Startup Deep Dive : 99Games — a Bollywood tie-in made it famous, a cooking sim kept it alive

In three months flat in late 2013, ten million people downloaded a mobile game built around a Bollywood heist film. That game, Dhoom:3 The Game, made a small studio in the coastal Karnataka town of Udupi a name in Indian mobile gaming overnight. Yet the title that actually paid the bills for the next decade was not the movie tie-in at all — it was a cooking simulator called Star Chef, which quietly crossed $30 million in lifetime revenue by June 2020, according to the company, while the studio itself went from a Robosoft subsidiary to an independent company to a business now reporting shrinking revenue three years running.

That is the story of 99Games: a studio that won its first fame from a licensed film property and its longest run from a slow-building original franchise, only to hit the same wall that has caught most of India’s early mobile-first developers — a hit does not compound into a business on its own.

Quick facts

What they do

99Games is a mobile-first games studio based in Udupi that builds free-to-play titles for iOS and Android, monetised through in-app purchases rather than upfront pricing. Its output splits into two lines: original casual and simulation titles it owns outright, led by the cooking-and-restaurant-management franchise Star Chef and its 2020 sequel Star Chef 2, and licensed games built around Indian film properties, most notably Dhoom:3 The Game and Sultan: The Game, produced under agreements with studios such as Yash Raj Films. The company has published more than 22 titles over its life and has, at various points, cited cumulative downloads ranging from 80 million (as of June 2020, per PRNewswire) to over 100 million (per its own later company materials). Its players are split across a global freemium audience for the original titles — the US was its largest market by revenue as of 2015, with Japan and Southeast Asia growing in importance after localisation — and a domestic Indian audience for the film-licensed games.

The origin

The founding insight did not start with games. Rohith Bhat, an engineering graduate, built Robosoft Technologies in 1996 as a software house for the Macintosh ecosystem, at a time when almost no Indian firm bet on Apple’s platform. When Apple opened the App Store in 2008, Bhat’s team read it the same way they had read the early Mac market: an unglamorous new distribution channel that incumbents were ignoring. 99Games was set up that year as Robosoft’s mobile-games arm, run by a small group with no prior track record in games, betting that the App Store would do for game distribution what it had done for software. The studio’s own account of its history describes the founding team as “a handful of naive yet passionate people” chasing an opportunity nobody else in Udupi was chasing (99games.in company history).

The struggle years

The first two years did not validate the bet. In 2008, 99Games shipped a run of chess and jigsaw titles — Chess Lite, Chess Pro, Chess Elite, Aqua Jigsaw, Jigsaw Wild — that together drew barely 55,000 combined installs, a rounding error even by the App Store’s early standards. One title, the word game WordsWorth, broke out to roughly a million lifetime installs and a Pocket Gamer Silver Award, proving the team could build something people wanted, but it was the exception (99games.in company history).

The following two years were worse before they turned. Between 2009 and 2010, the studio released a string of titles — Wordulous, Fish Fun, Christmas Sudoku, Pocket Clinic, Cupid Strikes — that the company’s own history describes as unsuccessful, forcing a strategic reassessment of what the studio was building and for whom. It took a licensed puzzle title, The Jim and Frank Mysteries: The Blood River Files, published through UK publisher Chillingo in 2010, to give the team an award-winning credit and a working relationship with a bigger publishing partner, before 99Games returned to original freemium design with Dream Star in 2012 (around 850,000 installs) — its first attempt at the free-to-play model that would define the studio from then on (99games.in company history).

The turning point

The break came from outside the games industry. At FICCI-FRAMES in Mumbai in 2013, YRF Movies approached 99Games with a proposal to build a mobile game around the upcoming Bollywood sequel Dhoom:3. The studio took the licensing deal, built Dhoom:3 The Game and Dhoom:3 Jet Speed around the film’s release, and launched with Microsoft sponsoring a dedicated Windows Phone version. The result was immediate: Dhoom:3 The Game crossed 10 million downloads across mobile platforms within three months of its late-2013 release — more than seven million on smartphones and over three million on feature phones — and became the first mobile game to pass a million downloads on the Indian Windows Phone Store (PRNewswire; DNA India). Before the deal, 99Games was a studio with a handful of modest original titles and no mainstream recognition; after it, the studio had a mass-market Indian audience and enough credibility to pitch its next, and ultimately more durable, bet: an original cooking game called Star Chef, piloted in Australia that December and launched worldwide in August 2014 (99games.in company history).

The money behind it

99Games’ capital history is unusually entangled with its parent company, and the two main trackers of Indian startup funding do not agree on the total raised.

• 2013, Series A: an initial institutional round, amount undisclosed (Tracxn).
• April 2015, Series B — $5 million: reported by PocketGamer as 99Games’ own raise, led by Ascent Capital with participation from Kalaari Capital. It came alongside a wider $12 million round raised by parent Robosoft Technologies from the same two investors, after which 99Games and sister company Global Delight were spun out as independent companies no longer dependent on Robosoft for funding (Medianama, April 2015).
• January 2017: a follow-on investment from Japanese investment firm Dream Incubator — its first India investment — alongside existing backers Kalaari Capital and Ascent Capital; the amount was not disclosed (Dream Incubator investor-relations release; Techseen).
• March 2019, Angel round: a further round from two investors, amount undisclosed (Tracxn).

Total raised is reported as $5 million across two rounds by Crunchbase and Inc42, or as $11.2 million across four rounds from 17 investors by Tracxn — the discrepancy likely reflects how each tracker attributes the shared Robosoft raise and the undisclosed 2017 and 2019 rounds, and neither figure has been independently confirmed by the company. What each backer changed is clearer than the cheque size: Ascent Capital and Kalaari Capital’s 2015 round funded the spin-out from Robosoft and near-shore expansion into the US, Europe and the Middle East; Dream Incubator’s 2017 entry gave 99Games a Japanese strategic partner just as Star Chef’s localisation into Japanese was turning the market into one of its top five by monetisation (PocketGamer, September 2017). No priced valuation from any round is public. Tracxn’s shareholding breakup shows founders holding roughly 28.8% of the company, institutional funds around 63.6%, angel investors 1.9%, and an ESOP pool of 5.3% — a cap table dominated by the funds that backed the 2015-2017 rounds.

How it makes money

99Games runs the standard free-to-play mobile model: games are free to download, and revenue comes from in-app purchases inside the game economy — extra currency, cosmetic and functional items, and event content — supplemented by advertising in some titles. The mechanics behind that model, as described by the company and industry press over the years, include:

• Money in: in-app purchases and, for licensed titles, revenue share arrangements tied to the film distributor’s brand and marketing push rather than a separate licence fee model disclosed publicly (99games.in; PRNewswire coverage of the Dhoom:3 launch).
• Costs out: user-acquisition spend to keep installs flowing, and a live-operations team to keep an ageing title monetising — Star Chef’s live-ops was run by a four-person team using in-house analytics tools three years after launch, alongside three parallel production lines, one dedicated to the flagship game and two building new titles (PocketGamer, September 2017).
• Where the margin sits: in retention and localisation rather than in initial downloads. 39% of Star Chef’s players returned on day one and 18% were still active on day 14 as of its three-year mark, a retention curve the studio used to justify continued spend on the same title rather than chasing new hits (PocketGamer, September 2017).
• External capital instead of new licences: for Star Chef 2’s June 2020 launch, 99Games did not raise fresh equity but instead partnered with US publisher N3TWORK, which funded user acquisition and scaling through its Scale Platform in exchange for a share of the game’s performance — capital tied to a single title rather than the company as a whole (PRNewswire, 3 June 2020).
• The part people get wrong: the studio’s fame rests on a licensed movie game that spiked and faded within a release cycle; the money was actually made over years by one original title (Star Chef) that most players outside India have never heard of, and that took until its third anniversary to be called a genuine commercial success by the company (PocketGamer, September 2017).

The numbers

99Games does not publish standalone profit-and-loss statements; the figures below are drawn from company-filing trackers that compile its Registrar of Companies filings. All figures in ₹ crore.

• FY23 revenue: ₹19.4 crore (Inc42 company filings data).
• FY24 revenue: ₹18.7 crore, a decline of roughly 3.6% from FY23 (Inc42).
• FY25 revenue: ₹13.3 crore, a decline of roughly 29% from FY24 — three straight years of falling revenue (Inc42).
• Net worth: Tofler’s filing-based summary records a large negative swing in net worth for the FY24 filing year, alongside a 23.6% decline in total assets and a 22.5% rise in borrowings — consistent with a company drawing down reserves or debt to cover an operating shortfall, though Tofler does not publish the underlying profit-and-loss line without a paid subscription.
• Capital base: authorised capital of ₹39.8 crore against paid-up capital of ₹11.6 crore (Tofler, based on Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings).

Where the money comes from

99Games has never published an exact revenue split by title or geography, but the public record points to a clear pattern: a small number of games and a shifting set of markets have carried a disproportionate share of the business at different points in its history.

• By title: Star Chef alone generated over $30 million in lifetime revenue by June 2020, on a portfolio the company put at 80 million-plus downloads across 22-plus titles the same year — meaning one seven-year-old game accounted for a large share of disclosed lifetime revenue even as dozens of other titles shipped around it (PRNewswire, 3 June 2020).
• By geography, early years: the US was 99Games’ largest revenue market as of the company’s April 2015 fundraise, which the company explicitly cited as the reason for building near-shore capability in the US, Europe and the Middle East (Medianama, April 2015).
• By geography, later years: Japan became a top-five monetising country for Star Chef after a dedicated localisation push, and Southeast Asia emerged as what the company called an unexpected major market once Thai and Chinese localisations shipped (PocketGamer, September 2017).
• By product type, domestic India: licensed film tie-ins — Dhoom:3 The Game, Dhoom:3 Jet Speed, Sultan: The Game — drove the studio’s Indian download volumes and brand recognition, exemplified by Dhoom:3’s 10 million downloads in three months, but these titles are tied to a single film’s release window rather than a renewable, ongoing revenue stream (PRNewswire; DNA India).
• The surprise: the game that made 99Games a household name in India (a Bollywood tie-in) was not the game that built its longest-running revenue line. That was an unglamorous cooking simulator built for a global, not Indian, audience.

The risks

• Three consecutive years of revenue decline with no disclosed profit: revenue fell from ₹19.4 crore in FY23 to ₹18.7 crore in FY24 to ₹13.3 crore in FY25, a cumulative drop of roughly a third in two years, while profit or loss for any of those years has not been made public (Inc42). Tofler’s filing summary additionally shows a sharp net-worth decline and rising borrowings in FY24, which together point to balance-sheet strain rather than a temporary dip.
• No new fundraise or major title in years: the last funding event on record is a March 2019 angel round (Tracxn), and the last major title launch on record is Star Chef 2 in June 2020 (PRNewswire) — a five-to-six-year gap in fresh capital and flagship releases in a genre (casual and simulation mobile games) where global players such as King and Playrix ship content continuously.
• Concentration in one franchise and one licence category: the studio’s clearest commercial proof point is a single game, Star Chef, and its clearest brand-recognition proof point is a single licensed film franchise, Dhoom. Both are exposed to the same risk — neither a decade-old freemium title nor a film-tie-in deal that depends on a studio renewing a licence is a guaranteed, renewable revenue base.
• Headcount data conflicts and trends downward: employee-count trackers disagree sharply — Tracxn puts headcount at 28 as of August 2025, down 56% year-on-year, while Inc42 and PitchBook separately estimate 68 to 76 employees around the same period. Even taking the higher estimates, none of the available trackers shows headcount growing, which is consistent with the declining revenue trend.

The takeaway

99Games’ two defining hits make an uncomfortable pair. Dhoom:3 The Game proved that a licensing deal with the right film, timed right, can manufacture ten million downloads in a single quarter — and that this kind of hit fades exactly as fast as the film’s own release window, because there is nothing to renew it once the movie leaves theatres. Star Chef proved the opposite: an unglamorous original game, localised patiently market by market and kept alive by a small live-operations team, can out-earn the flashier debut by tens of millions of dollars over most of a decade. The lesson that outlasts either title is not about mobile games specifically — it is that visibility and durability are usually built by different products, on different timelines, and a studio that mistakes the first for the second risks discovering, as 99Games’ own recent filings suggest, that neither one lasts forever without continued investment.

Frequently asked questions

What does 99Games do?

99Games is a Udupi-based mobile games studio that builds free-to-play titles for iOS and Android, monetised mainly through in-app purchases. Its portfolio spans original franchises, led by the cooking simulation Star Chef and its sequel Star Chef 2, and licensed Indian film tie-in games such as Dhoom:3 The Game and Sultan: The Game.

Who founded 99Games and when?

99Games was founded in 2008 by Rohith Bhat as a mobile-games subsidiary of Robosoft Technologies, the Mac-focused software company he had founded in 1996. It became an independent company in April 2015 after Robosoft’s $12 million Series B round from Ascent Capital and Kalaari Capital (Medianama).

How much funding has 99Games raised?

Reported figures conflict: Crunchbase and Inc42 put total funding at $5 million across two rounds, while Tracxn reports $11.2 million across four rounds and 17 investors, including Kalaari Capital, Ascent Capital and Japan’s Dream Incubator. No priced valuation from any round has been disclosed.

Is 99Games profitable?

The company has not disclosed profit-and-loss figures publicly. Filing-tracker Tofler records a sharp net-worth decline and rising borrowings for FY24, and Inc42’s revenue data shows revenue falling from ₹19.4 crore in FY23 to ₹13.3 crore in FY25 — trends consistent with financial strain, though the underlying profit or loss figure is not public.

What is 99Games’ most successful game?

By disclosed lifetime revenue, it is Star Chef, which the company said had generated over $30 million by June 2020, well ahead of the studio’s most downloaded title, Dhoom:3 The Game, which crossed 10 million downloads within three months of its 2013 launch but was tied to a single film’s release cycle.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• 99Games, “Know Our Story” company history page, 99games.in (accessed September 2026)
• Medianama, “Robosoft raises $12M from Ascent & Kalaari; 99Games & Global Delight to be independent companies,” April 2015
• PocketGamer.biz, “99Games raises $5 million to target growing Indian market,” April 2015
• Dream Incubator Inc., investor-relations release on its investment in 99Games Online Private Limited, January 2017
• Techseen, “Gaming startup 99Games raises funds from Dream Incubator,” January 2017
• PocketGamer.biz, “Three years on: Indian developer 99Games on the evolution of Star Chef,” September 2017
• PRNewswire, “‘Dhoom:3 The Game’ Crosses 10 Million Downloads Mark Across Mobile Platforms,” 2014
• DNA India, “‘Dhoom: 3 The Game’ crosses 10 million mobile downloads,” 2014
• PRNewswire, “Star Chef 2 Releases Worldwide On iOS and Android Devices,” 3 June 2020
• Tracxn, “99Games — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “99Games — Funding, Revenue & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “99Games Online Private Limited” company financial filing summary, accessed September 2026

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