Gameloft looking to sign Indian embedding deals

Gameloft is in negotiations to have its games embedded on more handsets being sold in India, according to The Economic Times.

The site claims Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG are in talks with the publisher, although this isn't a hugely surprising claim - big publishers like Gameloft are trying to seal preload deals with these companies around the world.

However, it seems Gameloft has specific ambitions for India, developing localised games in its Hyderabad studio based on Indian TV shows, with Hindi language support.

The piece quotes Gameloft's Ravi Kumar as saying the publisher has "a strike rate of 2,000 game downloads" from its deals with local operators Vodafone and Airtel, although it's not made clear what this figure means.

What is clear is the potential importance of India for mobile games publishers - something highlighted last week by a report from Juniper Research claiming that mobile data revenues on the Indian subcontinent will rise from $3 billion this year to more than $8.3 billion by 2013.