FarmVille creator eyes Indian farms'
A total of 100 million smart phones were shipped to India in 2015, but the penetration is still below 30 percent, says Mark.
Kochi: He looks to the east and says that the future growth in e-gaming is to happen here.
Creator of once very popular FarmVille game in facebook, Mark Skaggs from Texas who was at the NASSCOM 10000 Startup Warehouse on the Infopark campus at Kakkanad on Saturday, has now partially shifted his work base to Bangalore to tap the full potential of the ever growing Indian market.
Today he is also the director of Moonfrog, an Indian mobile game developer, with a host of his associates at FarmVille, and is researching and developing games that are pan India at Bangalore.
“India is the second largest smart phone market after China while the US is third, and it is still growing. A total of 100 million smart phones were shipped to India in 2015, but the penetration is still below 30 percent. We estimate that India will need 702 million smart phone devices by 2020. So the potential of the market is so huge,” says Mark.
He said that he realised the potential of India way back in 2009 when FarmVille shot up the popularity graph. “Then we created a page with the national flag of almost all nations but we missed that of India due to oversight. That created a big hue and cry with even Times magazine writing a report on it. That made me aware that India cannot be ignored,” said Mark with a heady guffaw.
FarmVille shot from 10-15 million players a day to 32 million at its peak in 2012-13.