In early 2008, at games2win.com, we had created a huge hit game called ‘Bombay Taxi’. It was a really funny flash game that challenged you to park a Black and Yellow taxi in the crowded streets of Mumbai while overcoming obstacles like beggars, kite fliers, local trains and elephants. And in a typical Internet style, we began receiving massive traffic to our portal via viral traffic – especially from USA and EU since Bombay Taxi was a classic parking game blended in a new exotic theme.
Just after the huge spurt of traffic, I was shocked to notice that visitors suddenly disappeared – almost like they had fallen off a cliff. This was not typical – traffic always tapers down and then plateaus out, so I decided to investigate. When I typed ‘Bombay Taxi Online Game’ on Google, I was shocked to find that overnight almost 400 websites had stolen our game and embedded it on their portals. These thieves had sniffed out a good game and now were enjoying traffic on their own sites thanks to our hard work!
My partner Mahesh Khambadkone and I huddled in our corner office conference room and brooded. This was a disaster. Each time we would make a hit game, thieves would steal it and we would never reap the benefits of tsunami like viral traffic. Flash files could not be protected and this was a big blow to our business model since we relied on advertising on our site to make us $$$. Also DRM (digital rights management) for flash games was really not a successful technology.
This led us to apply a thought process model at 2win group that we call “mental demolition”. Essentially it converts ‘how things are’ to ‘how things can become’.
Just demolish each fact and event and build it into something that works for you.
So, we realized:
- Why do things get stolen?
- Because they have value… no one steals the dirt of the streets and takes it home. So one big positive was that we had created some great content that the world loved to take home.
- The sheer number of websites that had stolen our game in 3 days overwhelmed us. This proved that there was a massive distribution opportunity for our games amongst sites we had never heard of before.
- What was really hurting us? The fact that we were missing on the ad revenues that these stolen games were generating on the pirate site.
- Was protection ever going to work? Everyone we knew had pirated music and videos and films from all over the Internet. Protecting IP was futile on the Internet.
In a brain wracking session, there was a flash of inspiration and a ‘Eureka’ moment: We plotted to create a technology that would allow us to place INVISIBLE ads in our games (for the pirates not to notice them) that would then travel along with the game to the pirate sites and become automatically VISIBLE when the game played there!
We actually cracked this technology (MK and I are the inventors in our patent filing), and the games2win.com business changed dramatically after that day. To give you a perspective, we now touch 15-20 million users via Inviziads each month (comScore May data – extended web). These ads are fully controlled by us and we change and sell the ads as per our control in each of the 160 countries the games have been stolen in. Over 8900 websites have stolen our games and new websites get added each day. Games2win from zero has become a top 50 global games business (comScore online games ranking May 2010) thanks to the traffic we pull into our sites via inviziads! Internally, we now benchmark a game’s success by how many websites have stolen it!
Look at the love triangle – Pirates love our content and steal our games. We love ads and place ‘invisible to visible’ ads in our games. Consumers love games and they play them on all kinds of websites all over the world!!
Players such as Viacom, Ubisoft and Warner Brothers now license Inviziads and you can study the business model on www.inviziads.com.
What are the lessons for entrepreneurs and start ups in this story?
- Try and create gold from dust. If you have a problem that is destroying you, look at it using a prism that could turn it to an advantage. I always feel that if Virgin Music and EMI etc., would have bought Napster (instead of suing it and closing it down) and then converted the site into their official mp3 website, iTunes would have been a me-too and not the gorilla it is today
- Understand and accept the eco-system. If the internet is about piracy and lifting, flow with it – don’t fight it
- Foes can be Friends just by a flick of a switch. Think of everyone as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide. Make your enemies work for you
Remember that winning the nuclear war in planet start up requires not just creativity and innovation but the ability to mentally demolish and rebuild yourself from scratch.
Kill Osama Bin Laden - The Game
UPDATE – 12th May 2011
Our Kill Osama Game has become the MOST Pirated Game from our Network to date. On rough count, its been stolen by approx. 192 websites so far.
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Another big lesson is “Don’t fight the system blaming it, be a part of it and correct it in an innovative way”. This applied from the HR room to the PM room.
Dropping you an email. Thanks.
Hi,
I have recently got to know about your posts and they are extremely informative and interesting.
In your case, games have a repeat value and people would like to play them again and again but I am not sure whether other things in the world having only one time usage value (like movies, songs etc) are going to get benefited from hacking or piracy.
Inviziads is a brilliant idea which works well in this case and it can be adapted in similar formats but what other piracy-affected businesses should do?
Regards.
I had seen you give a talk on the same subject at Proto 2009. Simply terrific to revisit it again on this post, and fantastic advice at the end. Don’t fight (Fight Club?) is embedded in ages.old philosophy, interpreted and presented in various forms, “you don’t fight the world, you fight yourself to win”. Same holds true for startups as well.
Kudos to you for coming up with the solution, it seems a shame that you decided to file for patent, though.
a vc compulsion
Great story and I never thought that checking where the file is being loaded at with a simple indexof(“….”) could be used to “ceate” a new technology. We have done this for years for our clients who need the content to be allowed to be used only on their sites.
So if I understand your post correctly if your patent goes through I won’t be able to apply this “technology” to offer it to our clients?
While the technique is very efficient and interesting, filing for a patent is in my opinion pointless considering there is prior art available, mochi ads have been doing that for ages allowing you to control on which domain you want to show or hide your ads, as can been seen on their ads api page. It would be a shame if the patent was granted.
We are not pursuing the patent…for the reasons mentioned by you and also that its to expensive and onerous to try and win it given its universal usage under some new variation.
great concept. superb article too.
learnt a lot from it.
Just the information I’m exploring these days. Which city are you based out of Alok?
One and only….Mumbai
Nice post Alok
You really deserve the position you are in right now.
As yes please keep posting your experience and learning like this
Ha ha !!!!.
Alok, you used the concept of a parasite.
Parasite is basically which sits on top of a host. It may be visible as well as invisible.
So, you people developed a technology to nurture parasites.
Creative & Good Innovation.
Interesting thought. . .I will have to ponder that a little more to get a better understanding.