HI FRIENDS,
Ludo King, which was launch in 2016, became one of the top five most installed mobile games worldwide in April.
Apart from offering the traditional Ludo experience, Ludo King has features including multiplayer support and various themes to attract young audiences alongside appealing to the players of the original board game.
Ludo looks old fashioned compared to the kinds of games you can get for free on your phones today.
Even before the pandemic, Ludo King was growing fast, driven by the same familiarity that helps apps like Teen-Patti games.
But once India found itself under lockdown thanks to COVID-19, the Ludo King app has grown dramatically.
Family WhatsApp groups share Ludo King plans and it’s become a social distancing staple for many Indians who never play any online games.
Gamers might not associate themselves with simple board games like this one, but crores of people seem to be on board for this game.
Vikash Jaiswal who’s the Co-founder and CEO of Gametion Technologies, the publisher behind Ludo King,
Decided to make the game in October 2015, while he was playing a Snakes and Ladders game on his phone.
He worked on Ludo King along with programmer and a graphic designer and launched its first version in December 2016.
In just three to four months of its debut on Android devices,
The board game appeared on top charts on Google Play and hit mark of 12 crore users in just 11 months of its launch.
First Launch Advantage
Vikash Jaiswal developed Ludo King at a time when very few traditional Indian board games were available for smartphones.
He believes that it was the first launch advantage that helped him gain success in just months of its launch.
This doesn’t mean that he didn’t have to make any efforts.
He brought the multiplayer mode in six months of the launch of Ludo King.
Vikash Jaiswal said :
“If you play other Ludo games, you will see classic rules,”
“For instance, you need to roll the dice if you get six. We, instead, add the ability to let you simply move your token once you get a six.”
Jaisal said his team of engineers and designers at Navi Mumbai-based Gametion Technologies actively look at user feedback to bring changes to existing experience.
Adding new features and what’s already available has also become important as Ludo King nowadays has many competitors.
Getting a Benifit from COVID-19
While many companies have been facing the adverse effects of the COVID-19 outbreak,
Ludo King is one of few names that we can take from tech world that seen positivity out of pandemic.
The data reveals that the monthly active users of the game grew nearly 47 percent between April and May,
while its daily user growth went up by 30 percent in the last one month.
Vikash Jaiswal said :
“We saw crashing of our server in the first week of the lockdown,”
“We worked day-and-night for seven to eight days continuously to scale the game.”
Gametion Technologies was using eight servers before the national lockdown was impose by the government on March 25.
But sudden increase in traffic led to an outage for Ludo King, forced the team to upgrade to 200 servers.
The growth during the initial phase of the ongoing lockdown helped Ludo King reach the number-one ranking in the top charts of free games on Google Play for some days.
The team also saw a massive increase from not only India but also its other top-five markets including Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan
Where local governments have also imposed similar restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The average time spent on Ludo King also grew nearly 48 minutes between April 18 and May 18, up 2.2 percent from March 21 and April 17.
Vikash Jaiswal said :
“I never expected that much traffic or the number-one ranking,”
“But yes, while making the game, I convinced my team members that when we release this game, it will come in the top 10 rankings of the board games category in India.”
“It was all luck with Ludo King,”
“But I always thought that I would be able to list my game in the list of top charts.”
THANK YOU FOR READING.
