[by Cerius Shah] Plans are afoot to “step into the Chinese online casual gaming market with a Chinese website,” Zapak COO Rohit Sharma tells exchange4media.  For their MMOG, in partnership with a Chinese firm, they won’t be looking at a subscription based model as speculated but rather use ‘item based sales’, which means selling virtual goods and gameplay inventory. Taking stock of the year gone by, Sharma claimed that the portal has more than 4 million registered users and more than 10 million page views; over 100 brands aboard (really?) on the gaming site. In-game advertising and advergaming contributed to 25-30 per cent of the company’s revenues, and this is expected to grow to reach 50 per cent of the total revenues by this fiscal end. More at e4m.

There are also plans to expand Zapak Gameplexes to more than 150 by 2008. Great focus and BIG plans, but we wonder if they expect to break even anytime soon. Zapak mail, Zapak.tv and Zapak Tiny have been relatively low key and some of the properties have been merely marketing fluff riding off mostly on homepage traffic mileage. Zapak Mail, I am looking at you. Any idea if the MMOG is being developed inhouse or merely customized and published by Zapak for the Indian market?