A new $1.5 million fund is looking for good game developers in India

• WinZo, a vernacular Indian e-sports platforms, just invested $1.5 million to support local game developers in India.
• Paavan Nanda, former co-founder of Zostel, and Saumya Singh, a former member of the ZORooms team, are aiming to make WinZo a ‘household name' by the end of 2020.
• The aim of the investment is to find independent game developers and partner with gaming studios to bring more original gaming content onto the e-sports platform.

WinZo, India's largest gaming platform which is available in local languages, announced a $1.5 million fund to support game developers in India's gaming ecosystem.

Founded by Paavan Nanda, former co-founder of ZORooms and Zostel, and Saumya Singh, a former member of the ZORooms team, WinZO is aiming to be a ‘household' name in India by the end of 2020 by targeting first time users in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

The Kalaari Capital-backed gaming platform wants to get the best of the talent with its new investment by "supporting and recognizing the small Indian game developers who are sitting and making games in isolation," Singh told Business Insider India.

So far, WinZo has 27 games on their platform — all made by game developers in India — but they're, more or less adaptations of existing games in the market.

"Through this fund we are looking to partner with Gaming Studios as well as Independent Game Developers by offering them an infrastructure to develop top quality content and a powerful platform to monetize their games from day 1," adds Nanda.

Monetizing gaming

"We have a very strong emphasis on ensuring that the cost of developing a game gets compensated either through the platform or through the basic investment done by WinZO when it contracts a developer to make a game exclusively for the platform, " explains Singh.

And, any game that gets pulled onto the platform, gets a share of the revenue.

And, where does the revenue come from?

As much as 20% of the users on WinZO are making their first online payment using the platform. "We aggregate the existing content and add an e-sports real money layer to it, so people are incentivised to make micro payments," says Singh.

The incentive of winning combined, gives the user the thrill of playing with real money and WinZO a 10% platform commission.