Updated 23 May, 2012, 6:39 pm IST

An Interview with Ronnie Screwvala

08 Oct, 2009, 12:00 pm IST | by Avinash Bali

We sit down with the head of UTV who gives us the lowdown on his gaming plans.

As most of you know by now UTV has ventured into the world of video games after acquiring Ignition Entertainment, a UK based developer. Thankfully these games aren’t crappy casual games shamelessly cashing in on some Indian custom or sport; these are full-fledged 3D games for current consoles like the Xbox360 and the PS3.

At the Tokyo Game Show we sat down and talked to the head of UTV, Ronnie Screwvala who gave us the lowdown on their game plan - literally speaking.

Why get into Gaming? Also why go with Ignition?

For UTV, content's where we've always been, be it on the small screen with TV or the big screen with movies. Our frontier and model has always been to lead with content because we believe that’s the value creator for an organization.

The next logical horizon for us outside the above mentioned mediums was a new media and that was gaming. When we did we looked at all aspects of gaming - mobile, online and console.
We also realized that for this we needed to go to a whole new geography since India was not the perfect candidate for console and online but it could be for mobile. This entire process took around a year. And finally when we decided we wanted to get into this space we wanted to do it with people who were already in that business rather than starting from scratch.

This is why we went in with Ignition for consoles, True Games for online and we already have India Games for mobile.

WarDevil, El Shaddai and Reich are pretty westernized games. Do you plan on making something specific for the Indian audience?

In our console and online business model, India is not on our geography map at all. However, most of the stuff coming out of India Games is India specific. If I were to bet on the next frontier for India it would be online rather than console.

Would the above mentioned games be released in India at all?

I think all three would get a fair release in India but to us it would be a minute part of our market because it’s really North America, Japan and Europe we’re primarily focusing on.

How do you plan on promoting your games in India?

We'll pretty much promote it the same way we would in Europe or America since the audience we're reaching out to is pretty much the same. Is the medium in India developed enough to reach that audience? No. Because it's a very sophisticated audience, a very small niche but platform operators like MS and Sony would be our best partners to promote these games in India since their intent at the end of the day is to grow console hardware.

Do you plan on tapping into the casual market? Like maybe making a cricket game for the Wii?

On the console space we want to be high end which is why we’ve invested in not one but three games. And all those games are AAA games, so in the console space our chances of looking at the Wii is low. We're actually looking at online and mobile spaces for games like cricket but definitely not in the console space.

Would UTV be interested in gaming events or expos like maybe a mini E3 for India?

In our overall content and IP space, event management would be a distraction for us. We're really at the top end of the value chain owning IPs and we're very focused on that.

Do you plan on tapping into the handheld market as well?

It's there on the horizon in terms of a plan but not something we're focused on right now.

Thank you for your time.