Vishal is the founder and CEO of Indiagames.com, a company that develops and publishes games in India. He is the head of a team of around 300 people which includes graphic designers, gaming testers and gaming developers. His company outsources some work to Eastern Europe, USA and China. He has offices in Mumbai, Beijing, London and Los Angeles.

But did you know that he created his first game (Pacman Clone) at the age of 14? He started his company FACT (Futura Academy of Computer Technology) in 1993 in a garage with just three computers in Chembur, Mumbai. He used to teach students software programming, multimedia, etc.

Just a second, I missed one thing… in 1993 he was just 16. I mean to say, he started his company at the age of 16, just after finishing high school. Needless to say, he is a passionate gamer and used to play games all night long.

In 1997, he started developing games for advertisements. He went from company to company asking themes to create games. His first project was for Pepsi. He has also developed the scoring system for Femina Miss India contest. He launched a games website ‘Indiagames.com’ in 1997 as he wanted to capture the Indian gaming market. He had realised that there is immense scope for India-based games. He designed ‘I Love India’ a game based on Kargil war, where a player has to shoot terrorists who were trying to cross LOC. This game was an instant hit.

Indiagames.com was a very small venture with just five people operating it, until Vishal was contacted by two investment bankers from PricewaterhouseCoopers. They told Vishal that they will arrange for Venture Capitalists, who will provide him capital for expanding his company and in return these VC’s will take a stake in his company. PwC said that they will charge him for the success fee only if they are able to get the funds for him. An amount of 3.5 crores was arranged from VC’s, which was used for expansion of office and around 40 people were hired. Vishal was quite conservative in spending money, reason for this was unknown to himself. The famous dotcom bust made him to think of shutting down the online gaming and move to mobile gaming. However, the other board members wanted to go with providing services to foreign companies. So for some time, they were Service Providers also.

But there was something missing and Vishal knew what that thing was. He knew that he needed to come out with a few products in the market. He needed to license a character, develop a game and distribute it. However, choosing the character was a very difficult task. If the character were to fail in attracting gamers, they would lose big time. In the end of 2003, Spiderman-2 was set to be released. Vishal contacted Marvel comics and managed to get the worldwide license for Spidey. The game was released in 60 countries in 6 languages. Later, he acquired licenses for Bruce Lee, Jurassic Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mask. Their revenues from game publishing have increased 10-fold.

Indiagames.com has partnership with nearly all major game publishers in the world. They have distribution deals with firms like Popcap, Atari, Codemaster Playfirst, and Activision. They also work with Qualcomm and Microsoft to give their games a cutting edge. Recently UTV has bought a majority stake in Indiagames.com. UTV has launched a channel ‘Bindass’ to tap the youth market. Vishal feels that combining Indiagames.com efforts with Bindass will be beneficial for the company in tapping the youth market.

Vishal’s dream is to give e-sports, the recognition of a sport. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, before breaking your head thinking about a unique or the latest business idea, just take two minutes and ask yourself, ‘do you have any hobby and are you passionate about it?’. Why don’t you give your passion a chance, may be it’s the best business idea for you.