Interview with Priti Pundir, Partner & VP Sales - Logic Simplified

Priti Pundir  

Partner & VP Sales, Logic Simplified

Give us a quick overview on Logic Simplified. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?

Logic Simplified started operations as a Game Studio in 2011 with a handful of skilled game designers and developers having the passion to create a niche in the game development industry. Soon, Logic Simplified started developing its First Game IP – Gamentio.com (Multiplatform Social Card Game Portal) and also offered off-shore game consultation and development services and teams for clients across the globe. We successfully made Gamentio live while building games for global clients many of whom came to us with just an Idea and we made it a reality for them. We have scaled our team to 80+ professional and skilled members now catering to all aspects of game development processes.

What is your role in the management and development of Logic Simplified?

Being a Partner of this Studio, I regularly participate in board of management for review and important decisions for the company such as revenue forecasting, budgeting, resourcing, team build-ups, and quarterly review of company performance. 

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry

Architected & Developed Gamentio.com portal with 1 Million hits a day. We started with the idea to develop the first 3D Social Casino games portal and offer it as a multi-platform experience across mobile devices and browsers. Working diligently over the years successfully scaled the portal with 1 million hits a day and growing. 

How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?

We follow the incremental model in Agile development methodology, where there are Sprints/releases divided in the life-cycle of the project. This ensures that the client receives regular planned updates of the product to be developed and the review cycle is short, these things have significantly factored in to keep the timeline on schedule for us. This methodology gets over the idea of providing a finished product towards the very end of a project as it is bound to consume a lot of time at the end to review and may even require reinventing the wheel. Our approach has helped our clients not just build their games on time but also reduce the time to market.

How do you help your clients in choosing the right and profitable platform for app development?

During the pre-sales ideation and analysis of the project, our game consultants work with the client in identifying the market, target audience and platforms they are trying to reach out to with their app. If a game targets multiple platforms, we suggest a cross-platform framework to easily port and scale. For games with high-fidelity graphics like shooting and action games, we recommend Game engines like UNITY3D or UnReal Engine . The final call is always of clients but we work as a consultant to assist them in reaching a decision.

Which would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, Native or hybrid apps? How do you define the factors that influenced you to make this choice?

Around 5-6 years back, Hybrid technologies were quite nascent and it somewhat had limitations in building apps in hybrid. However, today we are seeing that both Native and Hybrid apps are being developed in the industry quite comparatively. Before we develop any apps, we consult the client on their preferences. Some may want to develop it as native to give a seamless experience to their end clients and not worry about hybrid technologies and their limitations. While others such as startups want to keep the costs low initially and choose a hybrid app as it is faster and less expensive to develop. There are other factors like if the requirements of the app are such that it needs to be integrated with a third party library for which Hybrid integration is not available then the obvious choice is to go for native development.

How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget? 

We, like others, have a rate card in the company which is proportional to a developers/designers experience. This rate card is fixed and we share it with every client and then based on the project whether it is fixed price or time & material the relative cost is calculated, we do like to keep 20-25% as company margin of this cost.

How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?

That’s a good question because we are not just a team of game developers, we also offer game consulting services to our clients based on the industry trends and competition landscape. Our team’s rich experience in what works in mobile gaming industry and what doesn’t has helped many of our clients add significant value to their businesses. You can understand how much we believe in understanding our clients’ businesses to enhance the final output with an example of a kids’ learning app which we are currently building and for which we have hired a licensed child psychologist. The motive here is to make learning super easy and highly effective through animated games and digital lessons accessible through an app.

What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?

We have a clear escalation matrix that is shared with the client right from the beginning. Clients can use the matrix and escalate things and be assured of corrective actions and responses to be addressed. Working in an offshore model, we understand that it’s a virtual work environment out there, and hence to gain confidence and trust of client, in addition to team members we also assign Account Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst and Team Lead. These members bring unique set of skills which is used in catering to client management, accountability and satisfaction to the best of their abilities.

How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?

To keep pace with new technology, systems and processes, we are constantly looking to improve our efficiency, ensure quality and make the time to market shortest. This has helped us keep our clients at the forefront of innovation and in sync with the evolving technology. The early adaptation of DevOps and DevSecOps models by us was the result of this thought process only. With these approaches, we are able to automate the delivery processes, shorten the development lifecycle and ensure high quality while at the same time we encourage and give free time to our team to update their skills and build knowledge to meet the ever increasing and ever more sophisticated demands of tomorrow.

What are your thoughts about AR, VR and Internet of Things (IoT)?

AR – AR is really growing and our skills in OpenCV, Neural Nets and complex vision algorithms have already helped us create wonderful solutions for clients. We have worked from simple marker based teaching games where things pop up and dance on books or boards (when looked through the phone) to complex AR applications on Snooker. We keep getting enquiries about iPad based AR card games as well, so things sure are getting exciting on the AR front.

VR – VR mostly requires designing skills, environment artists and 3D modelers and we have excellent people for it. Having said that, I think VR is still at an early stage and still requires a lot of professional work in order to progress into full scale adoption and production. Nevertheless, I'd say that in 3-5 years, VR will become the norm, if not the standard, for games and entertainment.

IoT – We see a lot of scope in this field because it covers the widest range of solutions that directly impacts day to day goings-on of the world. Right from the households, to supply chains to MNCs and governments, IoT has a lot to offer to each sphere of life. We think if anyone in our industry doesn’t adapt and cater to the problems that IoT promises to solve, they will be left behind.

What do you think will be the future of Mobile Game technology? 

Mobile gaming technology is seeing a tremendous growth and ever increasing. Today, we do see mobiles devices which come with heavy power packed hardware that they eclipse out certain basic computers. As the world changes, we will see more and more businesses and brands offering entertainment and client-engagements through mobile platforms either for their existing legacy systems or creating a fresh mobile app. We have seen mobile multiplayer games like PUBG, Fortnite or Pokemon Go gain overwhelming popularity across countries and ages. More recently in the Covid-19 lockdown, we have also seen trends where apps like Indian Govt. app Arogya Setu became the top used app in the country, this app is a purely informative app and people are using it to stay safe. Similarly, Collaborative video call apps like Google, Whatsapp, Facebook have updated or enhanced their apps to facilitate more users to have video calls features.

Summing up, there will always be a need for a novel product in the market depending upon its necessity, entertainment value, easy information sharing, and collaborative ideas to manifest into easy, efficient, secure and fun solutions and we are ready to be part of this exciting time for mobile applications.