Mr Gaurav Agarwal is a Startup entrepreneur at a VC-backed project exploring browser technology in gaming. He is Enlisted on Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology for work in casual gaming. He also has Management consulting experience with Bain & Company, with key engagement in a global effort focused on building enduring partnerships with 100 developing market leaders of the future. He has experience in analytics through brief opportunities at BlackRock and Indian Statistical Institute and has worked in Diverse positions spanning leadership and event management through school and college.
Mr Gaurav Agarwal( Co-founder, Gamezop)
Mr Shrey Mishra ( Founder, Gaming Central and Co-Founder, XR Central) recently had an interaction with Mr Gaurav Agarwal( Co-founder, Gamezop). Here are some excerpts from the interaction with Mr Gaurav Agarwal.
Shrey Mishra (Founder , Gaming Central): Take me through your journey. And then let’s talk a bit about what is happening right now. And then what’s for the future?
Gaurav Agarwal : So we started games in 2016, 2017. And this was at a time when we couldn’t help that the experience was playing games as the existing earth existed. Quite fictional. Because one could watch a video with a single tap, but in order to play a meaningful game once led to undergo the hassle of downloading an app. And there’s a huge commitment to an app download. And if you don’t like it, you have to get rid of it, et cetera. We felt that games could be delivered like videos. Life will become so much easier for games. And think about it. I mean, video short through the roof, because videos are taking place. But all of us have watched videos in the past, which had to be downloaded as files. And then you have to play them on VLC or real media.
And then this was the failover. But restrictions. And back then, people won’t realize this because it was perhaps the only way to watch a video. You had to download a file, and then play it on a player. But we felt that we felt that his GM could be delivered in a similar manner. And they are instantly playable inside of their apps inside of the website. Just like on your Facebook feed, you can watch a video. You should be able to play again. And from then until now, we’ve seen that we weren’t the only ones who were thinking this way. So today we power games inside SnapChat, Amazon and outside KTM. So inside MX player and such like, because all of them felt that alongside whatever their forte is, Amazon was for shopping and basically planning videos, et cetera et cetera, very different industries. But the fact that games are ubiquitous, people don’t play games. And if they’re delivered inside their product, it may make life simpler for them.
Everybody wants to increase that crucial metric of engagement typed exactly. And games as we know that quote-unquote play for longer than you may realize that that works with certain ones.
Shrey Mishra: My interaction with some of your games actually was I think when you were providing these games to hike they were on the high court so I actually saw some create some of those games also and one thing which I can say is what I liked about the games was the design part, it was like at par with generally the global stuff which is correct. I really like that.
Gaurav Agarwal: I’m glad you feel that. In fact, we, unfortunately, can’t take any credit for the games because we don’t make the games ourselves. All of these games come to us from developers around the world. But what games do a good job at is that if a game comes to us in MD packet size and HTML game, we’ve been able to do over the past several years as we reduce the size of the day using proprietary tech to about two MB.
Shrey Mishra: Well It’s like an instant article kind of analogy for here.
Gaurav Agarwal: Absolutely. And the amp page for the game. But still, it comes with monetization capability. Let’s say I did not want to serve ads, but should somebody want to monetize and increase engagement alongside monetization, we monetize on their behalf and then share a portion of the revenue with them. So ultimately for guys like hike or Samsung Internet or other publishers that you work with, our proposition is, on one hand, to give you these games, which will sit inside your product and increase engagement. And on the other hand, you don’t have to pay us. We will monetize these games using software ourselves. And we will pay 50% of that to them. So not only do they have edit engagement on their product. But we open a new stream of monetization. So I guess that’s been like you said, the journey part has been that. And recently, alongside games launched a protocol, because games are for games because of their purposes. So hopefully they’ll get a habit with me.
Gaurav Agarwal: The idea is that games are where we started, but we will get into other content forms. Our model is one which is distributed. We see, let’s say, a PTM, a phone pay. All of our partners are answering Internet SnapChat as a distribution partner as a channel partner for games because we don’t acquire users directly. Hopefully, we’ll have different plug-and-play content solutions for them. Games, quizzes, news, and short videos. We could hope.
Shrey Mishra: One thing which I am curious about is where are your users. Are the users in the cities because its an instant gameplay thing too, And how was it increasing in tier two or three places?
Gaurav Agarwal: I think first and foremost, we are right that it’s an instantly experienced player. And we started in 2016, 17. In terms of the Internet bandwidth, everything was tier two and tier three. So back then, optimizing the games for low bandwidth areas. It was our option. This is where, let’s say, in 2017 18 with you try to do some high results on Facebook Messenger and so on. So we invested in this technology back then. Whatever seed money we raised, a large portion of that went into making sure that in spite of 2G or 3G Connection.
You Could still play the game. And one of the things that we did was download the game package at once. So first you trim the size of that image. Make sure that it works on devices of all kinds of browsers. And then unlike a video which can buffer over a period of time, go up game mini version. The game can really start after the full package there is a difference. So our argument if you’re playing a game on games of 24 months. In the middle of the game, if you want to hit a connection, you will still be able to compute all the levels of the network. Let’s say you kill that application and also could launch it again. Most of our partners, even in offline setups, can play our game because it still sits on the device memory of your phone. And it’s not a lot. It’s a two MB three and a half hundred package. You’re absolutely right. But to answer your question, more directly. Honestly, most of the activity. Today, at least from outside of the metro space. And in fact, India’s revenue terms are not our largest market. Since our partners are all over the world. We see a lot more revenue from advertising actually coming in from outside India because you are in the publishing business.
Shrey Mishra: Well, The CPMs are much higher.
Gaurav Agarwal: The CPMs are much higher. We still, because India is our primary market in terms of users. Maybe about 60 65% of our users. We have done a lot on the ad monetization front also. So let’s say when we package in these programmatic partners, all your SSPs. We have done a lot to create the right amount of big pressure and no inventory. So that it’s not just let’s say Google or Facebook beating or inventory. But a combination of 10 to 15 guys using the right tech head every day and Amazon as a product called Amazon publisher services. So we use a combination of these two groups. So tier two is where we see a lot more action coming from. Because that’s where the population itself. But that doesn’t mean that our monetization hasn’t been able to keep this. We do run a lot of direct deals. There are a lot of advertisers who want to target gaming inventory via us..
Shrey Mishra: And able to wrap up, if you were to give a few messages to upcoming game devs, you know, what would that be? How good some of the key points is for them and if you want to collaborate with millions of people.
Gaurav Agarwal: See, first of all, we are as upcoming as it gets. I mean, because we are very much in the country right now. We are a very small company. That being said, I think we are very keen to partner with game developers because we don’t make our own always happy to borrow content from game developers and put it on our network. And secondly, the reason we are attending events like these try to be a part of how the industry conversations because you realize that there is value in non-gaming products adding a gaming section for their users. Freezing this engagement increases monetization. So we’re very happy to have conversations of those kinds. And see if we could make non-gaming products into a small slice of the large gaming pie. Gaming is very large. Shouldn’t be dominated just by gaming companies non gaming companies now have plug-and-play solution is us.
