WinZO sponsorships India’s First ever XO Space; to boost Esports penetration in Bharat supporting 12+ languages

by Suman Gupta

New Delhi, February 2021: WinZO, India’s largest vernacular social gaming platform, is the official sponsor of XO Space. XO Space is India’s first ever Gaming House that is being hosted by its parent company Esports XO.

The gaming house will feature India’s 40 biggest and most followed Freefire Youtubers and streamers with a combined subscriber base of 75 million+. Pro Freefire Gamers such as ProNation and Dev Alone will be participating in this 11-month long competition which will be live streamed on WinZO and YouTube. The content will be hosted on the vernacular app, WinZO, in multiple languages to propel the reach to the deeper parts of Bharat. Within a week of launch, this event is projected to garner 1 Billion+ eyeballs, alone over YouTube.  XO Space is also witnessing participation from Indian Sub-continent and countries such as  Bangladesh, Nepal and other South East Asian countries. While this is an opportunity to build further on the streaming ecosystem, the winning  team of the XO space will be rewarded with a Cash prize worth Rs.11 lacs.

Post PUBG ban and cancellation of offline eSports globally due to COVID 19 pandemic, XO Space is a boost to the  pursuit of Indian gaming talent to rise to international fame.

In an unprecedented move, over the last 3 months, WinZO has partnered with 100,000 ByteDance influencers (Helo and TikTok)  from tier II and smaller cities/towns who were affected by the shutdown of the operations of TikTok post government ban over the Chinese apps. WinZO has deployed resources to upskill these influencers through extensive and structured training programs on gaming content creation and streaming technologies. The Vernacular focused Gaming and Streaming platform is not only distributing culturally relevant regional content but also democratising content making at a massive scale. This is a positive step in the support of PM Modi’s Atmanibhar Campaign.

One such beneficiary of WinZO’s upskilling program is Pro Freefire Player and streamer Mr. Lokesh Raj, popularly known as “Lokesh Gamer”. Lokesh started with WinZO at a very nascent stage with 200k subscribers and today enjoys 7.5M+ subscribers on his official YouTube channel. Mr. Raj said “WinZO played a pivotal role in upgrading my skills. Their training on regional content creation and streaming tech helped me create industry standard content to engage my users effectively and has resulted in swift growth. I leverage significantly from the traffic that can from WinZO to my channel,  growing my channel from sub 200K to above 7MM follower base within 12 months. ”

WinZO also developed a cutting edge tool; WinZO Developer Console (http://console.winzogames.com) to democratize game publishing for the game developers who can access the ready market of 30M+ registered user base of WinZO and effectively monetize their games. WinZO’s user base consists of transacting users who reportedly make 1 billion+ microtransactions per month on the platform. This effective monetization model allows developers to earn 100X more revenues than their play store and apple store IAP and Ad based revenues.

Mr. Ranjan Shrestha, of Bhoos Entertainment, who runs a ten-membered game studio and was one of the beneficiaries of WinZO’s developer’s fund-I of $1.5 million corpus said: “We had multiple games which were not doing so well on play store and other stores in terms of revenue generation. However, after the partnership and integration of those games on WinZO, we have received huge traction from the same games, thanks to the specialization of WinZO in promotion and marketing. Algorithms to push the content to the relevant audience helped drive the engagement further. We have seen 100x more returns than any other sources and we do not need to worry about the monetization and distribution at all. Our sole focus is to build high-quality games.”

As an extension of its Game Developer-I fund, WinZO also recently announced the Game Developer Fund-II with a corpus of $5 Million with the vision to support and nurture the game development,ESports, Streaming. So far, it has received 1000+ submissions on the Game Developer Console against the announced fund. WinZO has also opened its offices for these developers to collaborate & build together with the team.

Earlier in September 2020, WinZO announced its Series-B funding of $18 Million led by global interactive entertainment fund Makers Fund based in Singapore, New York-based Courtside Venture, and Steve Pagliuca, the Co-Chairman of Bain Capital and investor in Epic Games – developers of massively popular game, Fortnite.

About WinZO:WinZO is the largest vernacular social gaming platform in India, launched in early 2018. The company partners with third party game studios to host their games on their Android app, creating a Netflix-like experience for users, who can enjoy multiplayer gaming formats with their friends or strangers online in a localized and personalized fashion. The platform is available in 12 languages with over 30+ million registered users. Clocking over 1 billion micro-transactions per month, WinZO offers 70+ games across various multiplayer formats. This vernacular social gaming platform focuses on building a community of gamers and game influencers in Tier 2 – Tier 5 cities of India. WinZO is designed to deliver strong positive unit economics in the Indian gaming ecosystem, which experiences one of the highest engagements globally, through a unique micro-transaction led model.

WinZO was founded by Paavan Nanda, a second time entrepreneur, and Saumya Singh Rathore. It boasts a team of 60 members. Some of the major investors backing WinZO are – Makers Fund, Courtside, Kalaari Capital. WinZO is also backed by Stephan Pagliuca – Co-Chairman of Bain Capital and Co-owner of the popular NBA Basketball team, Boston Celtics.