| MUMBAI:
PC World, India’s prestigious IT magazine, has chosen Indya Games (http://games.indya.com
), the gaming section of India’s leading entertainment website, www.indya.com,
as the Best Indian Gaming site of 2008. Indya Games was chosen as a part of their
annual PCWorld Web Awards. Indya
Games’ “brilliant design, eye-catching layout and well-categorised sections”
gave it an edge over its competitors. It was also adjudged as having the best
design among all the Indian gaming sites and won a special mention for its catalogue
of desi games and its “emphasis for providing games with an Indian context”.
Indya
Games is the gaming section of Indya.com, STAR India Pvt. Ltd.’s internet
initiative which is the leading entertainment portal in India. Indya.com has,
in the recent past, partnered with ICC to develop the ICC Cricket World Cup and
Champions Trophy tournaments online. Star India has recently launched the beta
version of Starboxoffice.com. Starboxoffice.com aims to become the number one
movie website in the country where users can keep pace with the latest from Bollywood,
know the latest celebrity scoops and get a chance to interact with their favourite
movie stars. Speaking
on this achievement, Gurtej Sandhu, SVP New Media, Star TV, said, “Indya.com
is India's premier entertainment portal. It aims to be a destination for building
communities online who are bound by a common love for Bollywood and television.
Indya Games aims to enhance this experience by offering its users a delightful
mix of topical and desi games which are fun to play and have a high degree of
relevance in the Indian context. The success of Indya Games vindicates our approach
with respect to game selection and choice of overall user interface, both of which
combine to offer a superior gaming environment. The success of Indya games has
prompted the launch of the ‘Timepass’ section of Starboxoffice.com which
will be an online treasure trove of light hearted entertainment and promises to
keep the users hooked and it will contribute significantly to our community building
approach in the future. “ An
interesting aspect of Indya Games is that it has been designed to be really sticky.
The games are really addictive and very topical. Also, from a point of view of
technology, the site is very light and the least complicated to work on. Being
light, the site loads the fastest and it’s compatible to all browsers and
networks. The primary dictum that was followed for the site design was –
ease of navigation and friendly user interface. The site is very simple to navigate,
mostly single key navigations. The
site’s USP is the Desi section which contains games that would appeal to
Indians across the globe. The ‘Desi’ games which attract the most number
of gamers are – Gully Cricket, Encounter Specialist, Dabbawalla International,
Dungfoo Donkey, Macchar Maaro, Prince of Kurukshetra, Bombay Taxi, Agent 420 etc.
The games section
of Indya gets around 100,000 regular visits every month. Since Indya is not a
dedicated gaming site, the traffic to the games section is less when compared
to the overall traffic that comes to Indya.com – approx. 11 million page
views (Analytics data). When compared to the other sites, the games section of
Indya.com will rank second (Zapak being the leaders) in terms of traffic (Source:
Alexa.com). | 
