Founded by partners Asim Basnet and Prakash Shrestha in 2018, Dark Matter Production specialises in developing mobile games, a market still in its infancy in Nepal. Based in Chitwan, the company currently employs six team members and recently secured an investment pledge of Rs 15 million at CNIYEF Nepal StartUp Fest 2022 organised by the Confederation of Nepalese Industries Young Entrepreneurs Forum. Co-founder of Dark Matter Production, Basnet spoke with Sangay Sherpa of The Himalayan Times about the company, its plans as well as shared perspective on the gaming industry. Excerpts:
How did the journey for Dark Matter Production start and how is it going at present?
My partner and I joined an engineering college together but were disappointed due to the lack of implications programming had on our real life. Somewhere around in 2018, we came together for a chat and decided to do something on our own. As game aficionados ourselves, shifting toward game development was the choice for us as we saw a good scope and global outreach with prospects for the future in this industry.
With the decision made, we started developing a game called Sprite Ninja in 2018. While Prakash handled the programming side, I looked over works related to game designs. It was very difficult for us as the number of game developers was few to none at the time and we had no one to teach us the required art. The two of us learnt to make the game by taking online courses and with whatever information we could find over the internet. Gradually, the number of downloads for Sprite Ninja increased which led us to switch from part-time to fulltime game development. Although just the beta version of the game was released in the Play Store, it has been downloaded over 700,000 times while our other game has also crossed the 100,000 mark. We started hiring in 2020 and are currently focused on fine-tuning our games further, fixing bugs as well as updating the graphics.
What is your perspective on the gaming market and its prospects in Nepal?
In the case of having trained and skilled game developers in Nepal, games can be made very cheaply in the country.
Nepal is very inexpensive for making video games compared to others which allow for resources to be used in research and development to make the product better. Research is the key to a fine product. In the context of Israel, the gaming industry alone is worth $9 billion. As for Nepal, the gaming industry can surely contribute to the economy in case of a surge in game developers and better products.
How do events like CNIYEF Nepal StartUp Fest benefit a company like yours?
Entrepreneurship is key for a country's further development. There are many people in the country who have an idea or the urge to do something but fall short due to lack of capital. Such events and programmes can help start-ups reach exponential growth. Many western countries promote start-ups and in return, the start-ups contribute to their economy.
Such events can help young and new entrepreneurs to understand the market as many don't have any idea in their initial phases. For us, our company would have been limited to just Chitwan without the StartUp Fest. It also helped to boost our confidence and taught us a great deal regarding the country's market.
What is the next step for your company?
We introduced two games for mobile devices and are working towards further enhancing their user interface design and user experience in order to compete with the top games among the two categories. We will be updating the games very soon as they are still in their beta version and will be expanding our office to other cities after the ongoing project concludes.
Although we are making progress, the investment can surely help us to scale up our two products to compete at the global level. We have also planned to open a few studios in the country as well as increase our manpower to reach the goal. The investment will surely help us to achieve our goals faster than anticipated.
A version of this article appears in the print on September 1, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.