The game-changer

Atindriya Bose of Sony PlayStation on why the Ra.One game is set to bring a paradigm shift in the Indian gaming market.

Gaming,like dating,has come out into the open only recently. And although Bollywood has successfully adopted the dating scene to churn out some good fare,its presence in the gaming sector has been lacking sorely over the years. While there have been attempts to get into this market and establish it as another revenue generating source,they have been sporadic and unfocussed thus far. Atindriya Bose,Country Manager-Playstation,Sony Computer Entertainment remembers meeting producers to pitch them ideas on creating games based on movies and finding them non-committal on the issue. Corporates who fund films look at gaming from a promotional perspective,not a revenue angle. Therefore,if you ask them to spend some money on gaming they back off, he says.

Boses search for a partner came to an end last year at the office of Red Chillies Productions. Shah Rukh Khan,who was shooting for his forthcoming superhero film Ra.One,was willing and interested to invest his energies into creating a game. Bose is happy with the outcome of that initial meeting. As he explains,This sort of venture,to open the whole gaming space to Bollywood,required someone like Shah Rukh Khan. The partnership required someone who is futuristic in his visualisation of business prospects from gaming. And if it becomes successful,which I am pretty confident of,I think its a winning formula that could change the paradigm of Bollywood movies.

The game is all set to be launched in the next couple of weeks and hectic promotional activities are being planned for the same. Executives have been instructed not to talk about the game for fear of giving away the plot and build suspense around it. I cannot scuttle Red Chillies promotional plans by announcing things they have not revealed yet,such as characters from the game, Bose says in his defence. They are instead looking at the game as a launch-pad for surging console sales.

To further incentivise the game,the game will be priced at 8216;499 for the PS2 version and even the PS3 version will be priced below 8216; 1000. And,the game is going international as well. We are debating whether to have a downloadable version of the game for the PS3 version for international gamers as well. Just bringing out a Blu-ray disc for one country does not make sense, Bose says. The game will have about eight hours of playing time.

Sony PlayStation has put in almost a million dollars in developing and promoting the game,an unheard of figure in the gaming industry. Bose justifies this by saying,This is a very important project. I could have created a game in isolation after meeting the guys at Red Chillies. But,we have something really special on hand. The game has been written by Shah Rukh Khan himself and there is a very nice connect between what happens in the movie as well as the game. We have spent a million dollars only because both sides realised there is an opportunity of success that will add to the brand value of Ra.One.

The Ra.One game is also special because it is the first console game that will be branded before the movie releases,a practice unheard of in the West. While the gaming market based on movies is established to a great degree there,the same principles cannot be applied to India. Every movie cannot be converted into a game. Similarly,we cannot consider the Western model as ideal for the Indian market. Hollywood releases the film first so that the characters and plot are already established and the game acts as a bridge between the film and its possible sequel and create a brand footprint for the movie, Bose says.

For the Indian market,the idea is to build the game around the films promotional activity. We will create a pre-release buzz that will also help in selling the game. The Ra.One game will also provide an immersive experience that will give users a peek into the movie as well.

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This is evident in the game stills sent to Screen. Images of something called a Hart also seen in other Ra.One merchandise,a futuristic Tron-looking computer lab as well as a cloning lab are part of the game while characters such as Sonia Kareena Kapoor and a guard called Rakshastra have been revealed so far. Internet groups are already abuzz about the game and its plotline. The whole thing works towards the films success,as a result of which,the games life also gets extended, Bose says,adding that the learnings will come next but the focus is to develop both-sides-win formula for the Indian market.

Indeed,one of the major reasons for pushing this game is to allow consumers in the country to shed their elitist mindset towards console gaming by using the mass appeal of Bollywood in general and Shah Rukh Khan in particular through the game. Our entire idea is to create local intellectual properties IP and use them to broadbase our market. In this game for example,Shah Rukh Khan holds the IP rights. We will work on two to three films a year with producers who are ready to put in the kind of money required in this medium. However,he feels that gaming based on movies will take at least a couple of years to make sense to producers and corporates. In three years time,mainstream films will have their games,just as their Hollywood counterparts. Then our learnings from the Ra.One game will come in handy.

Bose says that the partnership gives him first right of refusal and other complex agreements regarding how the profits will be shared. Our target is to recoup our investment. If we make just 1.3 million on our million dollar investment,we will be happy, he concluded.