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Attempting to cash in on India’s Diwali festive season, WhatsApp’s India rival Hike Messenger today announced it is bringing popular Diwali-themed game 'Teen Patti Nights' on its instant messaging client.

SEE ALSO:China's Tencent invests in India's Hike to take on WhatsApp

Hike said 'Teen Patti Nights' is its first game that has multi-player support. The company has been testing games on its platform since March this year, and claims it has registered over 1.3 billion game sessions since then.

'Teen Patti Nights' is a popular poker game which sits well with a tradition among some Indians who play poker during Diwali. The game file is very light -- weighing only about 1MB -- and is aimed at all smartphone users in India, Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder and CEO of Hike told Mashable India.

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Credit: hike

The addition of 'Teen Patti Nights' further illustrates Hike’s growing intent to build a platform on top of instant messaging. The app, which competes with Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger app, offers news and several other features on its platform. As of January 2016, Hike Messenger has over 100 million registered users. The company declined to share the latest number.

Mittal added that the company will be adding more games to Hike app in the coming months. When asked if the company also plans to launch a desktop app, Mittal told us that desktop app won’t appeal to most people in India with majority of them using a mobile phone as their only computing platform.

Earlier this August Hike became the latest unicorn startup from India after it raised $175 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion from China's Tencent and Foxconn.

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