India’s leading vernacular social interactive gaming platform WinZO has started the third edition of its Game Developer Fund. Six months ago, WinZO raised about $65 MM from a series C- funding wherein he was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners (a California based organisation) and existing investors; Maker’s Fund, and Courtside.
WinZO covers a variety of games which includes casual, action, sports to mid-core multiplayer games such as Tennis, Golf etc. All the games which are selected are then customised as per the Indian regions and languages. It is constantly looking to provide support by giving capital or investing in games, economies around gaming, content creation, live-ops, and security.
It’s making quite steady progress as well. In July 2019, it raised about $1.5 million in Fund 1 and around $5 million in Fund 2 in November 2020. It received over 500 applications across 70 games and invested in the range of $100,000- 500,000 per game.
“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.