Level Up pioneering online gaming in India, Brazil marts

BY MARICEL E. ESTAVILLO – BusinessWorld Reporter Philippine start-up company Level Up, Inc. is pioneering online gaming in India and Brazil, betting on the huge but hardly tapped markets. Some 60 people in India and Brazil are now doing marketing and technical support works for Level Up, the home-grown company that started the online gaming craze in the Philippines three years ago. All the online gaming content and the technology delivered to homes and internet cafés in Brazil and India are being customized and developed from Level Up’s office in the Philippines. "Brazil and India are huge markets for us. I love the Philippines, this is where we started, but prospects are bigger in these two countries. "What is great about this is the fact that it is the Philippines that provides them the technology, the content and technical support," Ben Colayco, Level Up international chief executive, told BusinessWorld in an interview. Level Up does not produce its own online games, but buys licenses from content developers from South Korea. But it does customize the content, particularly the language prior to the commercial release of the games. Mr. Colayco said business in Brazil is doing pretty well, primarily due to the huge demand for "video gaming." This is the practice of viewing virtual competition among online gamers as a real sports, a trend that is very popular in Japan, China and South Korea. In video gaming, players who excel in online games are called "cyberathletes" and earn anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 per year. Brazil, with a population of 184 million and internet penetration rate of 14.1%, has now some 80,000 active gamers playing Level Up’s Ragnarok Online. To penetrate this market, Level Up introduced a different marketing strategy, targeting mostly the home market and through subscription because Brazil has a small number of internet cafés. While Brazil is fast catching up, India, with population of 1.1 billion and internet penetration of 4.5%, is still slow but showing some signs of promise, Mr. Colayco said. Level Up has been in India, its first overseas foray, for two years now. But commercial operation in India, now with 18,000 active subscribers, came eight months later after its commercial operation in Sao Paolo in Brazil. "By the time Level Up came in the Philippines, immediately all the computers were doing games. Believe it or not, there is really a strong gaming culture here. But in India, that has not happened yet, but we are seeing the business picking up in the next 12 to 18 months," Mr. Colayco said. It is estimated that Level Up has 50,000 gamers at any given time in a day. Indicators include the increasing internet usage, the rise in consumer spending and the fact that India is slowly opening up to foreign content, he said. The slow adoption of online gaming in India is driven by a number of factors. For one, most of the internet cafés in India have only about eight to 10 desktop computers, compared to Philippine internet cafés, which can house from 15 to 20 desktop computers. But the total number of internet cafés, at 50,000, in India is four times higher than in the Philippines with 12,000. Further, majority of the desktop computers in India are not cut for online gaming and are widely used for internet access and overseas calls via Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP.