MAM
MPL announces Rs 10 crore in revenue payout to its game developer partners
Mobile Premier League, India’s largest esports and mobile gaming platform, today announced Rs 10 crore in revenue for 10 of its game developer partners in just a year, from November 2019 to October 2020.
Game developers and studios publish their games on MPL under revenue-sharing agreements with the gaming platform, where developers can start monetising their games via MPL’s cash tournaments and contests.
One of these 10 developers, Hyderabad-based Yesgnome publishes its popular Cricket Clash game on MPL. Cricket Clash is one of the most-played games on MPL, especially during the recent lockdown, garnering over 41 million gameplays between April and October 2020. Other developers receiving the payout include Qunami, which publishes the Quiz game on MPL, and BornMonkie, which publishes Auto Raja.
MPL has onboarded over 70 games on its app since its inception in 2018 and has partnered with established as well as independent game developers from across India, opening up a new revenue stream for them to monetise their games. With over 6 crore users in India, game developers find a ready audience for their games on MPL’s Android and iOS apps.
“MPL’s unique platform model offers game developers the chance to monetise right from day 1 of publishing. We are privileged to have partnered with talented game developers from all over the country and are glad that our platform helped them monetise their games. We at MPL recognise the tremendous potential that the Indian game developer ecosystem has and thus, have announced a Rs 37-crore fund that game developers can use to build their offerings,” said Shubh Malhotra, Co-founder, Mobile Premier League.
The Rs 37-crore fund announced by MPL is earmarked for Indian game developers and studios to develop their games for a national and global audience. MPL has also expanded internationally, with over 3.5 million users in Indonesia, thus taking Indian-made games to the world.
The fund is open to all Indian game developers and studios and they can apply for it by reaching out to MPL. The gaming platform will soon launch a single-window online console for game developers to apply for the fund as well as to submit their games to MPL for screening and publishing.
“We have released AutoRaja, Bubble Shooter, Block Puzzle on MPL. Thanks to the unique monetisation model on MPL, we are making around Rs 5-8 Lakh every month from these games. MPL has a great team that takes care of the launch and event strategies to boost game revenue which is always great for developers,” said VK Samhith, CEO, BornMonkie.
“During the lockdown, we have seen a significant increase in our revenues on our games on MPL. The timing of the IPL also helped us in adding a few more titles which resulted in maintaining our revenue at a steady pace. We are excited about the next few months as we plan to release new titles, which we think will help to further improve overall run rate,” said Imtiaz Hussain, COO, Yesgnome.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
