After launching its own apps, Wynk for music and movies, Bharti Airtel on Tuesday forayed into games. The fourth-biggest data driver is trying to broaden the offering to its 4G subscribers as the company prepares to face competition from the launch of Reliance Jio in the next few months.
About 7% of mobile internet users are into gaming apps, after music and movies, browsing and social networking on cellphones, Karthik Seth, chief executive of Wynk at Bharti Airtel said.
Bharti has partnered with US-based Payphone, a Softbank-funded company, for its Wynk Games, following similar strategy of partnering with content providers for music and movies, he said.
Wynk Games, will be a operator-agnostic mobile app, and comes with 2,000 global and local games including many premium and paid games, spread across cricket, sports, racing, adventure, cards, kids, and puzzle genres. The subscription fee for the app is fixed at `99 per month, but it will be free for Bharti Airtel users and will come along with data packs now. For others, the app is now being launched with a trial subscription fee of `29, Seth said.
The launch of the gaming app on Wynk platform comes after its music and movies app got a better response from consumers, he said. Wynk Music currently has 8 million downloads a day now from about a million in April when it launched, Seth said, and added that Wynk Games is aimed to follow the trend of stimulating consumption of games.
Unlike its other apps, users can download games and play the advertisement-free Wynk Games offline, he added.