Unexpected Growth: An Indian Game with More Reach Than Temple Run?

Every time, we have unexpected reach in the title — you guys open our email 30% more than usual. That’s click bait in venture for you. We should really be charging you more often; anyway, more on that later.

For now, take a look at the chart below showing Ludo King’s break out.

Other apps like Ludo — Neo Classic, Chess and Carrom 3D which could fit into this same wagon wheel of traditional board games are by comparison doing quite poorly or sticking to the industry average — depending on how you look at it.

This development is all the more surprising because ‘Gamotronix’ — the developer behind this game comes from relative obscurity. Traditionally, games go viral when a developer is able to use the existing audience of users as a seeding ground for new game launches.

To give you an idea of why this is so impressive — Temple Run 2’s reach in India is ~4.5% (averaged over the 2nd quarter of this year & the reach of Temple Run 2 > Temple Run).

It’s also worth noting that its attrition rate is still on the lower side if the industry average. Here’s a comparative chart:

One of the determinants of customer profiling is average monthly spends. When you look at these numbers, you’ll find that Ludo King caters to the lowest spending group of users.

1. Why is Ludo King growing so quickly?
2. What channels of customer acquisition are they using?
3. Given that it’s hard to lower CAC on digital platforms like Google & Facebook without some sort of unfair advantage — what have they found?

One reason for their growth could be the rapidly changing composition of mobile users (data plans and smartphones have become cheaper ). While looking for ways to entertain themselves, these new users search for games they remember from their own childhood. Rather than First Person Shooters or temple run and the like — the games that fit into this category are games like Ludo and Snakes & Ladders. Could the explanation be so simple?

Thanks for your time,

Ashish Kapoor

Team KG

Originally published at kalagato.com.