By Marco Argenti, SVP, Nokia Developer

In an increasingly competitive app landscape, it’s truly exciting to see developers surface and achieve real, global success. And this week, we saw just that happen. UTV Indiagames – India’s premier gaming company – has made history, and become the first developer to break through the 100 million downloads milestone in Nokia Store. More impressive, according to their founder and CEO Vishal Gondal, is that over 50 million new downloads have been driven in the past three months alone.

UTV Indiagames is a great example of a company which has worked to achieve success with Series 40 consumers through game genres such as Cricket, Bollywood, Casual and Action – not only in their home market, but also overseas. Their top performing countries are India, Vietnam, Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia – truly, a global hit.

As head of Developer activities here at Nokia, I’m delighted not only to see this milestone reached, but to witness the power of localization in action. Their success underlines that the local approach is more important than ever. The combination of great locally relevant games, localized languages, and Nokia’s ability to merchandize or ‘surface’ apps through locally managed Nokia Store catalogues, has seen their popularity continually rise.

With a huge base of loyal consumers, UTV Indiagames have also leveraged Nokia’s key local monetization features.  The company offers 100 paid titles, and over 300 free ad-supported titles, thus ensuring consumers can enjoy games no matter what their payment means and abilities. The team is now looking to further expand payment options and consumer choice, with micro payments tailored to specific markets.

So what’s next? The UTV Indiagames team have their sights set on 1 billion downloads, and will focus on great games for Series 40 and Nokia Asha consumers, while also developing new games on the Windows Phone platform for Nokia Lumia consumers, which will be available in Marketplace soon.

The team at IndiaGames have brilliantly authored their success, and deserve their place in the history books. Today, with more than 100 million downloads being enjoyed by customers in all corners of the world, they set a new industry benchmark driving global success, locally.