With the advent of more powerful GPUs and CPUs, as well as a new generation of consoles, 2020 was a bumper year for gaming, where the huge demand led to a massive shortage in the semiconductor market. All of this has given rise to some massive gaming led conglomerates, one of which is WinZO. The company has been working to revolutionize the gaming scene, and has now announced the third iteration of its Game Developer Fund, with the largest ever corpus of $20MM.
With this, the company is looking to invest across all forms of interactive entertainment: games, economies around gaming, content creation, live-ops, and security. Moreover, it aims to collaborate with the companies working in these areas through Capital investment, infrastructural support and monetization support.
WinZo is one of the biggest gaming platforms in India, and has an interesting business model. The company partners with third party developers to host games on their Android & iOS app, where users can enjoy personalized multiplayer gameplay experiences. This way, it facilitates microtransactions for these games, and already has over 80+ apps in its portfolio. It claims to generate a 100X revenue for partnering developers through its own microtransaction based monetization model compared to the alternative means of In-app purchases (which is still controlled by the likes of Apple and Google) and advertisements.
It also operates in 12 different languages, including English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, and Bhojpuri, with over 50MM+ registered users. This allows WinZO to tap into the non English speaking market of India that might be interested in gaming, and opens up an entirely new arena for its platform.
It aims to deliver a culturally relevant and enjoyable experience in the Indian gaming ecosystem, monetized through a unique micro-transaction model.
The firm’s first fund was announced in July 2019 with a corpus of $1.5Mn, followed by the second fund worth $5Million in November last year. This third fund comes just a few months after WinZO completed its Series C round, having raised $65Mn.
“For a larger part, gaming is considered as a hit or a miss opportunity among investors as unlike other industries such as e-commerce, SaaS & D2C, there is no stipulated playbook for creation of a successful Game. As a result of this, a lot of gaming ideas/teams do not get requisite support in form of capital, guidance or strategic help from the ecosystem. We at WinZO are trying to change that because we believe that after ages India is on the forefront of an opportunity where it can lead the world. Over the next decade, it will not just be a high potential market but will also be yielding multiple unicorns & some emerging gaming companies at a global scale. India has overtaken US, China in terms of the number of games being downloaded in the geography on an annual basis. As one of the major players in the space we take it as our responsibility to fuel the inception of this gaming ecosystem that we dream of. GDF-III is another step towards achieving this.” said Paavan Nanda, co-founder, WinZO Games.
