Our vision is to be India’s biggest platform for live gaming and game streaming”: Yashashvi Takallapalli, VP & GM, Glance Gaming –Over the past few years, Glance Gaming has been gathering massive praise, providing streaming services as well as other gaming experiences among the fans. In an exclusive Interview with InsideSport, the VP & GM of Glance Gaming, Yashashvi Takallapalli shared her aim of becoming the biggest Indian platform for Live Gaming and beyond. For future updates on eSports and Gaming, follow InsideSport.IN
As we know, the Indian Gaming industry is growing rapidly, how is Glance Gaming revolutionizing the gaming industry in the mobile gaming sector?
Glance as a platform has redefined the way consumers discover personalized content by bringing premium, engaging content from the best of developers and publishers directly to the lock screen of smartphones. This enables consumers to discover what they love on the phone surface that they engage with the most, throughout the day. We have extended the same philosophy to Glance Gaming as well.
Globally, India ranks amongst the top five mobile gaming markets that will account for $4 billion by 2025. We firmly believe that there is a game for every kind of gamer, whether they want to game casually to spend some time, learn through gaming, participate in pro-level gaming, or even just enjoy watching game streams. With this in mind, we ensure that every individual can find a game that suits them by offering the Glance user base of over 200 million across India and Indonesia, a massive library of over 400 games, available for discovery and play on the lock screen.
These games are across action, adventure, board, strategy, racing, sports, simulation, and puzzle categories. Besides being highly engaging, a huge advantage of our games is that they do not need downloads and storage, saving consumers data and space. We also bring consumers some of the biggest live gaming tournaments and game-streaming action every day.
Besides the unique proposition for consumers, Glance Gaming also has the vision to boost the game developer ecosystem in India and going forward, globally. Given the massive reach of the Glance platform, developers are able to create games that can reach large audiences across geographies, age, and gender demographics, and they can do this at a highly accelerated pace. We already have 150 developers creating games for Glance consumers and are seeing great traction.
Glance Gaming has a feature to play games without downloading. Can you tell us more about Glance Gaming?
Being able to play games on the lock screen without downloads is a huge advantage for both consumers and developers. While it may not be apparent to urban users, a large section of consumers does not have smartphones with massive disposable storage space. Again, many may not want to install more apps on their already over-crowded phones. In several countries around the world, data is not cheap, and consumers think twice before downloading something they are not very familiar with.
Glance Gaming solves these issues of storage and data consumption on the consumer side, by making it possible to play directly on the lock screen whenever they want. For developers, this is a huge advantage, because they do not have to solve for installation of apps on phones, which is often a deterrent, even for great games. Their games get massive discovery and huge playtime, without people having to actively download anything.
According to you, why should casual gamers and eSports fans look into Glance Gaming?
As we stated earlier, being on the lock screen, Glance is a great proposition for casual hop-in hop-off gamers, and we have a massive ready-to-play library of 400 games, across most imaginable categories, to suit whatever your gaming style and preference might be, and this library continues to expand. The fact that this is a proposition that is loved by consumers is clearly indicated in our numbers. Overall, Glance Gaming has nearly 65 million active users, who spend an average of 12 minutes per day gaming on the lock screen. Nearly 40% of these are women users, and 73% are from non-metros, indicating that consumers in Tier 2 and 3 towns are also using Glance for gaming.
Where eSports is concerned, our vision is to be India’s biggest platform for live gaming, pro tournaments, and game streaming. We have hosted some of India’s biggest live tournaments already this year and are working towards bringing our gaming consumers’ most major eSports action on lock screens in 2023. Our live gaming active user base stands at 20 million, which is one of the largest in the country currently.
Can you please share the journey of Glance Gaming? And where it is today?
We started in 2019 when we allowed all Glance users to play games on the lock screen and discover games serendipitously. At that time, we had just about 40 games, but we witnessed close to half a million users playing games every day. We discovered that our users loved the gaming experience on the platform and the fact that they could play without having worry to download a game was a huge plus. These learnings culminated in a dedicated platform for all things gaming, Glance Gaming in 2020.
In the last three years, we have built multiple gaming-led experiences, allowing every user to discover& play games on demand, watch game streaming, and compete in tournaments. We started with a team of two, and today, have grown to a robust team of over 140 people who are bringing the best gaming and game streaming experiences to the lock screens.
In terms of our users, from half a million in 2019, we’ve grown significantly to 65 million monthly active users and 8 million daily active users, which easily makes us among the largest and fastest-growing gaming platforms in the country today.
Can you give us a glimpse of some features being explored in Glance Gaming?
Glance has been a category creator in terms of bringing the internet to the lock screen, and innovation is a core value for us. This manifests across each of our offerings. With this in mind, we aim to introduce multiple new unique features for our consumers soon. For instance, we are looking to make game streaming far more interactive and give viewers an opportunity to influence game streams in real-time, by giving earned power-ups to streamers.
This would essentially mean that our users aren’t just watching the games, but also influencing the course of a game, a first in the Indian industry. Consumers then would be able to compete in MOBA games too, which could also potentially lead to them being discovered by professional eSports teams, expanding the eSports community in the country. We would want our consumers to share high scores and achievements on social platforms to showcase their skills and growth in gaming, and even upload short videos of their gameplay.
For developers, we are exploring unique tools that can help them discover users for games, as well as engage and retain users in more meaningful ways. We are excited to test some of our solutions with developers and hope to expand more. Besides these, we aim to introduce unique content such as short-form highlights from game streams and eSports, gaming news, and updates from the world of gaming, that would establish Glance Gaming as a holistic ecosystem for the gaming community.
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