roby
Let's talk
← portfolio
Worlds · Shooters · 2024

Indus Battle Royale

~/work/indus/
Indus Battle Royale
Launch
16 October 2024, India
Role
Co-founder & CEO
Scale
10M+ installs · 10M pre-registrations
Honours
Google Play Best of 2024 — Best Made in India
Called
"The Wakanda of India"

The idea

An Indo-futuristic battle royale built from Indian art, culture and stories — an Apex-like shooter for mobile, on the Nasdaq tower in Times Square two years before it launched.

Going to the ground

We met players before we had a game to sell: Comic-Con playtests in Bengaluru and Delhi, a city playtest in Surat where kids skipped tuition to play, a 21-city tour where 10,000 players met us face to face. In Raipur and Lucknow, fans drove 200 km for a two-hour meetup.

Launch night

#1 on the App Store. Three million installs in six days. 750K daily players at peak, servers hitting rate limits, and the team in the war room till morning. And a real lesson: we had built Apex-level complexity, and the audience that arrived was Free Fire's.

Fixing it in public

We shipped against player feedback every week. The store rating went from 3.1 to 4.0 in ninety days. Then we took the same world to Brazil and the Middle East as Prime Rush.

Indus Battle Royale
Indus Battle Royale
Indus Battle Royale
coffee, a walk, or a hard problem?

Let's make something

Find me at the SPC office in Bengaluru, usually Wednesdays. Coffee, a walk, hacking user acquisition — all yes.

Line drawing of Roby John
I'm Roby
games · learning · the company
Message Me