WinZO, which claims to be India’s largest vernacular e-sports gaming platform, has announced a $1.5 million fund to support game developers. This fund will also be used to acquire content for the platform. WinZO, which is backed by Kaalari Capital, offers more than 25 games on its app-based platform in 10 languages. These languages include English, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Bhojpuri.
The company aims to develop real-time multi-player mobile gaming experience. This experience is social, inclusive, and accessible for the first-time smartphone users for tier 2 and tier 3 markets. WinZO plans to use funds, set aside to develop localized content for the platform. This will be done in partnership with cherry picked game developers in India and around the world. On this vernacular e-sports platform, more than 80 percent of users are using the app in non-English languages. The average time spent by the players on the platform is 55 minutes. Only 10 percent of the players are from the top cities of the country.
Announcing the fund, Paavan Nanda, co-founder, WinZO, said, “Through this fund we are looking to partner with gaming studios as well as independent game developers by offering them an infrastructure to develop top quality content and a powerful platform to monetize their games from day one. When the best brains of the world work actively towards unlocking potential, things work. Through this initiative, we look forward to interacting with highly enthusiastic and top notch talent, keen at creating a dent in the global gaming ecosystem.”
He further added, “WinZO’s social multi-player skill gaming platform clocked 100 million gaming minutes every day and has been able to successfully monetize this engagement. The company is growing 50 percent month on month. On one hand, large OTTs platforms are struggling to monetize in India, but WinZO is facilitating the first-ever M&E transactions from the T2/T3 audiences.”
WATCH: PUBG Mobile Zombie: Survive till dawn Gameplay
WinZO aims to provide a stable monetization model in the Indian gaming ecosystem. Which experiences one of the highest engagements globally. There are 300 million internet users that spend over 45 minutes daily playing games on their smartphones. These users hardly make in-app purchases. And advertisement revenues for some of these digital assets are abysmally low vis-a-vis some of its global counterparts. Increasing mobile penetration and high usage has led to a surge in mobile gaming in India. The average mobile device user spends 3-4 hours everyday watching OTT, playing games and music or on online shopping. Mobile gaming, however, is the fastest-growing source of entertainment for Indian users. This upsurge will create immense opportunities in the gaming ecosystem, employment generation, entertainment, engagement, and market growth.
