Hanuman Ansh film to become global gaming franchise via nCore Games deal

MUMBAI: Bollywood surprises rarely come quieter or bigger than Hanuman Ansh. The devotional biopic of Neem Karoli Baba, written and directed by Vishal Chaturvedi, turned a modest budget of roughly Rs 2 crore into over Rs 300 crore net within five weeks of its 7 August release, still running more than 7,000 shows daily deep into its fifth week. That kind of staying power does not go unnoticed, and Swambhu Media Network, the film’s producer, has now signed an exclusive worldwide, multi-year partnership with nCore Games, the studio behind FAU-G: Domination, to take the franchise from cinema screens into gaming consoles, PCs and phones.

The mechanics of the deal are worth noting. nCore’s subsidiary studio, Dot9 Games, will develop and publish three titles spanning mobile, PC and console platforms. The first, slated for worldwide mobile release, lets players learn, recite and live the Hanuman Chalisa verse by verse in their own voice, with custom avatars drawn from every state and region of India. It is explicitly designed to be intergenerational, aimed at a child learning their first chaupai as much as a senior for whom the Chalisa is already daily practice, and the entire Chalisa experience will remain free to play. Larger-scale, action-focussed console and PC titles are already in the works, with details to follow.

The commercial logic is genuinely compelling once you see the numbers side by side. India has more than 500 million gamers, but the addressable audience here is wider still: hundreds of millions of Hanuman Chalisa devotees worldwide and the followers of Neem Karoli Baba, whose Kainchi Dham ashram has drawn everyone from Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to Virat Kohli. Kaval Singh Bombra, president of nCore Games Inc., put the diaspora math plainly: more than 35 million people of Indian origin live outside India, and Hanuman ji travels with every one of them, making the franchise global from day one rather than an eventual export.

What lifts this above a straightforward licensing cash-in is the stated intent behind it. Vishal Gondal, founder of nCore Games, described the partnership as part business and part seva, framing the ambition as taking the Chalisa to billions in their own voice, one chaupai at a time. Deepak Ail, co-founder and chief executive of Dot9 Games, was equally clear that success will not be measured by day-one downloads but by whether people are still playing on day one thousand, tuned to the festival calendar as a living product rather than a one-off release. Namrata Singh, producer at Swambhu Media Network, added that children are the primary target group, calling Chaturvedi the most empathetic champion for games built for good and wellness the team could find.

If nCore and Swambhu can actually deliver on the free-to-play, family-first promise without diluting it into another ad-laden mobile grind, this has real potential to become a template: India’s gaming industry and its devotional culture are both enormous and largely untapped in combination, and a Rs 300 crore film has just handed a proven audience straight to a studio built to hold their attention for years, not weeks.