Walmart-owned Flipkart announced acquisition of Bengaluru-based gaming company Mech Mocha, which runs live-social gaming platform 'Hello Play'. As a part of the intellectual property acquisition, Mech Mocha's gaming team will continuing to develop new and innovative formats for Flipkart's gaming platform users. Mech Mocha's gaming platform is available in seven Indian languages and has over ten games including popular Indian multiplayer games such as Ludo, Carrom, Snakes & Ladder and Cricket.
"We see many first-time e-commerce users come online through formats such as video and games, as they build familiarity with the medium. Our observations of Flipkart GameZone reflect this trend as we see a strong correlation between casual gamers becoming early shoppers on Flipkart for their digital journey," said Prakash Sikaria, Vice-President, Flipkart.
Incorporated in 2011, Mech Mocha was co-founded by Arpita Kapoor and Mohit Rangaraju, and the company is backed by investors like Accel Partners, Blume Ventures and Shunwei Capital. According to the company each user daily spends over 35 minutes on the app and there are over 100 million minutes of conversations on the platform.
"With Vocal for Local being the focus for digital apps across the nation, this strategic backing of Flipkart provides us an opportunity to be part of a larger ecosystem that helps us create unique social gaming experiences for Indian users," said Arpita Kapoor, Co-Founder & CEO, Mech Mocha, while adding that now being a part of the Flipkart ecosystem and leveraging the Flipkart Cloud Platform, Super Coins, Reward store and Flipkart Ads platform would strengthen the Hello Play platform. In 2015, Flipkart was also one of the early investors in Mech Mocha, participating in the seed round along with Blue Ventures.
India's overall gaming industry size is estimated to be around Rs 6,200 crore with over 85 percent on logging into games from their mobile devices. According to a KPMG report, India is expected to grow to 440 million gamers by 2022 from the current 300 + million users. Also a recent AppsFlyer Performance Index stated that in India, Google Ads took the top spot in mobile gaming ads in volume.
SOURCE - BUSINESS TODAY
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