![]() John attributes his five year stint at Amber Point in Silicon Valley as being critical in understanding how important programming is in terms of game development. Article Continues Below - June Gaming’s origins: enterprise and educational softwareīefore we get to how and why MaskGun has captured public imagination, it would be interesting to look at what led to June’s creation and its influences. Download it and play with me! #playIndian #playMaskGun /hqgKw2Rs9d It’s called MaskGun and I am hooked to it. I had no idea we had such an amazing shooting game made in India. And now we’re getting these emails, which go to a new level, which are ‘are you Indian and are your investors also Indian and not Chinese?’” So when I respond, people will actually check me out, people actually go to a Google Maps page, find our office and see it see the photographs and say ‘ haan sir aap ka photograph dekha, aap Indian hi hoon’. “If I respond people, like really think like, some angrez or some gora guy sitting there writing to him because I got three first names, all Christian right? But I’m as desi as they come. “It’s like ‘ sir mujhe pata nahin tha yeh to India mein banaye, are you really Indian?’,” he says. The influx of new Indian users has also resulted in a slew of fan mail that’s indicative of the current wave of nationalist sentiment. We don’t really have to think about somebody to come and save us or try and buy games from other countries or republish them, which is really what’s happening on the internet.” I think we know how to make games in India already. “We’re not a PUBG alternative, we’ve not said any of those things,” he says. He’s careful about how MaskGun is perceived more so in the aftermath of PUBG Mobile’s ban in the country. ![]() While the current state and metrics of MaskGun’s player base may justify the company raising its profile, John is wary. At that point of time we felt we should be promoting our game in the country.” “Just before the PUBG ban, it was 20 to 25 percent. “We have seen 15 percent of our audience was Indian until July this year,” he says. However it doesn’t mean gamers in the country haven’t taken notice. With the priority being building the right team and sustaining its existing audience, it’s no surprise that June has been quiet. “We made some money on another game of ours and got him to make MaskGun look good,” Roby says. It finally came into its own after Alfonzo ‘Zo’ Burton, a UI developer on Glu’s Deer Hunter came on board for a spell. It was quickly superseded by a Counter-Strike inspired look and then what’s described as the game’s “Vainglory phase” borrowing UI cues from the popular mobile MOBA. The game has gone through several iterations over the years, with an early version sporting fonts akin to Quake 3. Roby claims that the MaskGun team consists of developers from the likes of Ubisoft and Glu, with June going to lengths to find “the right people to help build a world-class shooter”. We soft-launched in 2016 with a four-person team that’s now grown to 30 plus with all that experience in making a shooter game through various trials and errors.” “One of the advantages of just having a little bit of success on the shooter team was that we’ve been able to scale our team. “We started shipping a whole lot more content and brought the game back to our original vision of what a modern mobile shooter would look like,” he says. In May of this year, June decided to publish the game itself. Article Continues Below - MaskGun is built for the world and now played in India ![]() “It led to a million installs in the first week when we launched globally. “We had pre-launch registrations open on Google Play and organically we had 3.5 million pre-registrations,” he says. The reason for this, he believes, boiled down to the timing of its release. On debut MaskGun was the 8th biggest title in the Play Store’s games category. “We finally released it worldwide on Januand the response was incredible.” “We kept it in soft-launch for three years,” John says of MaskGun’s development. So I caught up with June Gaming CEO Roby John over a video call to find out more. It’s been half a decade since the original reveal and the mobile game landscape has changed tremendously, it made me wonder what June is doing differently with MaskGun that would make it stand out. That is of course, until I chanced upon a tweet talking up the game in what was an obvious plug. Since that polished demo, June Gaming has said little. Back then, the game sported a look not too dissimilar to Counter-Strike and for the time, had an interesting solution to make aiming easier. A multiplayer first-person shooter developed by Pune-based June Gaming, I tried it out for myself at 2015’s Pocket Gamer Connects - a mobile game developer conference held in Bengaluru. Before PUBG Mobile and Fortnite blew up, there was MaskGun.
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