Casual gaming space has become mainstream: Nakul Kapur, MX Player

MX Player launched games on its platform in 2020. Today, the platform hosts over 100 hyper-casual games that can be played free and come with multiple layers of tournaments, and rewards for winners. There has been an increase in the number of visitors on the platform in the recent past. “Due to the pandemic, we saw an upward curve in the digital gaming sector as well. We recently released our annual report on gaming, which talks about how users spent 4.35 billion minutes on the MX Gaming platform, which indicates that games on MX are faring exceptionally well,” says Nakul Kapur, Head of International Business & Games, MX Player, in this interview with Adgully. Excerpts:

How did games on MX Player fare in 2021?

We launched games on MX Player in 2020, and today, we host over 100 hyper-casual games that can be played free and come with multiple layers of tournaments and rewards for winners. The past year saw a huge rise in the number of visitors on the platform and the total time spent on it. Due to the pandemic, we saw an upward curve in the digital gaming sector as well. We recently released our annual report on gaming, which talks about how users spent 4.35 billion minutes on the MX Gaming platform, which indicates that games on MX are faring exceptionally well.

Nearly 96% of users were below the age of 35, with 74.3% of them being millennials. In terms of gameplays, 94% were from users below the age of 35, with 69.4% of them being millennials. The male-to-female ratio was 80:20. Our gaming inventory ranges across categories from popular Indian board games to strategy, quizzes, racing, arcade, sports, action, among others, and caters to diverse users across the length and breadth of the country, that they can enjoy for free!

Geographically, in 2021, Bihar topped the list in terms of gameplays and engagement, the non-metro user engagement was 20% higher than the metro user’s engagement. Tier 2 and 3 cities fared well on the platform. Additionally, Patna, Delhi, Lucknow, Kolkata, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Mumbai were among the top 10 cities that contributed to 66% of the games played on the platform.

Which are the top genres favoured by users on your platform? Do you have any plans to increase more genres in your gaming inventory?

We have a wide array of games on our platform across casual, arcade, survival, strategy, and action games. These have constituted nearly 71% of the total gameplays on the platform, and among these, Bubble Blast was India’s most favourite game with over 336 million gameplays.

We have also introduced score-based games and a leaderboard system and are looking to grow our portfolio of battle mode games to further drive competitiveness.

What are your growth projections and where do you see yourself two years from now?

Our goal is to take gaming to the entire 300-million MAU globally that MX Media is currently catering to. We have seen phenomenal growth in gaming in India in 2021, wherein on an average, MX users spend 56 minutes per day gaming on the platform, and we would like to scale this to our entire user base.  At MX Player, we have always believed in democratising entertainment for our users with a strong focus on being an “Everytainment app”.

When it comes to gaming, we want to cater to a wider audience segment aged from nine to 99. We believe that the casual gaming space is here to stay, and this space has become mainstream today. Online gaming has seen an increase in acceptance from gamers in India, and we want to further leverage this by offering high-quality player vis-a-vis player games to further increase our engagement on our platform. In addition to this, we want to also target women gamers in India owing to the growing popularity of games on MX Player.

We are a free-to-play casual gaming platform. So, we have a very clear business model in that sense. We make money when users watch ads on the platform and we will continue to amplify different ad opportunities to help our platform monetize games for MX Media as well as our partner studios.

With the arrival of Metaverse, etc., how will the gaming space evolve over the next two years? What will be trends in the industry to watch out for?

Metaverse is definitely the next big thing and with its arrival, gaming would become all-immersive and change the shape of the industry. With the integration of a marketplace, users would stand a chance to engage in this gaming space at a much deeper level by purchasing NFTs, digital tradable assets and other meta vanity collectibles. It would also be very interesting to see how the ‘play-to-earn’ model would grow in the coming years.