Anurag Choudhary Returned $1 Million to Investors. Then He Built Felicity Games.
How a founder who does not play games built India's only mobile game publisher, and why the real product is the spread between what a user costs and what a user is worth.
The first question you ask a gaming founder is whether he is a gamer. Anurag Choudhary’s answer is no.
No, I’m not. In fact, I end up playing games mostly to deconstruct them.
This is not a contradiction. It is the thesis. Felicity Games is not a games company that happens to be analytical. It is a trading desk that happens to sell games.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
Anurag spent seven years across Snapdeal and Swiggy, watching the latter go from seven cities to 500 and from 60,000 orders a day to a million. In 2021 he left to build Wakao, a split-screen challenge app riding the reels wave. Accel and Elevation put in $2.5 million.
The flaw was structural. Asynchronous mechanics for a synchronous desire, seeded India-first, chasing attention nobody could charge for.
Wakao didn’t have the legs to monetise that attention span. We were just building empty DAU.
Eighteen months in, they closed the position.
We returned a million dollars that was left with us back to our investors, because we could sense there was no way to monetise this.
Forty percent of the capital, mailed back. Out of it came three rules. Never invent the category.
There’s all the glory in building a category, but a lot of the incumbents who ended up large were not the first ones to build it.
Never accept a ceiling on the addressable market. Never touch a monetisation model that is not already solved. And then the thing that made it gaming specifically:
Angry Birds was the 52nd game that worked for Rovio. It took 51 failures to get to that point of success.
A single-app founder lives or dies on one coin flip. A publisher flips forever, as long as the maths holds.
The mispricing
Understand what happened in 2021 and the rest of this business becomes legible.
Before Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, a hypercasual publisher knew you. Knew you liked puzzles, knew you would churn on day three, had the next title queued for day four. Deterministic targeting made the whole industry work at 50-cent installs.
Post the Apple IDFA change in 2021, I don’t know what kind of games Akshay likes to play.
Installs now start at $2 and climb. The recycling machine broke, and the industry was forced to stop selling impulse and start selling habit.
It’s like a dal chawal game versus a pizza game. Some games look incredibly good, you see the ad and you want to play, but you get bored very quickly. And then there are some you keep coming back to for comfort.
Block Blast does roughly $400 million a year on nothing but a difficulty curve tuned to perfection. Which is what this business actually is.
At the core of it, it’s a UA arbitrage business. People are running trade desks for user acquisition. What’s the ROAS profile, what’s the retention curve, what’s the LTV curve, when will it break even, when will it turn to cash?
Forty games, three survivors
India has around 30,000 game developers and 400 studios, and almost none can afford to find out whether their own game is good. A statistically honest retention read needs 400 to 500 users. At US install costs, that is $4,000 to $5,000 to learn whether anyone comes back on day two.
Anurag’s funnel closes that gap in three phases. A prototype commissioned for $5,000 to $8,000, with no advertising switched on at all.
In the prototype, we don’t switch on any type of ad. We want to see ad-free retention.
The bar is D1 retention above 30%. Clear it and the game gets $15,000 to $20,000 of soft-launch spend, 100 to 150 levels, interstitials and in-app purchases, cohorted for three to four weeks against a D7 target of 40 to 50% of D1. Clear that and Felicity buys the title outright for $40,000 to $50,000 and rebuilds the backend.
A lot of games are vibe-coded, and you’re trying to fix things as it’s flying. The code is not architecturally sound and is prohibitive to scale.
Roughly 40 games evaluated. Five or six reached monetisation testing. Three are currently getting capital. But the survivors are not the asset.
When you’re single-game focused, you build everything for that one game. But if you’re a multi-portfolio company, your core IP is not your game, it’s your infra.
FeliCore bundles the third-party SDKs and solves edge cases like ad initialisation on low-RAM phones, where a bad boot sequence leaves a player staring at a frozen screen for 25 seconds. FeliGenAI generates acquisition creatives and art assets, at up to 99% lower cost by the company’s own reckoning. FeliGrid lets a product manager ship a new difficulty curve to one country with no engineering ticket and no store review.
The PM creates an experiment only for Japan, original versus the new curve. Another for Korea. One week later, a report on which one worked better and on what metrics. That is infra.
Or, more plainly:
It’s like a smart engineer with Claude versus a smart engineer alone. That’s what the infra delta is.
The scoreboard
Last year a tapping mechanic went viral. The top three incumbents were driving 150,000 to 160,000 daily US installs in a genre that had not existed four months earlier. Felicity shipped its own iteration, Arrow Maze, and reached a $1 million annual run rate inside three weeks.
Out of the $3,000 it does every day, the US only does $1,000. The rest is coming from Korea and Japan, because we were able to make a Torii gate level, a South Korea temple level. All of this didn’t exist as a capability within Felicity even six months back.
The trend was available to everyone. Being in Osaka and Seoul by week two was not.
Felicity has now raised $11.8 million across three rounds, from a $700,000 pre-seed in December 2023 with Kunal Shah and Swiggy’s founders on the cap table, to a $3 million round led by 3one4 Capital, to roughly $8.1 million in Series A this March. Revenue runs north of $3 million a year on 50,000 daily active users, carried by US ARPDAU of 20 to 30 cents. Seek & Find and Nova Solitaire have each passed a million downloads. A Singapore entity, Felicity Labs, has $1 million committed behind Southeast Asian expansion.
The precedent is local. In 2021 Bengaluru’s PlaySimple sold to Sweden’s MTG for $360 million upfront on $83 million of revenue and 2 million daily users, built on ad-monetised word games. Anurag’s own bar is narrower and harder.
I’d feel validated if we could take one game to $10 million in a year. That’s when I’d say yes, it’s a true hit.
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