Glance, the popular lock screen app that recently received a $200Mn capital backing from Reliance, is putting that money to use now. The company has announced acquisition of ‘Gambit’, a gaming studio that Glance says will help it launch ‘NFT-based live gaming’ across its lock screens. The financial details with regards to the deal remain undisclosed.
Glance has been putting a lot of weight behind its lock screen gaming vertical — Glance games. The company claims to have a significant 45 million monthly active users across Asia on its lock screen gaming platform. Close to 70% of its users are in the age group of 18 to 34, while over 40% of its gamers are female. With Gambit’s acquisition, the company is expecting to “to accelerate the ambition of building the biggest platform for NFT-based live gaming experiences for Gen-Z, across markets”, its said in a statement.
Co-founded in 2015 by Yashashvi Takallapalli, Gaurav Konar, Ranaveer Sankieneni and Deepak Venkatramani, Gambit owns and operates Nostragamus (Nostra Pro). It is a fairly popular gaming platform with fantasy sports, poker, rummy, quiz and hyper-casual games. Over 100 million games have been played on the Nostragamus platform, and it claims to have close to 10 million registered users.
“Giving users live, connected, interactive gaming experiences on the lock screen is key to Glance’s vision of building the world’s largest live internet platform. We also aim to launch creator-led NFTs for live gaming which will generate unique ‘play-to-earn’ and ‘play-to-own’ possibilities for the entire gaming ecosystem,” said Piyush Shah, Co-founder of InMobi Group and President and COO, Glance.
NFTs have become all the rage now, with some of the biggest names in tech putting their weight behind the emerging decentralised tech. And while NFTs off late have mostly been associated with art (people are paying ridiculous amount of money for digital NFT arts), Glance could become a leader when it comes to NFT-based live gaming. And it has all the userbase it needs, to make this concept a runaway hit.
A couple of months back, Glance raised $200 million from Reliance’s Jio Platforms to accelerate its global expansion. The company also entered into a business partnership with Jio through which Glance’s lock screen platform will be integrated into JioPhone Next smartphones, which is expected to further boost the reach of Glance Games. And for the unaware, Jio is making and marketing Android-powered JioPhone Next in an exclusive partnership with Google.
