April 21st, 2016
Nazara Games, a mobile game developer and publisher in India, has invested in London-based mobile game studio Mastermind Sports.
India is a small but fast-growing game market, and Nazara wants to be the leader in that growth. The amount of the investment wasn’t disclosed, but Nazara will have a 26 percent stake.
Mumbai-based Nazara has also launched CricBet, a real-time prediction-based cricket game that sports fans can play while watching events on TV.
Mastermind Sports developed CricBet as a “second screen experience,” where you can watch a cricket match and make predictions in the mobile game on what will happen next.
Game entrepreneur Tom McCall and Bangalore tech entrepreneur Pratik Shah started Mastermind Sports to focus on second-screen apps. They spent two years building a real-time prediction platform.
“We aim to use our sports and technology insights to create mobile games that engage fans during live matches, enhancing the experience with their friends and family without geographical constraints,” McCall said in a statement.
Nazara also recently invested in London-based gaming studio Truly Social.
Shah, cofounder and chief technology officer of Mastermind Sports, said in a statement, “The platform’s intelligent engine adapts to the ebbs and flows of a live match, ensuring the most accurate and insightful gaming experience possible. Our games, led by CricBet, are designed to truly test fans ability to predict what is about to happen. Something that every sports fan professes to do best.”
Manish Agarwal, CEO of Nazara, said in a statement, “We at Nazara believe that second screen experience via mobile phones would convert a passive activity of watching TV into a highly interactive activity. Our investment in Mastermind Sports is to enable deeply engaged fans to have a real time social second screen experience and amplify the fun of watching matches with friends cutting across geographical constraints.”
CricBet has eight prediction markets where fans can bet on things like where will the next boundary be scored, how many runs off the next over, and whether a batsman will score over 50.
