Hi all
I am really exciting and looking forward to be at the Open House at Mumbai on Saturday and hoping to meet all the exciting Rodinhooders in person.
The Rodinhooders is a great platform and a vibrant community of entrepreneurs (Thanks, Alok and team!!) and The Funding Pitches is a perhaps a great place and opportunity (Thanks, Asha!!) to pitch my startup – PlayZapp – and start the process of raising funding. I have attached a short deck on PlayZapp.
Briefly PlayZapp helps Mobile Game Developers enable Multiplayer Tournaments for their games. In just a few hours! Using PlayZapp, developers can allow users to Challenge and Play against friends and participate in public & private tournaments in addition to Messaging each other, checking out Leaderboards and more.
Our Vision is to help Game Developers multiply their revenues by using PlayZapp’s pre-built features around Multiplayer, Social Messaging & Tournaments, Quests & Rewards, Cross Promotion, etc all designed to improve the bottom line.
We are piloting PlayZapp with Gamecubator Labs, a division of Playmotion Singapore, who are launching their game integrated with PlayZapp in a few weeks. We are also in different stages of discussions with several Game Studios. We are also a sponsor for the Global Game Jam 2016 where we are supporting developers across 78 countries and in over 500 locations build multiplayer elements into their game. We are also exhibiting and presenting live game tournaments on PlayZapp at the Surge Conference in Bangalore, from Feb 23 to 24th where we are featured as an Alpha Startup.
The team consists of Raghu Sathanapalli – an IIT’ian and an MBA from London Business School with S/w Development & Business experience across large enterprises across US & US, Nathan Subramanian – a senior game development expert with a decade of experience in game development & leading teams in developing blockbuster games on mobile and all varieties of Console platforms, and myself – quit Wipro after graduating from Founders Institute to work full time on PlayZapp. At Wipro, for 17+ years I was involved in S/w product development at Nokia, Ericsson etc and sales and business leadership roles in the Telecom space.
We have also put together a very strong advisory team consisting of Sanjay Jesrani – CEO & Founder of GoNorth Ventures and Kedar Choudhary – ex Chief Software Architect at Ivy Comptech (who helped build highly scalable gaming infrastructure for Party Poker) and Ravi Polymer – CEO of Go Live Gaming – a Gaming industry business professional with experience in producing games, consulting for Medium and Large Game Studio’s etc.
Any feedback, leads, info, help with regards to PlayZapp is highly appreciated.
Looking forward to meeting all Rodinhooders at the Open House on the 16th Jan!!
Regards
Ravi
Mobile : +91 9652222534
Email : ravi@drutha.com
Twitter : @rvs2209
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
I think the biggest challenge is in slide 4
You “assume” that your solution will help improve game retention = economics
Unfortunately, thats not the case because 99% of that dependency lies with game design – something you cannot control.
Question – Why would I also not use Google Play Services for match making and pairing vs. your suite?
Homework – can you analyse this game of ours (multiplayer) and tell us what is wrong? We will switch to you if you have a convincing reply – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.games2win.cricketbattles
Ravi Venkatesh
Thanks, Alok for your comments.
While I agree with you that slide 4 is the core – and some of it is “assumption” that we are testing with our pilot customer – Below are some points to support that :
– Firstly we dont make a bad game a better game. We can take a good game and help it increase retention, engagement & increased monetization.
– Introducing multiplayer & messaging mechanics is proven to increase retention & engagement.
– PlayZapp takes the experience further with league and knock out tournaments and we want to build in a variety of quests and rewards that game developers can plug in.
– The monetization comes in from multiplayer and tournament tickets – either through increased mining to get the necessary virtual currency to buy them or through In App Purchases..
With regards to Google Play Services, we are building more ready made features – tournaments, friends list and challenge accept mechanisms etc – and will also be on iOS and users wont need to install another app..Not sure Google Play has the tournament model that we are building..
Our pilot customer is actually pretty much excited about the tournament features that we are making available to them through the plugin. And they have explored not just Google Play, but also Nextpeer, Game Sparks etc before we approached them.
Thanks for the ‘Homework’ : Certianly will analyze your game – and maybe there may not be much ‘wrong’, we can certainly suggest how we can help to take it to the next level. Please give us some time and we will get back to you on this!