Vikash Jaiswal doesn't think so. The Mumbai-based entrepreneur founded Gametion in 2009, and he is now making hay while the sun shines as his company sees unprecedented success. Jaiswal attributes the surge in numbers to the country's societal structure wherein children, their parents and grandparents often live under the same roof. He says, "Before the lockdown, you would typically have the youngsters playing action-packed games alone on their phones, while their mothers played Candy Crush for instance. But now, Ludo King has become an option to spend time together. The way it is built is another reason for its popularity. There is a lot of mental effort that goes into strategy-based games. But Ludo is more about luck really, so you can have fun without thinking too much about it. Dimaag mein zyada bhaari nahi padta hain. And if you think that you are a champion because you play a lot of it, you are wrong because even a kid can beat you in the next game."

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Jaiswal adds that this is one of the reasons why he modified the rules to include a six-player version, so that bachche, maa-baap and nana-nani can all join in. And he says that friends are also using the game as a tool to connect with each other during the lockdown, which reflects in the internal data they have gathered over the past two months. "Earlier, if there were 10 lakh players in the open lobby — i.e. strangers competing with each other — the 'play with friends' mode would have 1 lakh users. That trend has been reversed. If there are 6 lakh people in the open lobby now between the peak hours of 8 pm and 9 pm, there are 12 lakh others who are playing with friends," he reveals, saying that these figures are meant to only share a sense of which way the wind is blowing.

Vikash Jaiswal

And his hypotheses are right, if we go by the reasons why avid gamer Dhruv Gupta took to Ludo King during the lockdown. The Andheri resident says that he initially started playing it because he associates Ludo with his childhood, as is the case generally in India, like we mentioned before. "I found it better than a high-graphics game like PubG because it's simple, but still gets your heartbeat up," the 27-year-old says, adding that he's played it often with his friends during the lockdown. Gupta admits, however, that he eventually stopped because he felt that the algorithm was rigged to make the game more competitive and favour paying customers.

That is an allegation that Jaiswal will have to look into, though he tells us that his team is working on introducing new features like tournaments and audio chats in the 'play with friends' mode. But meanwhile, fact remains that the game he built with a company that started with a handful of employees from a small office in Khargarh has taken the entire country by storm. The numbers are on Jaiswal's side. Fifty-one million — that's 5 crore — daily active users is a figure you just can't trifle with.

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