Kochi: With high smart phone penetration in the state and a vibrant film industry, Kerala is fast becoming a hub for developing movie-based mobile games. The Kochi-based Startup Village incubator has now a number of companies set up by young entrepreneurs who are into creating promotional apps for the film industry. In terms of the number of movies it churns out, Kerala’s film industry is the fourth largest in the country.
Amid growing competition, movie producers are constantly on the lookout for new marketing tactics and ways to connect to the audience. Movie game development in Kerala is picking up pace in part to the success of game tie-ins in Hollywood and Bollywood, but mostly with the emergence of a new generation of world-class game developers in the state and increasing awareness that these apps are an effective tool to reach out to the smartphone owning tech-savvy young moviegoers in Kerala.
Mollywood had its first movie game ‘Hitit 1983’ in February this year starring Nivin Pauly. Interestingly, this application on Android platform was developed by a group of youngsters whose start-ups Coppra and Clipclap are being incubated at Startup Village, according to a release here. Coppra, founded in July last year by a team of engineering graduates, started its journey by developing a mobile game for cartoon series Minnaminni. "After Hitit, we created a promotional game for the Mammootty-starrer 'Gangster'. We are getting a lot of positive enquiries from the film industry after the success of these two projects", according to Faheem Moinudheen, the CEO of Coppra. Another Startup Village incubatee Raklin recently developed a game application for the movie Mosayile Kuthira Meenukal dubbed the 'MKM Game'.
The game was launched on Facebook and Google Play. 'MKM Game' is Raklin’s first product and is the first movie-based game in Mollywood that can be run on multiple platforms', said Akhil, co-founder of Raklin. "We are getting lot of enquiries from movie producers and discussions are on for new projects," he said. According to some experts, Kerala is likely to be one of the first states in India with 100 per cent smartphone penetration in every home and this is fuelling apps startup revolution in the state. In Silicon Valley, startups first capture the San Francisco market and then scale up nationally with funding, the release said.
