WinZO, the first Indian off-playstore products to reach 100 million user mark in Bharat

India’s leading social gaming platform WinZO has announced it has achieved a milestone of 100 million registered users on its platform this week. WinZO achieved this feat within 4 years of its inception making it the first off-play-store app (not distributed through Google Play Store) to achieve this milestone. WinZO’s userbase comprises 90% of the users from Tier 2 - Tier 5 cities and rural areas and 20% users being women from rural Bharat. 25% users of WinZO are making their first ever digital payment on this vernacular social platform.

WinZO, the largest social skill gaming and interactive entertainment platform in India, partners with third party game developers to host games and make them available for the WinZO’s 100 MM+ users from get go ensuring efficient game monetization from Day 0 of hosting the game. The platform is also the first ever gaming company to provide the product in 12 languages with a very strong focus on mobile-first users of Bharat. WinZO relied on innovative product led distribution models and its captive base of over 70,000 regional microinfluencers and content creators from the remotest of towns and cities of Bharat to unlock the massive potential of community driven social product.

Over the last one year, the platform was also seen boosting its branding efforts by securing multiple high profile associations such as onboarding Former India Captain - MS Dhoni as the brand ambassador, sponsoring Kolkata Knight Riders in Indian Premier League 2022 and sponsoring Gujarat Giants, Bengal Warriors in Pro Kabaddi League 2022. It has also collaborated closely with Ogilvy’s Chief Creative Officer Worldwide, Ad-Man Piyush Pandey for its brand campaigns.

WinZO has built proprietary tech solutions to solve for near real time concurrent experience in low end smartphones and fluctuating internet speeds to achieve ultra low latency services in the remotest place of the country, this is a very unique problem faced in the Indian market. The product is available in 12 vernacular languages and 90% of its users use the app in non-English languages. To fuel the spirit of democratisation of entrepreneurship among college students and language experts WinZO also has built a tech platform which helps them to earn upto Rs.20,000 per month by providing localisation services from any part of the country. WinZO which started as a trivia app, has gone on to expand its product offering to 100+ games in 6 formats resulting in average time spent by users on the platform being 55 minutes.

Earlier this year WinZO also announced Game Developers Fund of $26Mn corpus, which is mobilised to collaborate with companies across all forms of interactive entertainment such as game development, economies around gaming, culturally relevant content creation, live-ops, security etc to increase the entrepreneurial opportunities around gaming in the country.

Indian gaming industry is home to around 433 million active online gamers, generating revenue of over $1.5Bn which is expected to reach $5Bn by 2025 with an annual CAGR growth of 25%. Indian gaming industry growth relies on increased adoption of advanced gaming technologies, enhanced adoption among consumers, and significant rising demand for mobile gaming. With the increasing popularity and demand, India is likely to become a global hub for gaming in the near future. WinZO is set to ride the gaming wave in India with its deep-rooted reach in the nook and corners of the country.

Commenting on the milestone, Paavan Nanda, CEO & Co-Founder, WinZO said “This is still day 0 for us. We are humbled by the love we have received from over 100Mn users. The world is looking at India for creating UPI, a fin-tech product that changed the way Bharat transacts. We are aiming for WinZO to be one of the finest global consumer tech products that delivers culturally relevant and safe interactive entertainment experience - putting Indian Gaming on the world map. With the recent roll-out of 5G, we are excited about its application in gaming which will allow Indian gaming to be a $10 billion industry over the next couple of years.”