To cash in on the IPL craze, Chennai-based multimedia publisher Nextwave has launched a mobile game 'Battle of Chepauk' that is officially endorsed by the city's IPL franchise Chennai Super Kings.
‘Battle of Chepauk’, featuring the CSK players, the ‘Whistle Podu’ anthem and the sounds of the boisterous crowd in the stadium, is available on Google Play, the Android App store, in two versions: the lite version where the players can play the Super Over slog; and the paid version which allows them to play Super Slog and Super chase formats too. (The paid version can be purchased “in-app” at U.S. $2.99).
The game was launched by CSK's Captain Cool M.S. Dhoni and coach Stephen Fleming just before the launch of the IPL, and has since been featured on the official website of the IPL franchise. As a special bonus, those who score heavily on the leader boards of the game will get surprise gifts from CSK.
Cricket games rule
Nextwave already has a slew of cricket games across mobile and desktop platforms and are no strangers to cricket games. In fact, some of their earlier cricket games are bestsellers on iOS, Android and Mac platforms.
The games run on the acclaimed game engine Unity that powers some of the best mobile games around, including the likes of Splice: Tree of Life and Temple Run: Brave and Bad Piggies. Nextwave director P. R. Rajendran said though the company had published several other cricket games, ‘Battle ofChepauk’ was built from scratch.
The free version of the game, which this writer downloaded from Google Play store, played smoothly and was a lot of fun, especially if you are a fan of CSK and its anthem.
Nextwave is hoping to replicate its success with its flagship cricket game World Cricket Championship, which has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times across platforms. It has been among the top 10 paid downloads on Mac platform in India for more than six months, and also figures in the top downloads from the Samsung Apps store.
The mobile game seems to have caught the fancy of more male users than female. The analytics break-up shows that 94.7 per cent of users are men.
