Bharti Airtel launches Wynk Games

After the success of music and movie streaming businesses, Bharti Airtel today announced the beta launch of Wynk Games with a library of over 2,000 global and local games.

The gaming app is the latest OTT (over-ther-top) addition to Airtel's content portfolio which will be free for its internet subscribers and paid for customers of other network.

Bharti Airtel Director for Consumer Business Srini Gopalan said that Wynk Games is a way to get past the pain of unlocking levels in a game or having to download it to find out what the game is like. The app is currently available as an APK file on the website. That means you'll have to install it manually by allowing installs of APKs from unknown sources. Why couldn't Airtel wait a little longer for Play Store to allow the download of the app? We suspect Reliance Jio, that just launched their 4G services for employees had something to do with that.

For Wynk Games, the telecom major has tied up with Playphone Inc, a global leader in mobile social gaming. The apps will be available to Airtel customers for free and people on other carriers can subscribe for a price of ₹ 29 according the announcement on December 29.

"Like Wynk Music and Wynk Movies, customers using Wynk Games can download games and play them offline. Wynk Games is also an ad-free application, thus delivering the best experience for avid gamers", Bharti Airtel Wynk CEO Kartik Sheth said.

Airtel started Wynk with music streaming service and now claims to have over 15 million downloads, of which only one third are from Airtel users.

"When we launched Wynk Music we realised people either use pirated music often infested with malware or go for highly paid services. We addressed the issue on both side with Wynk Music. There were free songs available but people opted for Wynk. It has helped over all category to grow," Gopalan said.

Which is also the case with games. Cracked APKs that download over the internte are likely to have a malicious APK s piggybacking on them. Amazon's app store works on similar features and isn't available on the Playstore either. Probably because Google doesn't want you to have access to an alternative app store. He said also said that the music application category has grown substantially with consumption having grown 50 times over the last 18 months.

"Wynk Games application, bundled with Airtel data packs aims to similarly stimulate consumption of this category," Gopalan said.

California-based Playphone Chief Executive Ron Czerny said, "together with Bharti Airtel we are bundling Wynk Games with data packs. New games will be added daily from global developers."

The catalogue currently includes games from about 150 developers including top global developers like Square Enix, Zeptolab, Thumbstar, Tresensa, Bulkypix and more.