our audience was Indian until July 2020. Just before the first PUBG ban, it was 20 to 25 percent. Now it’s around 40 to 45 percent. At that point in time we felt we should be promoting our game in the country.
Now: MaskGun has 80 million players and rolled out 1v1 and 2v2 game modes aside from its existing suite of multiplayer options.
Indus Engine: Enhancing Gaming Experience
The battle royale space is filled to the brim with games that have high device requirements. Be it PUBG/BGMI or COD Mobile, if you don’t have a good enough smartphone you’re left out. With the Indus Engine, we’re able to deliver a consistent and performant experience on low-end hardware. This allows us to tap into a wider audience that’s been left out of India’s flourishing battle royale craze.
Indus runs on a custom-built engine with our own netcode, rendering and low-footprint download size to run on 100$ Android devices. Our game currently runs on devices with at least 2Gb RAM, renders 30fps on lower-end Android devices and is less than 1GB in download size. At the same time, it scales up to deliver high-fidelity graphics and 60-120fps on higher end IOS Devices.
Tailoring Games for the Indian Audience
We’re a firm believer of building with our audiences and they’re at the center of everything we do. For example: our casual hero shooter Battle Stars, we launched it collaborating with India’s biggest Youtuber, Techno Gamerz. However this wasn’t a simple celebrity endorsement. Rather, we worked in tandem with him to bring his likeness into the game as a playable character and he even advised on making the game better.
With Indus, we recently revealed our closed beta trailer where each character was voiced by a major gaming content creator from India. They in turn brought their audiences into the game and allowed us to extend our share of voice.
Most importantly: our playtests. Indus would be nothing without our community playtests. These allow us to build our games for Indian audiences as well as let us test the feasibility of themes like Indo-Futurism. This also results in specific features being catered for i.e. ping systems, free look, evolved traversal options, and gyro — all of these found their way into Indus via community feedback early on.
Indus Playtests by the Numbers
We have seen tremendous interest from Indian gamers for Indian-themed games. In terms of theme: 90% resonated with the theme of Indo-Futurism, particularly the premise and characters, more so after they tried the game at our playtests in Pune, Bengaluru, and Surat.
Most entries for playtest invitations were from Pune followed by Delhi, Gujarat, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.
Over 50 percent of those at the playtest want more game development and behind-the-scenes content.
The average age of players is under 25. 60-40 gender split in terms of interest.
None of this is a one-way street. The community is rewarded for its efforts. From community playtest attendees having their names in the game’s credits to prizes for naming in-game vehicles like our dropship and buggy, we ensure they’re taken care of and treated well every step of the way, all while we maintain transparency on the state of the game’s development.
Venture into Web3 and the Metaverse
Our North Star always is our Player Centric approach. Hence to us, more than just Web3, we looked at Blockchain as an enabler of providing our players with ownership of in-game items. Having had many players, clans and communities engage in player-to-player trade in our previous games helped us understand how Web3 technology like the Blockchain and keeping all your transactions on a ledger would go in the right direction of providing players with ownership of Digital Assets. We did not engage in promoting tokens or NFTs because in our region these are still regulatory gray areas. The good news is that there is now a regulatory framework available in other countries that govern the management and ownership of Digital Assets and Trading. SuperGaming is looking at being compliant with regulatory requirements before we provide a view on how we see these technologies impact the gaming industry in India. What our players can expect as always is a player-centric, player-focussed approach that uses Web3 so that they play-and-earn (if they choose to) but one that is regulatory compliant.
Balancing Creativity and Commercial Success
To us, all of these go hand-in-hand. This is the rare industry where art, commerce, and tech converge and all of these aspects are crucial for our long-term success. While creative ideas like Indo-Futurism help us break through the clutter and innovative aspects of Indus like its unique guns and firing mechanisms help deliver a truly differentiated experience, they work in tandem to create player affinity that allows us to sell them on battle passes and cosmetic items.
Future Plans and Global Aspirations
SuperGaming's immediate focus is on the successful launch of Indus. Their long-term vision involves leading a game development revolution in India, contributing to a vibrant ecosystem where Indian-made games gain global recognition. They aim to create games that not only capture the imagination of players in India but also make a mark on the global stage.