BENGALURU: Walmart-owned Flipkart, which had first invested in social gaming startup Mech Mocha in its early-stage round in 2015, on Tuesday announced the acquisition of its gaming team and intellectual property (IP) for an undisclosed amount.
The startup, which boasts India’s first live-social gaming platform Hello Play, is currently available in seven Indian local languages and has over 10 games including popular Indian multiplayer games such as Ludo, Carrom, Snakes and Ladder, and Cricket.
The acquisition would allow Flipkart to enhance its gaming strategy as it looks to develop new formats to boost user engagement on its gaming platform.
Co-founded in 2014 by Arpita Kapoor and Mohit Rangaraju, Mech Mocha has raised $9.9 million so far, according to Crunchbase. Accel Partners, Blume Ventures, and Shunwei Capital were other investors in Mech Mocha.
In addition to the acquisition of the company’s IP, Mech Mocha’s gaming team along with the co-founders will also join Flipkart as the company continues to focus on developing new and innovative formats to engage with users on its platform, Flipkart said.
The startup’s team would report to Prakash Sikaria, vice-president at Flipkart. “We look forward to being a part of the Flipkart ecosystem and leveraging the Flipkart Cloud Platform, Super Coins, Reward store, and Flipkart Ads platform to strengthen the platform for our users,” said Arpita Kapoor, co-founder & CEO, Mech Mocha.
“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,” Kapoor added.
“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 Sikaria.
Flipkart noted that social mobile gaming is seeing massive growth and adoption in India as socially distanced consumers are looking for ways to connect with friends and family over fun casual games.
Financial Express further reports: Flipkart took initial steps into gaming with a few micro games before its 2017 The Big Billion Days event. The initiative soon evolved into Flipkart setting up the games and gamification team and launched two games — Play and Win, and Bid and Win, according to a company blog post written in July this year. Flipkart currently runs GameZone on its marketplace for its customers to win gifts and deals.
India’s online gaming market is likely to grow at a CAGR of 12.5 per cent to become $531 million in size by 2025 even as the user penetration is expected to hit 10.2 per cent in five years, according to Statista. Moreover, the average revenue per user (ARPU) is likely to amount to $2.68. Globally, China will generate maximum revenues — $4,523 million in 2020. Mech Mocha, available in seven Indian languages has more than 10 games in its app.
