Mumbai gullies is an upcoming GTA-like game, which takes place in the city of dreams-Mumbai and is being developed by GameEon Studios.
The game is the dream of once a school going Mumbai boy named Nikhil Malankar.
Malankar who grew up as an avid gamer and founded GameEon studios in 2013, Like any other Fresher Nikhil also faced many hurdles before launching his first game, “The major hurdle that we faced when we started work on ‘Kyte’ was faith. Many people don’t consider gaming as a serious profession in India. Our few friends and relatives discouraged us; mislead us that this is not the field to work in. Our colleagues left us in between because of ego issues. But we didn’t lose hope and continued to work on our games. There are many people who will show you the mirror which is hurtful but it’s a good wake up call,” said the enthusiastic, 20-year-old Nikhil.
GameEon’s founder, Nikhil Malankar, also released a breakdown of the trailer for the game and shed light on the many details of the title’s open-world. From the voiceover to the attention to detail, Mumbai Gullies does look every bit like an AAA game.
Storyline and Environment:
The title will have a gangster storyline, populated with local elements and characters, Malankar said, adding that it’s being written by a “popular Bollywood writer”. “It will be an action-packed storyline and it will span across three different eras, so you will get to see how old Mumbai was, then how the slightly older Mumbai was, and then the current era,” he said. “The trailer shows the current era — you can see there are signboards on buses that say ‘no masks no entry’.” The young founder and his team of about 30 people want to build a product better than GTA V, and not just in terms of storyline. “The gameplay of Mumbai Gullies will be longer than that of GTA V and the player map will be much larger,” he said. GTA V’s map is about 88 sq. kilometres, while Mumbai Gullies’ spans across nearly 400 sq. kilometres.
Early Projects:
Malankar vision a GTA-like game for India way back in 2009. Four years later, armed solely with passion for gaming and zero experience, Malankar started GameEon with a few friends. In the first two years, they developed five mobile games but didn’t generate any revenue. The team did not monetise the titles but made some money through app and web development services. “Initially, I was of the opinion that having ads would obstruct the gameplay and not lead to a good user experience. But then, we realised that everyone monetised through ads, so we began to monetise our games too,” he said. While this helped, it wasn’t enough for the company to scale.
At the end of December 2016, Malankar gave up on GameEon. In 2017, he joined game development studio Talking Pixels and learned the tricks of the trade from founder Sanjay Soni. In 2018, he rebooted GameEon, with a focus on game development services, and provided services to multiple brands, including Nazara and ICICI Bank and the Covid-19 lockdown helped it soar. The company acquired smaller games to build its portfolio and make money through them. “Up until November 2020, our portfolio on Google Play Store had 40 games with over 100 million downloads,” Malankar said. The portfolio generated about $40,000 every month for the firm until October. Now, it is building another portfolio, which is expected to bring about $25,000 a month in about four months, he said. The combined capital from these portfolios, game development services and a separate crowd funding campaign on the Mumbai Gullies website are driving the game’s development and operational costs. Malankar said that the entire project is estimated to cost about Rs 21 crore. The company is currently not in talks with external investors to raise capital”, Malankar said.
Conclusion:
According to Nikhil, the game is expected to enter the testing phase by the end of 2022. The game will be sold digitally on Steam and Epic Games, with multiple DLCs and will be available in basic, silver, gold editions. The studio is also in talks with a distributor for the sale of physical copies. “The sales we want to achieve to break even on this project are around 4.2 lakh copies. So, if we are able to cross that mark, its profit for us, and India’s population is much more than that,” Malankar said.
